Slowing down : degrowth and the limits to urban mobility

Cities worldwide face immense challenges in transitioning to a sustainable future. While beingstructurally and politically bound to continuous growth, the striving for a constant increase inproduction and consumption puts enormous pressure on our planet and its ecosystems.Degrowth has been proposed as a pathway to solving this dilemma. Although scholarly attentionto urban degrowth has expanded, a central aspect of cities remains partly unexplored: mobility.Urban mobility, being motorized and dependent on fossil fuels, has a substantial environmentaland social impact, making it a central issue for sustainability. Within mobility research, urban sus-tainability has primarily been addressed by problematizing automobility and discussing how toreplace the car as the dominant mode of transport. However, the relationship between mobilityand growth extends beyond cars and needs to be addressed more generally. This article developsand expands the conversation between the degrowth and sustainable mobility literatures througha theoretical exploration of the concept of ‘‘limits.’’ It proposes a relational conceptualization oflimits, providing an analysis of this concept in relation to key vectors of urban mobility: space,speed, and the body. Our study suggests not only that limits should be conceptualized along thesevectors but also that these specific limits could be used to tease out what sustainable urban mobi-lity might mean in practice.