2022 Volume 14 Pages 50-70
Transportation infrastructures, as both enablers and victims of social movements, often become major political arenas of cities. In this article, we unravel the understudied role that social movements play in the formation of grassroots transport initiatives. We illustrate this role by synthesizing how grassroots efforts have created, diversified, and networked social innovations in urban transport systems in the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong. We document the timeline of the movement and related solidarity activities, which led to various grassroots transport initiatives. We identify three lines of research that appear to be decisively informative to transport literature: a) emergency experiences, community capacities and mobility resilience, b) grassroots engagement in transport disruption management and c) community-oriented governance for a participatory smart city. These issues require particular attention in future research to guide transport policy on grassroots initiatives toward sustainable transport systems.
