Lucy is a research associate in urban mobility working on the PEAK Urban programme.
Lucy is researching big data, digital technologies and concepts of the 'smart city', and their applicability to mobility governance in development contexts in India. Technological innovations advertise increased flow and efficiency in the function of urban mobility and Lucy's research will critically question how increasingly digitally mediated mobilities are compatible with the often fractured and unequal infrastructure of developing cities, how 'smart' mobilities are designed and governed, and how they are changing the current practices and politics of formal/informal mobilities. Key themes are socio-technical urban mobility networks, human-technological relationships, concepts of human and non-human agency, material geographies and the mobility of technical design.
Although with experience in quantitative travel behaviour analysis, Lucy is currently using ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies in order to understand the complexity of urban human-digital systems with an interest to further develop ethnographic and visual methods in the field of urban and geographical research.
Lucy completed her PhD in human geography at Cardiff University, Wales funded by ESRC Wales in 2018. It explored issues of rural/urban mobilities, urban governance, global and local design of mobility systems, commodity networks, poverty, wellbeing, gender, and development. Lucy has examined how transport solutions of the Global South are co-produced by social-material networks of international and local NGOs, donors, structures of governance and local users.
