Session title
Mobility as Practice: new frontiers in geographical understandings of urban mobilityCo-sponsored by the Urban Geography Research Group and the Transport Research Group
Urban mobility is a significant factor in a range of debates, from those about low carbon futures, through understandings of aging populations and the design of the built environment, to the spatiality of social inequalities. The aim of this session is to encourage critical debate about ways in which theories of practice can be used to reconfigure and advance understandings of urban mobility. Such reconfiguration and advancing is important in the context of, amongst other things: the UKs ambitious targets for the reduction of green house gas emissions (from mobility as well as other sources); one-in-six people in the UK currently being aged 65 or over - a ratio predicted to rise to one-in-four by 2050 - with the resultant need to understand the implications of an increasingly mobile ageing population; and the fact that a quarter of Britain’s families are without access to ‘normal’ mobility-related infrastructure including the car and internet, meaning that there is a pressing need to understand how such mobility inequalities impact on, and are influenced by, the use, experience and development of urban infrastructures.
New frontiers in urban mobility research have begun to take a ‘practice turn’ whereby acts of mobility are being understood in relation to the elements that constitute and reconstitute them. Underlying such analysis, as Shove et al (2012) argue, is recognition that too often there has been research and policy that ‘focuses on behaviour as a matter of individual choice … overlook[ing] the extent to which the details of daily life are anchored in and constitutive of the changing contours of social practice.’
In this session we are interested in exploring these ‘details of daily life’ and how they constitute mobility as practice for a range of sections of the urban population. Papers might address empirically and/or theoretically (but are not limited to) one of the following topics:
Dr Mags Adams
Lecturer in Geography | Environment & Life Sciences
Room 307, Peel Building, University of Salford, Salford, UK M5 4WT
t: +44 (0) 161 295 4067