Ageing in motion: critical perspectives on urban mobility and accessibility in Latin America

perspectivas críticas sobre mobilidade urbana e acessibilidade na América Latina While progress in both scholarship and policy is undeniable, much of it has focused on the Global North.Most of the scholarship is concentrated in geographies characterised by high motorisation rates, suburbanised urban forms, and broad integration of older adults into pension and welfare systems, such as the Global North.Comparatively fewer studies address how territorial context, policy frameworks and social practices shape older adults' mobility experiences in the Global South (Villamizar Duarte et al., 2025a; Villena-Sanchez & Boschmann, 2022).Similarly, the rate of uptake of the AFCC framework is unevenly distributed, with Latin America registering extremely low adoption rates (Guillemot & Warner, 2023), raising questions about the transferability of models conceived in and for the Global North.Recent developments in urban mobility and accessibility literature propose a shift from abstract and homogeneous representations of movement towards an understanding of mobility and accessibility as a socially constructed, produced, and dynamically reconfigured practice (Borello Vargas, Spencer & Jones, 2024;Robert et al., 2024;Villamizar Duarte, Pinto & De Góis, 2024; Villamizar Duarte et al., 2025b).This literature provides the analytical lens through which we frame the contribution to this special issue by focusing on the intersection of ageing and urban mobility not only in terms of infrastructural conditions and transport provision, but also as situated practices, social negotiations, and differential experiences through which older adults experience and appropriate the territories they inhabit.This issue of Cadernos Metrópole responds to this research gap by bringing together twelve original contributions that examine the intersections of ageing processes and local situations of mobility and accessibility in Latin American cities.The articles span a diverse range of geographies, scales, and methodological approaches, from census-based accessibility analyses across Brazilian states to philosophical reflections on older bodies in Latin American streets, from participatory geodesign in heritage cities to ethnographic accounts of ageing in favelas.Together, they advance an interdisciplinary agenda that places the lived experiences of older adults at the centre of urban debates, challenging both the biomedical reduction of ageing to functional decline and the technocratic narrowing of mobility to transport metrics.This introduction frames the contributions of the special issue within the broader landscape of scholarship on ageing, mobility, and urban accessibility.We first review how research has addressed the relationship between mobility practices and the ageing process.Then, we introduce the twelve main contributions to this issue, identifying how they advance the scholarly debate along three thematic lines: structural and social barriers to active ageing; territory, proximity, and the conditions of autonomous ageing; and emerging conceptual and methodological contributions.Third, we introduce the complementary articles that accompany the dossier.We finish by articulating how this special issue advances the research and policy agendas on urban mobility and ageing from the editors' conceptual framing through to the contributions received.Ageing, mobility, and accessibility: framing the debate Traditional research into ageing and mobility often adopts a biomedical lens, focusing on the progressive deterioration of physical and cognitive abilities and the embodied experiences associated with chronic diseases, impairments, and disabilities.From this perspective, ageing is accompanied by a continuous loss of autonomy that dictates the development of daily activities (Barreto, 2012;Elias,