Is the automobility regime experiencing a transition towards sustainability? To answer that question, this book investigates stability and change in contemporary transport systems. It makes a socio-technical analysis of transport systems, exploring the strategies and beliefs of crucial actors such as car manufacturers, local and national governments, citizens, car drivers, transport planners and civil society. Two guiding questions are: Will we see a greening of cars, based on technological innovations that sustain the existing car-based system? Or is something more radical desirable and likely, such as the development of travel regimes in which car use is less dominant?
An examination of the process of prioritizing private motorized transportation in Bengaluru, a rapidly growing megacity of the Global South. Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In this book, Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population. Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses.
This book defines and charts the barriers and future of vehicle-to-grid technology: a technology that could dramatically reduce emissions, create revenue, and accelerate the adoption of battery electric cars. This technology connects the electric power grid and the transportation system in ways that will enable electric vehicles to store renewable energy and offer valuable services to the electricity grid and its markets. To understand the complex features of this emergent technology, the authors explore the current status and prospect of vehicle-to-grid, and detail the sociotechnical barriers that may impede its fruitful deployment. The book concludes with a policy roadmap to advise decision-makers on how to optimally implement vehicle-to-grid and capture its benefits to society while attempting to avoid the impediments discussed earlier in the book.
The transition towards ‘smarter’ autonomous transport systems calls for a rethink in how transport is governed/who governs it, to ensure a step-change to a more sustainable future. This book critically reflects on these governance challenges analysing the role of the state; the new actors and discourses; and the implications for state capacity.
This book presents an in-depth phenomenological and deconstructive analysis of the automobility imaginary, which is none other than the mundane automobility reality within which we dwell in everyday life. A successful transition to a post-automobility future will require new ways of thinking about and conceptualizing automobility, one of the most significant and powerful imaginaries of contemporary neo-liberalism. This book offers such a view by reconceptualizing automobility in its entirety as both an imaginary and a dreamscape. In order to address the challenges, externalities and tragedies that automobility has brought upon us, automobility, we argue, must end as we know it.
We have been trying to make cars cleaner and more efficient, but has this really made them more sustainable? This book argues, within the context of sustainable consumption and production, that we should see the car as a natural system, subject to natu
This book investigates how practices of community carsharing are influencing everyday mobility. It argues that hegemonic practices of automobility are reconfigured through practices of community carsharing, thereby challenging capitalist mobilities in the realm of everyday life. Through a detailed empirical study of practices of community carsharing and its practitioners in the rural regions around Munich, Germany, this book reveals how the practice contributes to the emergence of alternative automobile practices, meanings, identities and subjectivities. It also explores the embedding of automobility into its ecological context, the connection of function and community in practices of community carsharing and the changing of ownership relations through a process of commoning mobility. This reconfiguration of everyday practices of automobility takes place through processes of everyday resistance, re-embedding and commoning, and ultimately results in the emergence of an alternative mobility culture, thereby facilitating the dissemination of an alternative common sense of community carsharing. This book on community carsharing provides a valuable insight into carsharing in rural settings and exemplifies how carsharing specifically, and sharing mobilities in general, can contribute to a social–ecological mobility transition. The work will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners working in mobility studies and mobilities.
Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.
This is a fully revised edition of the groundbreaking study on tourism, which was originally published in 1990. The original chapters have been empirically updated and many new research findings incorporated and evaluated. This Second Edition deepens our understanding of how the tourist gaze orders and regulates the relationship with the tourist environment, demarcating the `other′ and identifying the `out-of-the-ordinary′. It elucidates the relationship between tourism and embodiment and elaborates on the connections between mobility as a mark of modern and postmodern experience and the attraction of tourism as a lifestyle choice. The result is a book that builds on the proven strengths of the first edition and revitalizes the argument to address the needs of researchers and students in the new century. Praise for the First Edition: `There is much to be applauded here...this is an engaging and thought provoking book which should be read by those interested in advertising and the changing nature of contemporary culture′ - Contemporary Sociology `The book is written in a very accessible style that would serve as a good point of entry for anyone interested in leisure, tourism, and cultural change in contemporary societies. The scope of Urry′s book is breathtaking, one is left with a feeling of coming to terms with the complex set of social relations that are tourism, both in their production and consumption′ - Planning Practice and Research
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present “car society.” Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.
