Low carbon innovation in Chinese urban mobility: prospects, politics and practices (original) (raw)
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This paper has an empirical and theoretical focus: to empirically assess electric bicycle development in China, and to theoretically test and apply the "Multi-Level Perspective" on transitions and innovation. We examine the electric bicycle (e-bike) sector in China to understand the future prospects for urban mobility and the interaction of e-bikes as a form of vernacular technology within the existing transport regime. For this purpose, we address the following questions: 1) What factors will influence the future adoption of e-bikes? 2) How are alternative travel modes evaluated against e-bikes? 3) Will e-bikes become a popular sustainable mobility mode in the future or only an intermediary mode to cars? To provide answers, we conducted a survey in Nanjing city in order to assess the attitude of e-bike users, and other mode users (e.g. pedestrians; bicycle users). We then analyse responses from this survey through the lens of sociotechnical transitions theory, notably the "Multi-Level Perspective" notions of niches, regimes, and landscape. The paper explores the influential factors underpinning future e-bike adoption and the decision-making calculus behind alternative mode choices. Generalised Linear Models are used to investigate the factors influencing future e-bike adoption and alternative mode choices based on the survey data. We conclude that e-bikes are an intermediary mode on Nanjing's motorisation pathway, and that they therefore may eventually reflect a dying regime.
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Urban development is key to sustainable development in the world because people have moved from rural areas to urban cities. Mobility and transport have the highest potential to reduce emissions of carbon in urban areas. Local and international companies have been affected by introducing Chinese apps and smart communication networks. A vast potential can be seen in turning urban mobility into long-term sustainability by incorporating pre-existing but under-utilized lowcarbon carriers in cities like public transport into various shared business networks. Though, exponential market growth and creativity in the sharing economy have undermined existing knowledge sources, socioeconomic relations, and physical and spatial urban infrastructures. This paper explores the connection between the ongoing development of urban systems and socio-ecological developments in mobility sharing, using observational data from three case studies focusing on automobile sharing in Shanghai. There is a robust evolutionary structure that incorporates an increasingly sustainable urban at macro-level and advanced industry systems into a smart and green transport framework at meso-level. These two layers of evolutionary expansion in urban environments and market systems, created by disruptive mobility-sharing innovations and brought on by urban changes towards an increase in sustainability, both shape one another and strengthen sustainable principles and practices in the swift-changing urban and business innovation industries in Shanghai.
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Shanghai continues to position itself as the financial capital of the Chinese mainland economy. The concomitant explosion in wealth, the increasing penetration of consumer culture, the in-migration of vast numbers of non-Shanghainese to the city seeking work and the dispersal of the city to the periphery all have significant implications for mobility. This research poses three questions: 1) How do people move around Shanghai? 2) Why do they move in this way? 3) How does this choice of mobility impact on their being and sense of agency? Adopting a qualitative methodology, we approach mobility as a cultural phenomenon and seek to uncover the meanings that car drivers and transit riders attach to mobility and how this impacts their life and their experience of Shanghai. We found that in spite of the fact that Shanghai now has the most extensive metro system in the world, there is a growing materially, culturally and socially embedded automobile culture. The car has a resilient symbolic appeal for the residents of Shanghai. While the automobile is enabling in some routine functions of daily life, collectively it has diminished the agency of people in Shanghai. Congestion, pollution and psychosocial pressure to buy a car portend a socially unsustainable system of mobility. While the metro enables vast numbers of individuals to perform the functions of daily life, it is becoming overcrowded and is associated with the spatial and class-based segregation of people.
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