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Could Our Streets Be Transformed Into 'Sites of Peacebuilding'? (Ashton Rohmer) | Otter.ai

Could Our Streets Be Transformed Into 'Sites of Peacebuilding'? (Ashton Rohmer)

Kea Wilson24min

Speaker 1

00:08

Hey everyone, welcome to the break. I'm your host, Kea Wilson, so in our last episode, we talked about how there isn't really a war on cars, but there might be a war on walking and biking with clear, identifiable enemies. But what if it goes even deeper than that? What if we thought of automobility, that is the system of forces that makes driving the default way of getting around all over America and, in fact, over most of the world, as itself, a kind of war being fought in the name of so called transportation progress that's been going on for so long that we've ceased to even see it as a war at all. Or more accurately, what if we thought of car culture as a conflict system that is extremely profitable for some people, and which has claimed more lives than World Wars one and two combined, and that's only to talk about the direct violence that comes in the form of car crashes. That's the argument that my guest today is making, and she thinks it could change everything about the way we view our advocacy. Her name is Ashton Romer, and she's a PhD candidate in a field called Peace and Conflict Studies, but her background is in urban planning, and she argues that car culture has a whole lot in common with more traditional forms of warfare, and not just the body count. It's a fascinating reframe that I really enjoy talking about so let's just get right into it. Here is my conversation with Ashton Romer.

Speaker 2

01:46

How about we just kind of start off with the big picture? Why don't you just tell me a little bit about the genesis of this paper and how you as a Peace and Conflict Studies scholar, which is a term that maybe not all of our audience is going to know came to this topic?

Speaker 3

02:06

Yeah, so I am a an urban planner by training. So I got my masters in planning back in 2017 and spent a little bit of time in government consulting shifted hardcore to academia when I started reading really long, boring books and thought maybe, maybe practice isn't where I'm supposed to be. Maybe I should be asking hard questions. And when I got to my program, I had spent at that point a lot of time in community engagement meetings, and had been thinking a lot about how the built environment impacts our social relationships. And I was very involved in, you know, the DC advocacy space, and seeing themes continue to come up. And so I have an interest that is very different from the other folks in my program. You know, a lot of folks, when they think about peace and conflict, they think about what's going on, you know, in basically everywhere in the world, except for the US. And also they don't think about it from a transportation perspective. Or if they do, transportation is an add on or a piece of another conflict, an identity based conflict. You know, how do bridges? And you know, bridge infrastructure complicate identity conflicts in this far from place, and so in a self serving way, wanted to get this piece out there, because the field of peace and conflict resolution has never thought about my field of study as a site of inquiry. And so I wanted to show people in my fields that thinking about transportation and really, more specifically, car culture, would reveal a really rich kind of set of issues to think about with this peace and conflict lens

Speaker 2

03:47

that's so interesting, and I want to make sure that I got my arms around what the Peace and Conflict lens is. You mentioned in the paper that now this is a field, but has an overwhelming focus on wars and the liberal peace building paradigm. Say a little bit more about that. What traditionally has the peace and conflict studies been, and what do you think it could be if it starts looking at these issues, not just closer to home, but kind of deep within the fabric of our culture, like car supremacy,

Speaker 3

04:13

definitely. So I think that, generally speaking, peace and conflict studies folks do focus a lot on wars. So I actually tried to submit this article to, I think it was three different journals, and I got a desk rejection because it didn't have war splattered all over it. Now, of course, there was a an article published, I think, in 2024 by minor at all, that cataloged all of the harms that come from driving cars. And I think what they estimated was that the number of people that we've lost to just I think it was car crashes and air pollution and maybe some lead poisoning was equal to the number of people we've lost in World Wars one and two. And yet, you know, we don't talk about these things as certainly not a public health. This epidemic the way that we've talked about gun violence, even though, you know, for a long time, gun violence in car crashes ran neck and neck in terms of how many people tragically lost their lives in both of those but people in peace and conflict studies are very focused on things like religious conflicts or ethnic conflicts in places where we see a lot of imagery from, you know, across the world. And so my hope is that, in thinking about both the very concrete quantitative figure this is how many people are impacted by car crashes annually blowing it up, to say, well, yes, and why is that the case? What are all of the different facets of this that reveal a much broader conflict system, and that each of those facets actually reinforces something else. And for that reason, it's very tangled and difficult to unpack. And from a peace building perspective, it means that there are a lot of places where practitioners, policy makers, academics, can chunk off things to tackle and try to dismantle this larger conflict system. And so my hope is that, for example, if we think about identity conflicts, we think about factions of different ethnic groups in, let's say, Eastern Europe, from a peace and conflict studies perspective, how do we think about modal identities? Is that a thing that should exist? I tend to think it is. When you are using a certain vehicle, or, in the case of pedestrian not using a vehicle in our public space, other people make certain claims and assumptions about you moving throughout our built environment, and those perceptions can dictate how we treat each other, or how we think about each other in relation to both kind of the social fabric and the built environment. And so if we were to apply identity thinking to this larger conflict system that I'm talking about, we might be really critical of socially constructed identities that are merely based on how one person moves throughout the built environment.

Speaker 2

07:15

That's so fascinating, and I want to circle back on it, but I think maybe I do want to take one more step back to basically the frame that you put on this paper, which was the frame of the gal tongues triangle. Am I pronouncing that right? That name is so very German, and I just want to make sure

Unknown Speaker

07:32

I think that's how it is. I've been saying

Speaker 2

07:34

it Sure. We're both going to say it wrong if it's wrong. But when you talk about things like modal identities and sort of forms of cultural violence. That is one leg of the triangle. But there are two other ones that I kind of want to go through one by one, because that's how you structure the paper, and it really helped me sort of get my arms around this topic. So the first leg of the triangle is direct violence. You know, we're talking about car crashes. We're talking about hit and runs. We're talking about, you mentioned, vehicle ramming attacks, reckless driving, even the trauma of near misses. When you say direct violence, is that all we mean? What is direct violence and what are some of the less obvious ways that it manifests within a car supremacist system?

Speaker 3

08:14

Yeah, so I guess maybe I'll step back a teensy tiny bit just to connect a previous answer with with this question, one of the ways that I thought I might be able to get some traction within my adopted field of peace and conflict studies was to use a very prominent scholars kind of theoretical framework and put cars into it. And so my intent with using this triangle of violence was to use something that was really legible to peace and conflict folks, so that they could see that not only does it constitute violence, but it does so in a very specific way that creates a reinforcing system. So to your question about direct vehicular violence, I think one of the things that I've been really grappling with as someone who considers herself a kind of a scholar activist, is the language that we use in advocacy spaces. And so for instance, when we use traffic violence, I'd like to move to a point myself where I'm more comfortable with calling it car crashes, because I think that when we say traffic violence, you know, it muddies the waters a little bit. Because when we think about traffic, we think about in our kind of modern nomenclature, oh, I was stuck in traffic. Or, as folks who listen to your brilliant podcast, know, we are traffic. And so if you were to really take that to its logical extent, we're actually not talking about, you know, congestion being the cause of the trauma that plays out on our streets. It's actually, you know, people driving cars. And so how do we shift some of this language to be a little bit more specific about what we mean? And so my intent with. Framing the direct vehicular violence section was really to pull out the ways that we see interpersonal behavior playing out in society. And I think what's interesting too about thinking about this as a conflict system, and why, from my perspective, it's so interesting to study each of us unwillingly kind of contributes to or participates in this conflict system every time we go anywhere, right? Like, if I'm walking out my door to go to the grocery store and some one driving a car who lives in Northern Virginia fails to yield to me because they're rushing to work, then that is a conflict. And it's, it's a little bit different than, I think, how transportation engineers might think about conflicts, because there's some degree of decision making that's inherent in a lot of the interactions that play out. Now, of course, a lot of things that are not totally up to our decision making authority, which is where the, you know, the structural and the cultural pieces come in.

Speaker 2

11:02

Why don't you just tell me in your words what structural violence means in this context, because it's a little bit separate than direct violence. I feel like I tend to marble the two together when I report. And I'm curious

Speaker 3

11:15

how you distinguish them, yeah. And I think, I mean, this is something that I've thought about before, because, especially in my academic little space in peace and conflict studies, we like to think a lot about, Well, is it, you know, is it a an interpersonal thing? Is it a structural thing? Is a behavioral thing, or is it this larger, systemic thing? And I think, you know, in some ways, behind every behavior is a structure that condones it, and then behind every structure is an individual behavior that created that system in the first place. And so I don't totally love to kind of pull them apart and think of them as a separate things, but for the purposes of this paper, the way that I thought about structural vehicular violence was really about taking individual people and their behavior out of it, and thinking about some of the institutions, the processes, the impacts of our car dependent society, and how that structures are, you know, kind of community, well being and so, for example, the lobbying done by the car industry to reject safety standards in vehicles. You know, we certainly have a massive problem right now with the unnecessarily large vehicles that are prowling our streets and the increased risk that those vehicles pose to people, particularly those that are unprotected by large metal boxes. We of course, have a really shameful legacy of redlining and white flight in the US context, and so when we think about suburban sprawl as being enabled by vehicular travel that links all the way back to how black and brown people are able to move in their built environments now, and the fact that black and brown people in low income communities are disproportionately victims of car crashes is a really perfect example of how structures, in so many ways, have failed a community.

Speaker 2

13:19

Yeah. I mean, it's so clear how structural violence leads to direct violence, and then to muddy the waters even further, let's talk about that third legs. No surprise, you talk about something called cultural violence. I feel like you've already given us an example of this in your very first answer when you talked about language. And you know the distinction between traffic violence and maybe car violence or car crashes or something like that. But paint the bigger picture for me, what is cultural violence in this conversation about car supremacy, and why do you characterize it as violence versus just like bias or romanticizing a mode of trouble or something like that?

Speaker 3

13:55

That is a great question, and I'm really glad that you asked it. We have some really terrific research by folks like Ann Walker and Mark show who talk about the normalization of certain behaviors and beliefs in our society. And, you know, Tara Goddard also did this work in the US, showing that, you know, a lot of folks think that it's perfectly okay to, you know, pollute the air with their cars, but not to pollute the air with their cigarette smoke. And so really, I think of cultural violence as the norms and customs that desensitize our understanding of how the world works and how certain people are impacted by our own actions. And so as an example, we have pop culture and media around franchises like the Fast and the Furious that glamorize really aggressive, risky driving. And when we understand the impact that culture has on individual behavior, we start to see that culture is a really influential part. Of our world, I can hardly go a day without somebody bringing up a topic that I can make a connection to, between car culture and what they're talking about, whether it is, you know, ads during the Super Bowl, or talking about getting, you know, a license and how as a 16 year old, that is seen as some milestone to be very excited about, and how that cultural tradition carries so much weight and changes our relationship to these interpersonal behaviors and these structural issues that are talked about earlier in

Speaker 2

15:36

the paper. Okay, I want to loop back around kind of to where we started, which is you talked a little bit about why the field of peace and conflict studies needs to, you know, expand its focus and in some ways, look inward towards the conversation about party supremacy, car dependency and all of these forms of violence that it includes. Why does the field of car dependency need the field of peace and conflict studies, like, what changes when you put this lens on the field that you were trained in originally, versus the way that like advocates tend to think about this stuff. Like, how can this language help propel our advocacy and deepen our effectiveness

Speaker 3

16:16

as someone who thinks of herself and hopefully, you know, actually does the thing as an advocate. I am continuously noodling on this exact question as someone who is trained as an urban planner. I don't recall in my training, granted, I specialized in land use rather than transportation, so perhaps it was in the transportation courses in my master's degree, but I don't recall there being conversations like this to explain or unravel all that is built up in this. So, for instance, I took a class in dispute resolution. And my recollection. Now, this is many years ago at this point, but my recollection is that a lot of it was, well, we have a developer and they want to do this, you know, mixed use development, and then we have this concerned neighborhood community, and we have this planner who has to kind of navigate between those things, which I'm, you know, that happens absolutely, however, when we're in community meetings, and you can look at cities across the world who are navigating urgent questions about safety and accessibility and equity in our mobility networks. They are mired in fraught debates. And it's not just about sometimes people say it is, but, you know, I don't like the look of the speed bump. You know, cars are a direct symbolic link in our mind between what it means to be, in some cases, an American, what it means to be successful, what it means to be productive. And so when we enter into these spaces as planners or advocates, and we have a certain idea in mind, if we don't have that broader context of all of the things that cars mean and all of the ways that cars are embedded in our culture, we might not be able to connect with folks that are in a certain mind space about how they think our streets should operate. And so when we have conversations about the role of cars in society when we don't think about the layers of negative externalities and how cars and the group of folks that own cars create a modal hierarchy. And this is where, you know, in the in the paper, I do reference another kind of theoretical contract that I'm working on. I'm about to do some work on around car supremacy. There are folks that are incentivized to maintain the mobility status quo, to be able to drive their car wherever they'd like, and sometimes it's because of structural causes that folks have no other choice to drive cars. But there's always a choice in how you know, someone treats another road user, or there's always a choice in how someone shows up in a public meeting, or there's always a choice in some of these smaller, everyday interactions that people have with our mobility system. And so I want us to think about, for instance, driver behavior, not just being okay. Driver behavior, what mode do I use today? Or driver behavior. You know, do I go to my community meeting or driver behavior? How do I treat other road users? We're all much more involved in a much more complex system. And as advocates, I think if we can do a better job of highlighting how these things connect and how we are all worse off because of the paradigm that we're stuck in right now, my hope is that we'll be able to make more progress, especially when we have political leaders that show the will needed to overcome these cultural and structural and interpersonal dynamics,

Speaker 2

19:58

absolutely and. And you know, you had this, I'm going to end kind of where you ended in the piece, which is this really beautiful line that, you know, we can re imagine streets as sites of peace building. And it just made me reflect a lot on how to use the advocacy process as an extension of the larger peacemaking process. Because one thing that I reflected on a lot as I was reading your paper was how I feel like my participation, at least in the car dependency dialog, is because I want to be more humane. I don't want to look at another human being killed on a road and shrug it off as a necessary evil that you know is like important for the project of progress. I like that for me, feels like war to my soul in a really direct way. So I guess I just want to close out with this, like, what does it mean to you to reimagine the streets as sites of peace building

Speaker 3

20:57

we are caught in such a tenuous moment in the experience of our species, where we are living in a socially disconnected, a you know, politically polarized, and it's wreaking havoc on our democratic norms, on our social and public institutions, on our collective spaces. A lot of people talk about the AV as you know, the savior of us and well, I do hope that they reduce crash risk. Well, you know, we'll still see if that comes to fruition. I think that at their core, they still commit the cardinal sin of cars, which is they are fundamentally private commodities that are existing in public space, and they're separating people from the Civic fabric. And so when I think about streets as sites of peace building, I actually think of streets as the final frontier when it comes to civic structures that enable us to be with each other. One of my other research projects is on bike busses. And I think that there is perhaps no better encapsulation of what a process of imagining streets for peace building and community and civic life could be than the spatial and social embeddedness that happens purely by, you know, volunteer will and child Joy weaving through our neighborhoods. And so I think that, you know, Robert Putnam said that two of the four reasons of why we have a decline in social capital our country were, you know, TV screens and sprawl, and now we've got TV screens in the cars that enable sprawl. And I think it, it actually echoes some much larger dilemmas that we face in society and where we are at this particular moment of political upheaval, and I think that our streets could be the deciding factor in whether or not we're able to come together. And I know this sounds so idealist of me, but I really do think that they could serve as a critical space for rekindling a sense of belonging and in community life.

Speaker 1

23:14

Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much again to my guest, Ashton Romer, who, I should say, by the way, is on the job market. So if you are hiring for an incredible professorship in peace and conflict studies or a related field, snap her up. She's a gem. If you think this show is a gem, you can support us in all kinds of ways. You can make a tax deductible contribution at streets blog, USA, that's usa.streetsblog.org That's our parent company. You could leave us a positive review on Apple podcast Spotify, or anywhere else that you listen. Or you could just tell a friend to tune in and spread the word. The break is a production of streets blog USA. Our theme music is eggshells by Christina Johnson. I am your host and editor, Kea Wilson, and before I let you go, same question as always, what is one thing you have done today to help end car dependency? I.

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