Artificial Intelligence and the Hybrid Rhythms of Mobility Injustice

Cities and their mobilities have long been understood as rhythmic systems in which everyday life emerges through the interaction of temporal, spatial and social rhythms. Yet existing theories of artificial intelligence and classical rhythmanalysis provide only limited conceptual tools for explaining how computational systems become part of these rhythms and how such emergent temporalities might implicate and exacerbate existing mobility injustices.

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, this talk extends the framework to account for how AI-enabled urban mobilities introduce new political and ethical challenges for mobility justice. We argue that computational systems have become active participants in the co-production of hybrid human–machine rhythms that increasingly organise everyday urban (im)mobilities. We provide a conceptual and analytical framework for examining how AI reshapes the rhythmic organisation of urban mobilities, and we establish hybrid human–machine rhythms as a new object of urban mobility analysis. Understanding AI-enabled urban (im)mobilities requires analysing not only what computational systems do, but how they reorganise the rhythms through which urban life is perceived, experienced and governed.

Discussants

Dr Anna Nikolaeva
Dr Carolina Maurity Frossard

About Prof. Mimi Sheller

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is Professor of Integrative and Global Studies and was Inaugural Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA (2021-2026). Sheller was founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers Journal of Mobility Studies and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has published more than 180 articles and chapters and currently holds two grants from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the Caribbean Collaborative Action Network, a NOAA-RISA team. Recent books include the co-edited volumes Detours in the Mobility Transition (with Vincent Kaufmann, EPFL Press/Routledge, 2026) and Building Equitable Climate Adaptation in the US Caribbean (with Sarah Molinari, Palgrave, 2026); and monographs Advanced Introduction to Mobilities (Edward Elgar, 2021); Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020); and Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018).