Making Mobilities Matter

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000582703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Making Mobilities Matter explores the interconnection between everyday practice and policy and planning in urban mobilities. It develops a theoretical framework for understanding everyday life and its mobilities in a mobile risk society and critiques the technocratic views that still dominate transport politics and research.

Recognizing the importance of culture and everyday life in shaping urban mobilities, it examines how contemporary communities exist, expand, and are sustained through localized and virtual forms of sharing responsibility, exchanging life experiences, creating meaning, and giving ontological security to people's lives. It also offers perspectives on the emotional aspect of mobilities in everyday life and how utopias can respond to these emotions. Making Mobilities Matter ends with a discussion of the prospects for urban mobilities in the future and how these issues are vital in battling climate change.

Making Mobilities Matter is essential reading for students and researchers seeking to understand the importance of mobilities in sustainable urban development and tackling climate change.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003100515-1

Everyday life is “puzzled” together by mobilities. Most of the time it is not a reflexive practice, it is just something we do on the phone, on the tablet, on the bike, in the bus, in the car, etc. We repeat it continuously every day, very often in more or less the same way and, as German sociologist Max Weber puts it, in a mental state dull semi-consciousness. There are routes and paths that we tap into without giving the mobilities much thought. What is important is what it enables us to do, this is what our minds are occupied with. Some years ago, I moved to a different part of Copenhagen, only about one kilometer from where I had previously lived. Some practices stayed the same, but I was surprised at how much reflexive energy I needed to put into moving between the different activities in my everyday life (such as taking the kids to school, work, grocery shopping). I often found myself on paths that were no longer the fastest, safest, or nicest way to go. My everyday mobilities routines were locked in and reformulating them required more energy than I had imagined. This might have been less obvious if I had moved to an entirely different area far away from my previous residence, but the shortness of the distance made me realize how my body was engaging in one kind of mobilities and allowing my mind to practice another.

The key point here is: everyday mobilities are routinized practices. In order to make everyday life work, there is no room for being reflexive on a daily basis on what is the cheapest, most sustainable, most practical, or fastest way to move between activities. Take morning routines as an example: the sequence of taking a shower, brushing teeth, eating breakfast, and having coffee is not renegotiated every morning. The same goes for mobilities. Living a late modern everyday life with all its (ostensible) opportunities for individuals to pursue in order to create the good life for themselves and their close ones is highly dependent on mobilities. In 2016, the EU’s transport energy consumption was 34% higher than in 1990, and road transport had the largest growth, reflecting a decrease in the overall price of passenger cars (European Environment Agency, 2018). There is no way around the dominant role the private car has come to play in everyday mobilities and an “autologic” dominates today’s civil society. In his book Mobilities, John Urry (2007, p. 130) goes as far as to suggest that “civil society in most countries should now be re-conceptualized as a civil society of ‘car-drivers’ and ‘car-passengers’.” The rise in automobility in relation to the climate change agenda is creating conflicts in everyday life which is termed as the “mobile risk society” (Kesselring, 2008a) and produces ambivalences. In the mobile risk society, individuals are themselves responsible for choosing the “right” trajectories and design the good life for themselves and their families. Modern institutions expect that individuals can overlook the full complexity of living in a reflexive modern society even if they know this is not possible. Thereby responding to issues such as climate change and automobility are individualized and often involve either ignoring the problems or feeling apathetic about changing everyday practices. Understanding the routinized everyday mobilities is the starting point for thinking about how to initiate change toward more sustainable mobilities. In this book, main focus is on the empirical field of everyday mobilities, with a primary focus on physical mobilities such as cars, trains, and cycles. But everyday mobilities also mean policy and planning when these scales are inextricably linked.

The interconnection between everyday practice and policy and planning is essential in battling climate change. This is not a new thing, not least in relation to one of the core issues: transportation. Already in the UN’s 1992 blueprint for Agenda 21 from the Rio Summit, transport was outlined as an important focus area and has since been a recurring issue in national and international politics. To mention just two examples: the report Mobility 2030: Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability, published by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2004, highlights the fact that no one-best-way solution exists and broad engagement and collaboration is needed (World Business Counsil for Sustainable Development, 2004). Most recently, the Sustainable Development Goals have highlighted the need for sustainable mobility with a focus on the Avoid-Shift-Improve approach to “promote … multimodal, collective-shared mobility solutions” (High-level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport, 2016, p. 7). Thus it is not knowledge on possible ways to change the current system, that is missing. The issue here is the isolated view on the transportation system that fails to realize how mobilities are much more than getting efficiently from A to B. Making Mobilities Matter contributes to the agenda of strengthening the impact of mobilities research in urban planning. Despite a growing focus on transportation’s impact on climate change as well as an increasing emphasis on designing cities for people, a traditional approach to transportation still dominates urban planning and policy. Engaging with the mobilities of everyday life can help to understand the need for a broader and more inclusive approach, or, more precisely, to better understand “the culture of mobilities.” With mobilities, the perspective changes and new pathways to achieving sustainable futures open up.

The mobilities paradigm is occupied with understanding large-scale and local processes related to daily movements of people, goods, capital, and information (Adey et al., 2014; Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007). Using the term “mobilities” instead of “mobility” emphasizes how different forms of movement, whether physical or virtual, are interconnected and produce and reproduce each other. When driving a car for instance, the navigation system or the radio are other mobilities interacting with the driving, not to mention the whole infrastructural, economic, and emotional system supporting the practice. In this way, the concept of mobilities is made as a plural word exactly to highlight that which surrounds and supports, for instance, driving. Mobilities have a visible imprint on the city, especially automobility with its domination of city space determining which spaces can be lived spaces. Cities and regions are comprised of social, technological, geographic, cultural, and digital mobilities networks, and through these they are linked to the global “network society.” The inseparable bonds between cities and mobilities have developed over time, and our future cities will be shaped even more by the mobilities of people, goods, transport, waste, information, data, and signs (Ritzer, 2010; Urry, 2007). Via a number of significant technological developments in transportation and communication, cities have changed their pulse, pace, and reach. People increasingly assume that holidays are spent far away from the locality of everyday lives. Work life has become highly dependent on virtual interactions. Instead of a following decline in physical mobilities, virtual mobilities have made new connections possible and face-to-face meetings are still seen as required for trustworthy business relationships. Virtual mobilities in the form of smartphones, iPads, and computers play a determining role in everyday life choices, chores, and practices. In this sense, there is no doubt that the technologies, especially those that support our virtual mobilities, have changed, and today technology is something no one can escape. In his last book, The Metamorphoses of the World (2016), Ulrich Beck points out that even if we do not use or have access to iPads, smartphones, computers, or travel, we still live in a world that is centered around mobilities that have an impact on our lives. The mobile global economic markets are influencing housing prices, news stories, food, and all the other elements that are shaping our emotional and material lives.

Despite this, it seems that within the contexts of urban planning, transport engineering, and economic politics, contemporary discourses of planning and designing mobilities have dealt with the issue of traffic as an isolated issue (Jensen and Richardson, 2003). Within this tradition, the questions of “why” and “for what and whom” often seem to be missing. For most cities, this results in a prioritization of the automobile systems. This is counterproductive to a sustainability agenda in that it intensifies and accelerates climate change, creates traffic jams due to induced traffic, and continues the ongoing destruction of public spaces (Newman and Kenworthy, 2015). In this sense, modern planning paradigms are still “technocentric” with an ideal of flow and “zero friction” (Hajer, 1999). The dominating neoliberal concept of an economy based on global flows of trade and workforce (Larner, 2000; Tickell and Peck, 2002) results in an unchallenged principle of “seamless mobility” as the pathway for the efficient organization of cities. As Urry (2007, p. 20) puts it: “There is too much transport in the study of travel and not enough society and thinking through the complex intersecting relations between society and transport.” In addition, the system of automobility, and its efficiency and benefits, is often overestimated (Rode et al., 2015). This perpetuates the perception of the car as a mobility artifact without serious alternatives.

In line with the technocentric paradigm, the “sustainable” solution to this is the automatized vehicle. On several occasions, I have heard traffic planners and politicians talk about the future of automatized driving with the vision that in the future you “curl up in your car with your comforter and coffee and get a couple more hours of sleep while being transported to work.” The snappy answer I have given in these situations is that in the future “I still want to wake up in the morning, cuddle with my partner for a few minutes before I go in and kiss the kids good morning, and then have breakfast together.” From a technocentric perspective, the automatized car provides new, fantastic opportunities; it works in exactly the same way as an ordinary car except that transport time can become productive time. Based strictly on a narrow economic perspective, this is meaningful in terms of an idea of more work produced, better surplus for the company, and more taxes paid; however, in a broader perspective, it contains numerous economic, cultural, social, and environmental elements that are destructive for cities. In order to have fully automatized cars that glide effortlessly from place to place, pathways need to be emptied of unregulated movement—even more so than today. The livable city, which is essential in the global city competition, is not that systematized, at least not when you look at the Forbes list of the most livable cities in the world. Also, in the technocentric rush of the possibilities the automatized car entails, the most mundane everyday practices, that are a big part of creating meaning in everyday lives, are forgotten. This path-dependent way of thinking about cities’ mobilities seems widely unchallenged, indicating the need for a new level of reflexivity on how to make cities livable places for the good mobile life, environments of justice, equality, and access to common goods (Sheller, 2018), a need for a subject-oriented turn in urban planning and design (Schmalz-Bruns, 1995) that considers sustainability and socially cohesive cities as essential and not just “nice-to-have” features. Nigel Thrift (2001, p. 48) talks about “an emancipatory politics of bare life” among other things, including contemplation. This idea can be translated into thinking about cities created around the needs of walkers (bodies), instead of creating an architecture of automobility (metal boxes). In line with this Peñalosa (2008, p. 319) states that: “So far, urban quality of life has been referred to in relation to issues such as equality and happiness. But there is another aspect to consider—a country’s competitiveness in the information age will depend largely on the quality of life in its cities.”

In the last 100 years, many cities have been designed with the needs of cars as a prerequisite because the car played a significant role in the move from the first to the second modernity. On an everyday scale, this meant the opportunity to leave the locked-in life in traditional communities where tradition (and physical proximity) determined life courses. With extensive opportunities for virtual and physical mobilities, not least the car, individualization became a keyword within social science, followed by warnings of risks of anonymity and anomie. This became a story about the erosion of communities and a weakening of social ties. It has been argued that close communities have all but disappeared and are no longer meaningful; in this book, however, I argue that they have not lost their meaning and significance. Changing everyday mobilities practices means changing the organization of everyday life. Everyday life organization is also about creating ontological security, to have meaning and get recognition for the paths chosen. This happens in communities and during the last decade, communities have re-emerged as one of the important issues within public debate and political discussions as constituting the backbone of cities. Communities can emerge simply because people are continuously looking for other beings or objects to make sense of, or create meaning around, dynamics that are transforming their lived experiences (Dewey, 1954; Lippmann, 1993/1927). New communities may take many unexpected shapes, and by moving beyond localized communities by means of virtual communities, the sense of belonging to a community might find new ways of establishing ideas of common sensitivity toward family life, neighborhoods, democracy, working life, or global issues (Delanty, 2003; Wellman and Gulia, 1999). Virtual and physical mobilities simultaneously affect local and global communities by opening up different arenas for co-existence. Globalization is a process penetrating cities and transforming internal dynamics by inserting people, objects, and information from all over the world into the localized space. Globalization has the potential to both rupture existing links and create new ones in people’s everyday experiences. Furthermore, communities and social ties are still found where they were thought to have been largely eroded by mobility, instability, and fluidity.

Thus, communities are still very much there as a precondition for lived lives, and it is therefore pertinent to consider them fully when working with future cities. The encompassing mobilities dominating modern lives mean that we need to move beyond an understanding of communities only as localized (spatial) fixities and investigate communities on the move. This is not a new approach. Several scholars within social science and mobilities research have used many different approaches to describe social interactions, for example, networks or assemblages. In this book, I return to the concept of communities because of the emotional aspects within this approach. Community captures essential emotions and plays a significant role in the making of meaning in everyday life, an understanding of which is essential if we wish to create sustainable urban mobilities in the future. Using examples from previous qualitative empirical work I did on issues surrounding mobilities, I argue in this book that communities still provide essential ontological security to everyday lives and, as such, communities have the power to change practices. The examples used in this book come from two ongoing and three previous research projects centered around mobilities practices and futures. Even if communities did not constitute the main focus of this research, they, however, always appeared in the periphery. In this way, this book is also an explorative process outlining a pathway to explore the role and significance of communities and emotions in mobile everyday lives.

Today, it seems the power of individualization as the pathway to freedom has eclipsed the power of people, communities, and institutions as the drivers of change. As a consequence, lived lives are often given little significance in relation to change as people are only seen as individualized consumers. There is no doubt that modes of thought and possibilities in everyday life are influenced and guided to a great extent by the capitalist system. Lived lives have different expressions, also decided by factors such as class, gender, education, and location. These factors aside, however, the values, emotions, and dreams of everyday life are something most have in common. Behind the individualized, there is still a need for an ontological security based on wants and desires, security, safety, and communities. These emotions are ascribing significant meaning to elements of everyday life and are an important driver for change. Utopias are, so to speak, a visualization of these emotions. They tell us something about what matters to us and what we don’t like. However, using dreams, utopias, and imagination to inhabit the kind of world we want endangers the fragile irrationalities holding everyday life together, but without imagination and aspiration, another more real and significant menace is born when these imaginings, dreams, and utopias disappear, and we then subsequently forget how to play and live life beyond the framework that already exist.

Everyday life is both practical as well as influenced by conceptions of time, freedom, and community. Sharing responsibilities, exchange of life experiences, continuity and meaning, and ontological security is essential elements of communities, and they are based on emotions. Emotions are embedded in the mobilities ontology, and research on “affective mobilities” has shown the importance of what happens to the bodies on the move and bodies settling down and building a sense of home and belonging (Glaveanu and Womersley, 2021, p. 2). Mobilities research has developed an understanding of embodied and sensory experiences as essential in shaping the institutional material arrangements and practices of mobilities. The emotional forces of experiences on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Voicing everyday life
• 3 Planning for technology or people—the human scale
• 4 Communities on the move
• 5 Emotions and utopias
• 6 Futures
• References
• Index