Professor Tim Schwanen
Director of the Transport Studies Unit
Professor of Transport Geography
Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford
About
Tim is Director of the Transport Studies Unit, Professor of Transport Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment, and also a Supernumerary Fellow at St Anne's College. He joined the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) in March 2009 and became Director in September 2015.
Tim is one of the editors of Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, the youngest addition to the E&P family, and he serves on the editorial advisory boards of five journals focused on transport and mobility. Since September 2021 he has been a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences, the UK's national academy for academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences.
Tim obtained his PhD from the Department of Human Geography and Planning of Utrecht University, The Netherlands in 2003 (cum laude), after which he worked as a post-doctoral researcher and Lecturer in Urban Geography at the same university. Tim joined the University of Oxford in March 2009, first as a Research Fellow at the TSU and later as Departmental Lecturer in Transport Studies and Human Geography. He has fulfilled the TSU Director role since September 2015 and was the Fellow in Geography at St Anne's College in 2015-2021. He also was a Visiting Professor in Human Geography at the School of Business, Economics and Law of the University of Gothenburg in 2016-2019.
Tim is a member of the SoGE Technological Natures: Materialities, mobilities, politics research cluster.
Current Research
Tim's research concentrates on the geographies of the everyday mobilities of people, goods and information. It is international in outlook, interdisciplinary in scope, informed by the thinking in various sub-disciplines within Geography, and organised around five more general concerns:
- Low-carbon mobilities and cities - innovation and experimentation, politics and governance, justice;
- Futures and temporality - sociotechnical transitions, path dependency, habit, rhythm, resilience, vulnerability;
- Social and spatial inequality - age, gender, the role of mobility and infrastructure;
- Well-being - conceptualisations, relationships with mobility and place, politics;
- Philosophy of transport and mobility - history of thought and praxis, new concepts and modes of thinking.
Teaching
Tim teaches on the Preliminary Examination (Prelims) and Final Honour School (FHS) in Geography, as well as the Nature, Society and Environmental Governance (NSEG) MSc programme.
On the Prelims programme he teaches some of the 'Networks and Mobilities' lectures in the Human Geography course. He coordinates and teaches on the FHS Special Subject course 'Transport and Mobilities'. On the NSEG Course he teaches half of 'Decision Making Processes', which is one of the programme's core modules, and co-teaches the 'Cities, Mobility and Climate Change' Elective to students across the School's MSc students.
Tim leads the Geography School at St Anne's College and teaches on all the short courses of TSU's 'Global Challenges in Transport' professional education programme.
Current Graduate Research Students
Maryam Altaf | Gendered Mobilities and Platform-based Transport Services in Lahore, Pakistan |
Ho-Yin (Tommy) Chan | Towards resilient cities, communities and individuals: Cutting across the top-down-bottom-up dichotomy through citizen initiatives in everyday transport practices and planning |
Michael Davis | From Transit Oriented Development to People Oriented Development: a Fresh Look at Medium Sized Cities in Latin America |
Gaurav Dubey | Political economy of low carbon mobility transitions - the case of electric mobility in India |
Wenbo Guo | Mobility, subjective well-being and health in transitional China: towards socially sustainable cities |
Yifan Han | A demand atlas for the planning, operations and upgrading of bicycle-sharing systems |
Luis Iturra | Exploring urban inequality through unveiling uneven atmospheres in everyday mobility practices |
Yi Fan Liu | Disaggregating the BlueSG assemblage: Examining the productions and negotiations of user (im)mobilities and agency in Singapore's electric vehicle sharing service |
Helen Morrissey | Data and governance in South Africa's paratransit industry |
Clive Parkinson | Automobility as 'Dispositif' in Contemporary China |
Ignacio Perez | Examining the role of data in smart city management: following the transport data dispositif in Santiago de Chile |
Camila Ramos | Transport-related social exclusion: A study on minimum standards and thresholds through the lens of accessibility |
Nina Teng | Examining Trust in Shared Mobility: The Case of On-Demand Peer-to-Peer Ridesharing in Southeast Asia |
Shiv Yucel | Improving Extreme Heat Resilience: Measuring Inequalities in Access to Relief |
Zhaoqi (Eric) Zhou | Understanding cycling infrastructure and practice in Shenzhen, China |
Recent Graduate Research Students
Paola Castaneda Completed DPhil in 2022 | How is the bike made mobile? Learning from bicycle advocacy in Latin America |
Eric (Tak Hin) Chan Completed DPhil in 2020 | The role of built environment and travel behaviour in influencing people's well-being - A case study of Shenzhen |
Heuishilja Chang Completed DPhil in 2018 | The resilience of shrinking communities in rural Japan: Can the Cittaslow approach be a possible development strategy? |
Anna Davidson Completed DPhil in 2018 | Moblizing bodies: unsettling sustainable mobility through cycling in Los Angeles |
Rafael Pereira Completed DPhil in 2018 | Distributive justice and transportation equity: inequality in accessibility in Rio de Janeiro |
Thomas Ashfold Completed DPhil in 2016 | Work, Time and Rhythm: Investigating contemporary ‘time squeeze’ |
Outreach
Tim regularly gives key notes and invited talks at conferences and departments, including the 15th NECTAR Conference "Towards Human Scale Cities - Open and Happy" in Helsinki in June 2019.
He was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Transport Geography in 2013-2015 and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of multiple academic journals: Applied Mobilities, European Journal of Future Studies, Journal of Transport Geography, Sustainability, Transportation, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, and Travel Behaviour and Society.
Tim is one of the Fellows of the KiM Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis.