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Emilia Smeds

Profilbild av Emilia Smeds

Postdoktor


Om mig

Postdoktor, Avdelningen för Urbana och Regionala Studier, Institutionen för samhällsplanering och miljö

Jag började arbeta på KTH i augusti 2023 efter att ha verkat i Storbritannien i över tio år. Jag är en brett utbildad samhällsvetare med examen inom statsvetenskap och miljöpolitik (BSc, London School of Economics and Political Science) och stads- och trafikplanering (MSc, Bartlett School of Planning), samt disputerade 2021 inom urban geografi (PhD, University College London). Sedan 2016 har jag arbetat som forskare inom olika EU-finansierade projekt. Senast var jag Research Fellow på University of Westminster i London.

Min expertis som forskare är hållbar och rättvis omställning av stadsmiljöer och infrastruktursystem, speciellt verktyg för styrning och offentlig förvaltning av omställningen mot bilfria städer. Jag är även intresserad av och har skrivit om klimat- och innovationspolitik på stadsnivå. Min forskning har ofta legat nära planeringspraktiken: jag har själv arbetat som trafikplanerare i London och Helsingfors, samt samarbetat med kommuner, regioner, kollektivtrafiksmyndigheter osv i många olika europeiska städer.

Forskningsområden i korthet

  • Omställningen mot bilfria städer

  • Styrning och förvaltning

  • Socialt rättvis utforming av trafiksystem och offentliga rum

  • Klimatpolitik på stadsnivå

  • Strategisk samhällsplanering

  • Medborgardeltagande

  • "Urbana experiment" och "tactical urbanism"

  • Innovationspolitik i förhållande till stadsregioner

Utförligare beskrivning av min forskningsagenda finns på den engelska versionen av min profilsida.

Pågående forskningsprojekt

Genomförandet av regionala utvecklingsplaner genom mjuk styrning

Finansierat av Region Stockholm, 2023-2025. Projektledare: Jonathan Metzger

Långsiktig planering på regional nivå är centralt viktigt, utöver den kommulana nivån, för framtida utveckling av en hållbar rumslig struktur i stadsregioner. I Sverige, liksom i mångra andra europeiska länder, är dock regionala utvecklingsplaner endast vägledande för vad som byggs inom kommunala gränser, det vill säga icke juridiskt bindade. Därför är genomförandet av regionala planer beroende av så kallad "mjuk styrning", där kommuner, näringsliv och andra regionala aktörer måste vara motiverade att samverka genom kontinuerlig dialog kring ansvarstagande. I detta projekt undersöker KTH, på uppdrag av Region Stockholm, vilka slags styrningsverktyg kunde vara effektiva för att stöda denna samverkan och förverkliga de prioriterade åtgärder som beskrivs i RUFS 2060 – den nya regionala utvecklingsplanen som utvecklas för Stockholms län.

NORD-URB-EXP: Experiment och Lärande om Gaturum för en Rättvis Omställning till Bilfria Städer i Norden

Finansierat av Formas, 2025-2028. Projektledare: Emilia Smeds

Projektet undersöker experimentella försök att omvandla gator och offentliga rum genom att ge mera plats åt människor och socialt umgänge, i stället för bilar, parkering och trafik. Det krävs mer kunskap om under vilka förhållanden och genom vilka processer som småskaliga, kortsiktiga experiment kan bidra till långsiktig samhällsförändring. Under COVID-pandemin framkom experiment med gaturum eller så kallad ’tactical urbanism’ som en framstående ny slags trafikpolitik, men innebörden av denna politik för beslutfattningsprocesser, maktutövande, och medborgarinflytande är ännu oklar. Genom att jämföra hur olika städer i Norden använder sig av experimentering som planeringsprocess kan nya insikter angående dessa frågor nås på ett effektivt sätt.

Målet med NORD-URB-EXP projektet är således att förstå hur processer för kunskapsproduktion och lärande mellan olika aktörer inom stadsplanering möjliggör att experiment får långsiktiga påverkningar och bidrar till en socialt rättvis omställning till bilfria städer, med nordiska städer som fallstudier. Projektet uppnår detta genom att konkret undersöka tre frågeställningar:

  • Till vilken grad kan urbana experiment ses som ett paradigmskifte i förhållande till tidigare stadsplanering, och med vilka skillnader då det gäller statens roll, skalan som planeringsarbetet sker på, och de grupper med stadsbyggnadsexpertis som har mest inflytande?

  • Vilka intressegrupper uppstår bland medborgare kring urbana experiment? Hur påverkar dessa grupper, i samverkan med planerare, konsulter och det civila samhället, slutsatserna som beslutsfattare drar i fråga om hur experimentet ”fungerar” och har lyckats eller inte, och således bestämmer om nya lösningar ska bli permanenta delar av stadsmiljön?

  • Vilka spänningar finns mellan hur processerna där olika urbana aktörer tillsammans ”lär sig” av experiment med gaturum fungerar, och önskan att säkra en rättvis omställning till bilfria städer? Är realiteten och idealen kompatibla?

Tidigare forskning (sammanfattning på engelska)

What is the street for? Interrogating ways of seeing and the epistemic justice of reconfiguring public space

Principal Investigator. Funded by British Academy, 2022-2023.

Streets are the backbone of urbanism. The COVID-19 pandemic multiplied calls to rethink what city streets are for, beyond their current dominance by private cars, with a boom in "tactical urbanism" initiatives seeking to experimentally reallocate street space from traffic to public space. It is often taken for granted that such street transformations are politically progressive, yet behind the popular narrative of the street being ‘for people rather than cars,’ the question of ‘for what people?’ looms large. There is growing debate about the implications of tactical street transformations for social justice, including questions of social diversity with respect to participating publics, and how radical or emancipatory the politics at play really are. This project brought together scholars of spatial and transport planning to critically reflect on ongoing street transformations from the perspective of 'epistemic justice' or ‘whose knowledge counts’ in interactions between citizens and planners. You can read the resulting collection of essays Seeing Like a Citizen’: Rethinking City Street Transformations through the Lens of Epistemic Justice in Planning Theory and Practice, including my individual piece Citizen Epistemologies as the Driver of Public Plaza Equity in New York City [email me for an open-access link].

Experimenting with City Streets to Transform Urban Mobility

Postdoctoral researcher. Funded by JPI Urban Europe, 2021-2023.

Temporary ‘street experiments’ are increasingly used to reallocate street space, from car traffic to public life. With the EX-TRA project team at the University of Westminster, we investigated citizen perspectives on these experiments, arguing that we need to develop a more inductive – rather than expert-driven – understanding of the value that they might have in the context of everyday neighbourhood life. Drawing on survey data, we analysed how 458 citizens used and perceived new public squares and parklets across London, Munich and Bologna, and based on this developed a framework for the value of street experiments across 10 mobility and public life dimensions. You can read the resulting article The value of street experiments for mobility and public life: Citizens’ perspectives from three European cities in Journal of Urban Mobility. I left the project in May 2023.

Urban Mobility Transitions: Governing through Experimentation

PhD project. Funded by UK Engineeering and Physical Sciences Research Council, 2016-2021.

Transitions away from car-dominance is one of the key debates in urban research, policy and practice today. My PhD research examined how mobility in cities is governed through experiments, commonly understood as pilot projects, and whether experiments hold potential for  transitions away from automobility dominance. The research drew on a synthesis of sustainability transitions, transport studies and urban studies literature, and traced the outcomes of 108 experiments undertaken over two decades in Bristol (UK) and New York City (USA) between 1996/7 and 2016. It compared the capacity of municipal governments to use experimentation as a governance mechanism, in ways that had transformative impacts on urban mobility systems. By studying the long-term impacts of 'pilot projects' in both cities between 1996-2016, it revealed contextual governance factors that enabled upscaling of sustainable mobility innovations. The findings demonstrated that experiments can contribute to transforming the physical shape of urban mobility systems and the institutions governing them, and can even contribute to transitions, if assessed as change in commuting patterns away from car use.

The PhD thesis is free for anyone to download and so is a pre-print of the first publication Urban transport experimentation: a network or hybrid governance process?. In an early paper during my PhD journey, Networking Cities, I discussed how much of urban experimentation with low-carbon infrastructure is mediated by global city networks such as C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.

Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning: Pathways and Links to Urban Systems

Doctoral researcher. Funded by European Commission (CIVITAS/H2020), 2019-2021.

The SUMP-PLUS project focused on the Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) approach that the European Commission advocate that European cities use locally. At University College London, we found that attention to the achievement of climate change mitigation targets was insufficient in existing SUMP guidelines. I co-led the development of a new vision-led, backcasting-focused planning approach for European cities to achieve carbon-neutral mobility by 2050. The conceptual framework and a first version of practitioner guidance was published as the report Developing Transition Pathways towards Sustainable Mobility in European cities. After I left the project in 2021, some of the content from this report was integrated into the Commission-endorsed SUMP Topic Guide on Decarbonisation of Urban Mobility.

The ideas from the project are also presented in two policy-oriented pieces, including a chapter in the book Towards a European Green Deal with Cities that reflects on the evolution of EU research & innovation policy related to transport and how the programming of EU funding affects what kind of innovation projects are undertaken on 'the ground'.

Social Sciences and Humanities perspectives on Transport and Mobility in Europe

Volunteer Early Stage Research Fellow, 2019-2021.

Within the ENERGY-SHIFTS project, I contributed to the Working Group on Transport and Mobility that advocated for a greater role for the perspectives of Social Science and Humanities scholars in informing the European Commission's Strategic Energy Technology Plan and Horizon Europe programming. Based on a Horizon Scan methodology, we developed A Social Sciences and Humanities research agenda for transport and mobility in Europe: key themes and 100 research questions that won the 2024 Moshe Givoni Prize for the best paper published in the journal Transport Reviews. In that paper, it was especially interesting to reflect on a different angle on the programming of EU research & innovation policy, namely how it affects what academic research on mobility ends up being undertaken.

Transport justice for night-time workers in London

Co-Investigator, 2017-2019.

With colleagues at University College London, we worked for several years – largely without external funding – to critically examine the exclusion of night-time workers from London's Night Time Economy policy, which initially focused largely on those consuming nightlife. We highlighted that transport provision in the form of the new Night Tube was being planned without clear policy attention to the needs of lower-income night-time workers, who were often reliant on bus travel to their homes further from the city centre – first in a policy-oriented report and later in the article Socio-spatial and temporal dimensions of transport equity for London's Night Time Economy. A second article Night-time mobilities and (in)justice in London: Constructing mobile subjects and the politics of difference in policy-making further developed this case in order to explore Mimi Sheller's theorisation of mobility justice. We argued that  transport planning and research needs to consider social difference to a greater extent, and go beyond thinking about the distributive justice of accessibility planning to engage with deliberative justice (participation) and epistemic justice (knowledge production). The project ended with a seed-funded collaboration with a UK trade union that represents night-time workers, and eventually our work was cited by the Greater London Authority and City of Sydney.

Travel to school in the context of suburban family mobilities

My MSc research at the Bartlett School of Planning (2014) explored through surveys and in-depth interviews with parents why many children are driven to primary school, rather than walking or cycling, in the context of suburban London neighbourhoods as 'automobile peripheries'. There were many reasons, but crucially I found that in contrast to common narrative regarding the need for car-loving parents to change their behaviour, poor public transport provision meant that combining active travel to school with subsequent travel to work was very difficult for families. While I was a junior researcher and the work is inevitably flawed, it did apply quite an innovative conceptual framework combining time geography (space-time constraints) and social practice theory (three elements model) to analyse mobility practices. It was published as a book chapter Automobile peripheries: travel to school in suburban London through the lens of social practice and the original MSc dissertation contains more relevant material [email me for open-access links].


Kurser

Hållbar urban mobilitet (AG2144), lärare | Kurswebb

Planering och design för hållbar stadsutveckling (AG2150), lärare | Kurswebb