Dr Ersilia Verlinghieri

Ersilia Verlinghieri is Senior Research Fellow at the Active Travel Academy, University of Westminster and Research Affiliate at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on transport governance and planning, with particular emphasis on issues of social and environmental justice in low-carbon mobility transitions, participatory planning and participatory research methodologies. Recent research has focused on working conditions in the cargo bike sector, the governance of transport decarbonisation and the evaluation of social impacts of transport interventions. She has published over 30 academic articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and policy reports.

I use an interdisciplinary approach to develop new ways of theorising, researching, and reconfiguring transport systems to tackle contemporary ecological and social crises.

My work can be grouped under 3 main themes:

1.     From distributive to procedural justice: Developing theoretical and methodological approaches to better understand the unequal distribution of the social and health impacts of interventions

This theme includes the development of new methods to assess the impacts of transport interventions (including spatial analysis, as well as social impact and health impact assessment frameworks), with a specific focus on complementing the quantitative evidence with participatory methodologies (see for example Lucas, Philips and Verlinghieri, 2021). 

As part of this strand, I am currently leading a large NIHR funded mixed-methods project evaluating the social and health impacts associated with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in London. 

More information about the project is available at: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/transport-...

2.     Restorative and epistemic justice: Opening the theoretical and methodological horizons to new theories and voices 

The work within this theme aims to promote justice as recognition of the different voices and needs within research and planning, and links to the broader agenda of decolonising transport studies. The theoretical work on expanding the understanding of transport and mobility justice (see for example Verlinghieri and Schwanen 2020; Smed, Verlinghieri et al 2024) is linked to attempts to redesign decolonised spaces for teaching and researching on transport and mobilities (Verlinghieri and Middleton, 2020).

As part of this strand, I strive bring an ethics of care to my research and teaching practices, and I continue writing on the theme (see for example, Larrington-Spencer, Verlinghieri, et al. 2024).

3: Building mobility justice: Contribute to rethinking transport planning and putting into action of different futures.

The work within this theme is, first of all, concerned with unpacking and addressing the limits of current transport governance settings, including, for example, examining the political economy of transport decarbonisation processes (Verlinghieri et al. 2024). It also aims to open up planning to grassroots actors practices and radical theory, not only recognizing their validity, but trying to understand their contribution in connection with the socio-political and economic dynamics that form 'mobilities'. Works so far include the study of the influence of social movements into transforming transport planning (Verlinghieri 2020; Verlinghieri and Venturini 2018), my involvement as researcher in the Car-Free megacities project led by the climate action charity Possible and my most recent work looking at improving working conditions in the cargo bike sector, which involved several actors including unions. 

More information on such research is available at: https://blog.westminster.ac.uk/ata/good-work-in-the-cargo-bike-secto... 

In connection, I am also involved in a large project called Common_Access:  https://www.commonaccessproject.com/

A full list of publications is available at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=m1uhxrAAAAAJ&hl=en&...

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.