Imagining Justice: analyzing visions of just, inclusive, and diverse transitions in urban mobility planning

Policy debates on how to design just and inclusive transition processes from fossil fuels to more sustainable means of natural resource use have reached the urban planning sector. Lately, voices calling for environmental, energy, and mobility justice resonate more deeply in the scholarly and public debate, pleading for an inclusive, intersectional and diverse re-setting of infrastructures, technologies, processes, and discourses. As a result, paying attention to the diverse needs of various actors in the urban settings - particularly vulnerable groups - and the inclusion of these diverse needs in policy designs and processes seems to become more and more important for sustainable city planning. At the same time, there is a lot of uncertainty about what just transformation should look like, which, in turn, is not conducive for the transition process. In this paper we follow up on these trends and elaborate on the question what visions about just transition unfold in the public debate. Theoretically we draw on the concept of imaginary from Science and Technology Studies (STS) as a heuristic device to identify and analyze different narratives when it comes to justice, inclusion and diversity in urban mobility transition processes. Empirically we carrying out a content analysis of policy documents of major stakeholders in the field of sustainable mobility transitions. First, we show that envisioning just transition elicits many different, partly heterogenic, narratives, which result from an under-specification of popular buzzwords such as ‘justice,’ 'inclusion' and 'diversity'. Second, we outline how just visions are translated into policies and how they are meant to be implemented. We conclude that it remains predominantly opaque what it means to design inclusive and just policies and whose needs need to be considered to account for the diverse set of (particularly vulnerable) actors in transition processes.