| This research examines the emergence of multimodal transportation in the urban United States through a transportation reform movement and new directions in federal policy since the 1990s. Multimodal transportation is part of a growing discourse on transportation alternatives and options in response to the predominance of automobile-centered design. I characterize multimodality as an emergent concept, a manner of formulating social possibilities that contrasts with the uniformity of automobility. Whereas automobility suggests that the car can be most things to most people, multimodality suggests transportation infrastructures that embody social differences. It suggests that the built environment provide a material basis for multiple ways of living. This dissertation is the result of two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with pedestrians, bicyclists, bus riders, urban residents, advocates, planners, and engineers in Oakland, California. The research combined participant/observation, semi-structured interviews, and photographic research methods, situating contemporary circumstances in the historical context of twentieth century U.S. urban transportation.; I use the concept of social worlds to explain differences in social practices from a phenomenological perspective. In particular, the embodied activities of walking, bicycling, bus-riding, and city living constitute communities of practice that correlate in historically specific ways with divisions by race, class, gender, age, and physical ability. Recognizing how infrastructure shapes forms of urban life by design, I introduce the concept of technological pluralism to answer how we, as diverse people, might live together better in a shared material world. Social worlds and infrastructure are thus descriptive concepts for the lived worlds and the built world, respectively, while technological pluralism is a normative concept that questions how the relationship between these worlds might be improved. This technological approach to pluralism suggests a politics of recognition that would (1) institutionalize the competing rationalities of multiple social worlds to (2) protect the minority rights of these communities by (3) deliberately steering technology and design toward more inclusive public goods. |
