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.
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
Biography
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen is Professor in Urban Planning at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research links sociology, geography, urban planning, and the sociology of technology. The mobilities turn has been significant and formative for her research focusing on mobilities practices, the interrelation between spatial and digital mobilities and its impacts on everyday life, cities, and societies. She is co-organizer of the Cosmobilities Network, co-founder and co-editor of the Applied Mobilities journal, and co-editor of the Networked Urban Mobilities book series (Routledge, 2017-).
'Mobilities matter! We all know this, but with Freudendal-Pedersen’s new book we learn how profoundly this is the case. The book is sharp on the dilemmas and fragilities that everyday life mobilities lead to, and is illustrative to how small choices may have big effects. An important contribution to the mobilities literature on the edge of planetary challenge.'
Ole B. Jensen, Deputy Director of Centre for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg University, Denmark
‘Making Mobilities Matter demonstrates why mobilities thinking is essential for addressing some of the biggest challenges of our time. Freudendal-Pedersen invites us to take seriously the richness and complexity of people’s mobile lifeworlds that are insufficiently addressed by narrow economic or technocratic approaches to planning and design.'
David Bissell, Associate Professor of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Australia
'In clear-eyed and accessible prose Making Mobilities Matter invites us into the conversation on the connection between everyday mobilities and how we might find new pathways to achieve sustainable futures. Focusing on communities, meanings, and emotions, Freudendal-Pedersen’s unique approach reminds us that we hold the future in our own hands. To change unsustainable mobilities requires that we reorganize everyday life, and that calls for alternative approaches toward future planning, in and with people. Through empirical research on mobilities practices and futures, this important book reveals a new paradigm in urban planning and changing mobilities.'
Mimi Sheller, Dean of the Global School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
