Cross-class alliances and the rise of electric vehicles in Dublin

Abstract

The role of transportation in producing greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful pollutants has led governments across the globe to incorporate electric vehicles (EVs) at the centre of their climate action strategies. In turn, critical geographers have directed attention to the role of EVs in driving resource extractivism in geographies outside of the city and in enclosing urban space at the expense of infrastructures such as bus lanes, cycleways and walkable spaces. Less well charted, however, is the odd structure of class relations involved in the formation of new accumulation strategies, spaces and fixes capable of holding together, for a time at least, some of the tensions emerging from the chaotic unfolding of EVs and associated infrastructures in cities. In the following paper, I shine a light on the role of EV users in Dublin, Ireland, who pursue and forge novel cross-class alliances with automobile firms in an effort to promote EVs and cement private and commercial automobility as the core of the decarbonization agenda. I argue for the need to conceptualise the decarbonizing action of EV users as part of a wider class project intended to enrol wealthier users in a push to alter the city and produce uneven pathways of decarbonization.