The Morality of Urban Mobility

The Morality of Urban Mobility
Author: Shane Epting
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786608219

Cities’ transportation systems affect people, ecosystems, and future generations, and they increase tensions between historical preservation, social justice concerns, and future needs. In turn, all of these factors deserve consideration, but not equally. A just and moral way forward must prioritize values in how we give preference in planning decisions. Shane Epting illustrates that the problem of “moral prioritization” rests at the heart of these problems. To overcome such challenges, he develops a multitiered assessment system that shows how to evaluate complicated affairs in urban mobility. This book brings philosophical underpinnings of public works into full view, showing how the love of wisdom benefits the ongoing and future transportation issues of our increasingly urbanized world.

The Morality of Urban Mobility

The Morality of Urban Mobility
Author: Shane Epting
Publisher: Philosophy, Technology and Soc
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-05-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781786608192

Shane Epting illustrates that the problem of "moral prioritization" rests at the heart of problems with city transportation systems. To overcome such challenges, he develops a multitiered assessment system that shows how to evaluate complicated affairs in urban mobility.

Assembling Moral Mobilities

Assembling Moral Mobilities
Author: Nicholas A. Scott
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496219414

In the years since the new mobilities paradigm burst onto the social scientific scene, scholars from various disciplines have analyzed the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of transport, contesting its long-dominant understandings as defined by engineering and economics. Still, the vast majority of mobility studies, and even key works that mention the “good life” and its dependence on the car, fail to consider mobilities in connection with moral theories of the common good. In Assembling Moral Mobilities Nicholas A. Scott presents novel ways of understanding how cycling and driving animate urban space, place, and society and investigates how cycling can learn from the ways in which driving has become invested with moral value. By jointly analyzing how driving and cycling reassembled the “good city” between 1901 and 2017, with a focus on various cities in Canada, in Detroit, and in Oulu, Finland, Scott confronts the popular notion that cycling and driving are merely antagonistic systems and challenges social-scientific research that elides morality and the common good. Instead of pitting bikes against cars, Assembling Moral Mobilities looks at five moral values based on canonical political philosophies of the common good, and argues that both cycling and driving figure into larger, more important “moral assemblages of mobility,” finally concluding that the deeper meta-lesson that proponents of cycling ought to take from driving is to focus on ecological responsibility, equality, and home at the expense of neoliberal capitalism. Scott offers a fresh perspective of mobilities and the city through a multifaceted investigation of cycling informed by historical lessons of automobility.

Urban Ethics

Urban Ethics
Author: Moritz Ege
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-10-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000175723

This book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Whose gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life? Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City
Author: Sharon M. Meagher
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2019-08-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317400631

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: • Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities • Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City • Urban Aesthetics • Urban Politics • Citizenship • Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of Place. The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization. Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science.

Saving Cities

Saving Cities
Author: Shane Epting
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 64
Release: 2021-09-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030858332

This book makes the case that several urban technologies contribute to wicked problems such as climate change and vast social and economic inequalities. Such situations often create unfavorable conditions for mental life in cities. These conditions force us to expand the taxonomy of technology to include new designations: “wicked” and “saving” technologies. Epting holds that the latter can support worthwhile goals such as socially just urban sustainability. Along with fleshing out this view, he provides concrete examples of saving technologies, which include cohousing initiatives, ariel cable cars, participatory budgeting, and car-free zones/cities.

Urban Enlightenment

Urban Enlightenment
Author: Shane Epting
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000851869

This book applies the concept of moral ordering to urban affairs. It demonstrates how multi-stakeholder engagement can enhance the quality of city life while supporting ambitions such as ethical urban sustainability and human flourishing. While there is a history of philosophers viewing cities as technologies, cities’ encompassing nature inherently limits them. Urban sustainability matters often affect marginalized and vulnerable people, the public, nonhuman species, future generations, and urban artifacts. Problems can arise when stakeholders’ interests and needs appear at odds. The author argues in favor of the concept of moral ordering, a process designed to address issues involving different stakeholder groups such as municipal officials and residents. By employing moral ordering, a view comes into focus, revealing that the attention that each group receives reflects their place in the process, providing the necessary degree of moral respect. Finally, the author shows how moral ordering can lead to urban enlightenment. He examines real-world applications of moral ordering, such as New York City’s Participatory Budgeting Project, to make the case that municipalities can begin to bolster municipal-community relations in ways that promote urban enlightenment. Urban Enlightenment will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of the city, applied ethics, philosophy of technology, urban planning, environmental studies, and political science.

City of Men

City of Men
Author: Romit Chowdhury
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2023-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978829523

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.

The Ethics of Agribusiness

The Ethics of Agribusiness
Author: Shane Epting
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 100064068X

This book offers an original perspective on food supply chains. It argues that the ability to trade food on a global scale could be intrinsically good aside from any instrumental value that people gain from it. While the author’s argument seems to counter wholesale anti-agribusiness views, it is consistent with the larger goals of food-justice movements. The author examines the structures of food supply chains, revealing the kinds of harm they help produce. They include slavery, abusive labor, geopolitical exploitation, ecological degradation, and public health impacts. Although the book argues that food supply chains can be collectively beneficial, eliminating their immoral features must hold steady as a continuous enterprise. Securing this outcome means that we go beyond critique. The final chapter advocates for the sustainable food label to address issues of food justice and food sovereignty. The Ethics of Agribusiness will interest researchers and advanced students working in food ethics, environmental ethics, and agricultural ethics.