About this Digital Ehibition

Taken in Natal, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, this photograph captures an ordinary scene that reveals an extraordinary contradiction. Sidewalks meant for pedestrians have been occupied by commercial structures, forcing people to walk in the roadway alongside taxis, ride-hailing vehicles, and motorcycles weaving through stopped traffic. Although a pedestrian crossing is visible, it remains largely ignored, while rows of traffic cones symbolize temporary attempts to manage a much deeper conflict over urban space.

The intense golden sunset is more than a visual backdrop. In a city already shaped by high temperatures, the warm light reflects the growing environmental dimension of mobility. Stationary vehicles, heat, and the absence of safe walking space converge into a single image where transport is not only about movement but also about inequality, exposure, and climate.

This is not a photograph of exceptional circumstances. It portrays the everyday reality of many cities in the Global South, where the struggle for space, safety, and sustainable mobility unfolds one street at a time.

Kolkata hosts over 20 million people. Its metro carries up to 800,000 riders a day, but it is the Intermediate Public Transport system — small, mighty cycle-rickshaws, part of the city's story for over a century — that is the true lifeline of last-mile connectivity.

With e-mobility slowly taking centre stage, the cycle-rickshaw has transformed into the e-rickshaw: powered by rechargeable batteries, lining up densely in front of Metro stations, building an indispensable connectivity system for the city's daily commuters.

The poem follows a four-hour journey through Thailand to a farmer whose harvest must travel the same road from field to market. What begins as a physical journey becomes a reflection on who bears its costs, and what happens when distance becomes part of the price of labor.

Climate change intensifies that distance: rain can arrive before a crop is ready, or disappear when the soil needs it. The farmer's hands anchor the poem — carrying the marks of long, grueling work, while the road carries the harvest away from them. The journey eventually turns toward the Philippines, where familiar landscapes and agricultural communities reveal a shared experience: across borders, transport shapes whose labor reaches a market and who gets left waiting.

Written after the author's encounter with farmers during the SIDA-funded workshop "Revisiting Agrarian Transition & Environmental (In)justice," hosted by Chiang Mai University, Thailand, 16–20 June 2026.

A seven-scene illustrated story set on the streets of Kampala. One morning, Uncle Rwamiti discovers that the road beneath his feet can speak — tired not from carrying traffic, but from being blamed for a mobility problem larger than itself.

Through their conversation, the story shifts attention from vehicles to the people trying to reach school, work, markets, healthcare and home. The work does not argue against cleaner vehicles; it asks a complementary question — as we decarbonise transport, can we also rethink whom mobility is ultimately meant to serve?