Automobilities

Mobility - flows, movement and migration in social life - has emerged as a central area of sociological debate, yet one of its most dominant forms, automobility, has remained largely ignored. Automobilities presents one of the first examinations of the car and its promise of autonomy and mobility.

Exploring the vehicle's role in imposing colonialism on Indigenous people, this book proposes an Indigenous automobility that reclaims sovereignty over place and centricity.

The power of the bicycle to impact mobility, technology, urban space and everyday life.

Cars, Automobility and Development in Asia explores the nexus between automobility and development in a pan-Asian comparative perspective. The book seeks to integrate the policies, production forms, consumption preferences and symbolism implicated in emerging Asian automobilities. Using empirically rich and grounded analyses of both comparative and single-country case studies, the authors chart new approaches to studying automobility and development in emerging Asia.

In the late 19th century, bicyling and motoring offered new ways for a hardy minority to travel. Escaping from the 'tyranny' of the train timetables, these entrepreneurs were able to promote private mobility when the road, technology and infrastructure were unequal to the task. With a moribund network out of town, poor roadside accommodation and few services, how could road traction persist and ultimately thrive? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including magazines, newspapers and advice books on stable management, this book explores the emergence and development of bicycling and automobility in Britain, with a focus on the racing driver-cum-entrepreneur SF Edge (1868-1940) and his network. Craig Horner considers the motivations, prejudices and cultures of those who promoted and consumed road traction, providing new insights into social class, leisure, sport and tourism in Britain. In addition, he places early British bicycling and automobility in an international context, providing fruitful comparisons with the movements in France, Germany and the United States. The Emergence of Bicycling and Automobility in Britain is an excellent resource for scholars and students interested in mobility studies, social and cultural history, and the history of technology.

Just how resilient are our urban societies to social, energy, environmental and/or financial shocks, and how does this vary among cities and nations? Can our cities be made more sustainable, and can environmental, economic and social collapse be staved off through changes in urban form and travel behaviour? How might rising indebtedness and the recent series of financial crises be related to automobile dependence and patterns of urban automobile use? To what extent does the system and economy of automobility factor in the production of urban socio-spatial inequalities, and how might these inequalities in mobility be understood and measured? What can we learn from the politics of mobility and social movements within cities? What is the role of automobility, and auto-dependence, in differentiating groups, both within cities and rural areas, and among transnational migrants moving across international borders? These are just some of the questions this book addresses. This volume provides a holistic and reflexive account of the role played by automobility in producing, reproducing, and differentiating social, economic and political life in the contemporary city, as well as the role played by the city in producing and reproducing auto-mobile inequalities. The first section, titled Driving Vulnerability, deals with issues of global importance related to economic, social, financial, and environmental sustainability and resilience, and socialization. The second section, Driving Inequality, is concerned with understanding the role played by automobility in producing urban socio-spatial inequalities, including those rooted in accessibility to work, migration status and ethnic concentration, and new measures of mobility-based inequality derived from the concept of effective speed. The third section, titled, Driving Politics, explores the politics of mobility in particular places, with an eye to demonstrating both the relevance of the politics of mobility for influencing and reinforcing actually existing neoliberalisms, and the kinds of politics that might allow for reform or restructuring of the auto-mobile city into one that is more socially, politically and environmentally just. In the conclusion to the book Walks draws on the findings of the other chapters to comment on the relationship between automobility, neoliberalism and citizenship, and to lay out strategies for dealing with the urban car system.

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.

For more than a century cars have symbolized autonomous, unfettered mobility and an increasingly global experience. And yet, they are often used differently outside the centers of global capitalism. This pioneering book considers how, through the lens of the automobile, we can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. Through new and provocative readings of famous plays, novels, and films, as well as recent popular videos, Postcolonial Automobility reveals the surprising ways in which automobility in the region is, at once, an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy, and an affective activity intimately tied to modern social life. Lindsey B. Green-Simms begins with the history of motorization in West Africa from the colonial era to the decolonizing decades after World War II, and addresses the tragedy of car accidents through a close reading of Wole Soyinka’s 1965 postindependence play The Road. Shifting to screen media, she discusses Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart and reviews popular, low-budget Nollywood films. Finally, Green-Simms considers how feminist texts rewrite and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car stands in for patriarchal power and capitalist achievement. Providing a unique perspective on technology in Africa—one refusing to be confined to narratives of either underdevelopment or inevitable progress—and covering a broad range of interdisciplinary material, Postcolonial Automobility will appeal not only to scholars and students of African literature and cinema but also to those in postcolonial and globalization studies.