Making Mobilities Matter

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.

Mobilities in Remote Places explores the meanings, challenges, and opportunities of remoteness as practiced and experienced by those who live and work in some of the world’s most remote communities. As mobilities around the world proliferate in countless forms, the meanings of remoteness undergo significant change. Places once considered impossibly distant have appeared to become closer, more accessible, and less distinct from global centres of geopolitical power. But instead of disappearing altogether, configurations of remoteness evolve, manifesting themselves through new possibilities, new challenges, and new insecurities. Drawing from a variety of case studies from around the globe, the book’s contributors examine remoteness as an outcome of evolving mobility constellations. Rather that defining remoteness as an absolute or objective time-distance condition, the book shows how remoteness is a practice, experience, and representation that is situated, relational, and emergent. This collection of original and thought-provoking chapters will be of interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in mobilities, place, and human geography.

The Freedom Riders Across Borders: Contentious Mobilities provides the first comprehensive transnational historical analysis of the Freedom Rides. It explores the transnational history of these social movements and the struggles for the right to mobility and other civil rights in the United States of America, Australia, and Palestine between 1961 and 2011. This book makes a significant contribution to the transnational studies of social movements and the burgeoning field of mobility studies by investigating the specific constellations of mobility as historically and geographically specific formations of movement as well as investigating how the images, ideas and strategies of Freedom Riders were adapted, translated, and moved across time and space. Foremost, this book speaks to the pressing questions of the past and present concerning the politics and inequalities of mobilities impacting different social groups in different ways. From a historical perspective, it gives answers to the intensified interest and questions concerning the dynamics, techniques and "contentious politics" of social movements in a globalized environment. The book details how the question of mobility has come to constitute political conflict and protest over norms, restrictions, and representations. It shows not only that mobility is a differentially accessed resource which shapes and is shaped by political processes, but also that contestation is an equal part of forming mobility. The book identifies vehicles as a mobile site of contestation and, in the context of the Freedom Rides, as a site of strategic political action. In doing so, Lüthi makes a persuasive case for mobility to be given a central place in the study of progressive social movements. As such, this book will be of great interest to researchers in a number of disciplines, including history, geography and sociology.

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.

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

This book explores mobilities as a key to understanding the practices that both frame and generate contemporary everyday life in the urban context. At the same time, it investigates the challenges arising from the interpretation of mobility as a socio-spatial phenomenon both in the social sciences and in urban studies. Leading sociologists, economists, urban planners and architects address the ways in which spatial mobilities contribute to producing diversified uses of the city and describe forms and rhythms of different life practices, including unexpected uses and conflicts. The individual sections of the book focus on the role of mobility in transforming contemporary cities; the consequences of interpreting mobility as a socio-spatial phenomenon for urban projects and policies; the conflicts and inequalities generated by the co-presence of different populations due to mobility and by the interests gathered around major mobility projects; and the use of new data and mapping of mobilities to enhance comprehension of cities. The theoretical discussion is complemented by references to practical experiences, helping readers gain a broader understanding of mobilities in relation to the capacity to analyze, plan and design contemporary cities.

Exploring the complexities of mobility, this book questions prevailing views, highlights the risks and implications of mobility-centred policies, and argues for nuanced approaches to addressing mobility-related societal challenges.

This book offers the reader a comprehensive understanding and the multitude of methods utilized in the research of urban mobilities with cities and ‘the urban’ as its pivotal axis. It covers theories and concepts for scholars and researchers to understand, observe and analyse the world of urban mobilities. The Handbook of Urban Mobilities facilitates the understanding of urban mobilities within a historic conscience of societal transformation. It explores key concepts and theories within the ‘mobilities turn’ with a particular urban framework, as well as the methods and tools at play when empirical, urban mobilities research is undertaken. This book also explores the urban mobilities practices related to commutes; particular modes of moving; the exploration of everyday life and embodied practices as they manifest themselves within urban mobilities; and the themes of power, conflict, and social exclusion. A discussion of urban planning, public control, and governance is also undertaken in the book, wherein the themes of infrastructures, technologies and design are duly considered. With chapters written in an accessible style, this handbook carries timely contributions within the contemporary state of the art of urban mobilities research. It will thus be useful for academics and students of graduate programmes and post-graduate studies within disciplines such as urban geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, urban planning, traffic and transportation planning, and architecture and urban design.