Conducted by Anne Kubo | LinkedIn
Vikas Bagde is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in sustainable urban mobility innovations. His research focuses on the role of narratives in shaping bottom-up mobility solutions, with a particular emphasis on electric rickshaws in India. Vikas combines his background in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Ecology, Environment, and Sustainable Development to explore how grassroots-driven innovations can contribute to sustainable and accessible transportation solutions. Through qualitative and quantitative methodologies, he engages with various stakeholders to uncover the impact of narratives on innovation processes, aiming to inform policy and foster inclusive urban mobility.
Anne Kubo: Please introduce yourself and your topic!
I’m a PhD candidate working on sustainable mobility innovation. I think the dominant mobility paradigm, or the prominent way of mobility innovation is not sustainable. This is because it’s a top-down approach that is very much profit centered. And we see that mobility is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, and all sustainability challenges. My approach to tackle this problem is to entirely revisualize the innovation paradigm, so how we understand the problem, how we frame it and then the approach that we take to solve it. One of the approaches that I’m focusing on is called bottom-up innovation where we want to have the innovation as holistic as possible, we want to have as much participation of users as possible. So that gives us diverse narratives in the innovation, helping us to understand systems better.
Just to compare with some mobility innovation that is being done by some of the corporate or established enterprises, what happens is that the basic objective to innovate is to maximise profit. The problem is taken more like a technical challenge and not as a social one. And as a result of that, you see that in most of this type of mobility solution, we see a lot of technologies, engineered products, being used. Like if I ask you, what are some mobility innovations that come to mind?
A: Looking through EU plans, I see a lot of mentions of new technical innovations. For example, talk of automated systems, lorries with integrated pedestrian and cyclist detection.
Exactly, with your example of more autonomous vehicles the problem is with the approach to mobility. It’s looked at like something that can be minimized as improvement work or additional efforts, but we don’t look at it as an integrated part of the society. Mobility is reduced to moving as fast as you can from point A to point B. And then it becomes a task that needs to be completed, so an autonomous car can free the human being from driving so they can instead sit on the computer or do yoga or whatever.
Basically, the whole point is that products are being overengineered and mobility is looked at as a negativity utility to be minimized as much as possible. Whoever is developing the product pours a huge amount of money into research and development and then wants to recover that money and make a profit out of that innovation, wanting to avoid doing a lot of iterations within this process. And that makes it difficult to deal with the negative aspects or consequences, like the environmental impacts, of your product.
A: So, the solution is shorter iteration cycles?
This collaborative method fosters more equitable relationships between researchers and participants, moving beyond traditional hierarchical research models. By embracing these innovative approaches, we can anticipate deeper insights and more impactful outcomes that resonate throughout society. This shift promises to transform how we understand and address mobility challenges, whereby change can occur and be embedded within the communities who historically experience the most challenges within mobility systems.
VB: Yes, and a less linear process that incorporates other stakeholder views. That’s one part. And the other part is that the top-down approach reinforces the dominant narratives. In the case of mobility, the dominant narrative is that the car gives you the freedom of mobility. Which is not true. Those narratives that benefit the regime are the dominant market forces that are then reinforced by innovation. The third and fourth problem I see with the innovation process is that it is very resource intensive, and only produces generic ideas or cosmetic changes.
A: What are some ways we can respond to these shortcomings for more holistic sustainable mobility?
VB: In order to find a more sustainable approach to innovation we need to address these four problems of top-down innovation, but bottom-up innovation is not as well documented or understood, which is where I come in. I talk about the electric rickshaw as a case study and my entire research revolves around narratives that then influence the long process of policy. Narratives take a while to take shape and build momentum, for example the idea that electric vehicles are cleaner, right? But once this narrative has been built, now all the countries across the world want to have as many electric vehicles as possible and convert their mobility fleets. Once this narrative becomes dominant, or even just prominent, then it automatically influences the decision-making process. Now, in the US and many other parts of the world, you get a subsidy if you get an electric car, or you get a subsidized charging facility. So, identifying narratives and their use is a very powerful tool.
A: How did you get into this line of research?
VB: I started out as a mechanical engineer. I come from a farmer’s family in India and fortunately I could attend a school and I proved good in academics. I decided to go into mechanical engineering, but there they don’t teach you anything about social sciences. I grew up experiencing a lot of crop failure that was devastating for the farmers and high rates of farmer suicides with drastic consequences for families. Observing this vulnerability in my social surroundings, I decided to focus more on these complex problems and studied Ecology and Environmental Sustainability.
Doing my masters, I realized I was looking at this as a problem of the rural areas or of agriculture, which is not the case. The high demand for resources is coming from the cities, and I turned to looking at the problem of urban spaces. I found out transportation is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases and climate change, which is what leads to a lot the crop failure. As a mechanical engineer I was able to critically look at the newest thing in transportation technology, electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are not necessarily sustainable since they contain a lot of rare minerals like lead or lithium that are polluting to mine, very limited and cannot be recycled easily.
My main argument in this context is that with electric vehicles we are shifting the pollution from urban spaces to rural agricultural areas. A country like India is almost 70% powered by coal-fired power plants, and with very low-quality coal on top of that. Most of these power plants are located in the rural areas and the parts where indigenous populations reside. So, this has far-reaching social consequences if you consider the power relations between the urban and rural populations.
Moving from this, I decided to come to Amsterdam to do my PhD because of Marco, who I think has a very practical and holistic approach to mobility policy. This more hands-on approach works well with my background from mechanical engineering and farming.
