Polytopophilia: Mobility-Just Design for Transitions

Place-based design for transitions is positioned as a critical strategy for fostering systemic change through localized interventions rooted within communities and ecologies. In an era marked by hypermobility, displacement, and translocal entanglements, this framework faces profound limitations. Mobility, whether chosen or forced, has become a defining condition of contemporary life, shaping how people relate to, inhabit, and design for place. The tension between grounded transition efforts and the lived realities of uneven mobilities calls for approaches that integrate mobility justice within a place-ethics for design.
This article situates this kinetic era of mass movement as a backdrop for rethinking the spatial commitments of transition design. The paper argues that place is not a fixed or bounded entity but a relational and distributed construct.
Polytopophilia is introduced as an orientation of affection for multiple places that challenges static notions of rootedness and embraces the layered, networked geographies that shape contemporary life. Rather than assuming fixity as a condition for stewardship, polytopophilia affirms that people can cultivate deep commitments across dispersed and shifting locales.
Mobility-just design offers a critical extension to existing transition design methodologies by embracing fluid, distributed, and contested place-relations and infrastructures.