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Book Reviews
Tristan Josephson, Marcin B. Stanek, Tallie Ben Daniel, Jeremy Ash, Liz Millward, Caroline Luce, Regine Buschauer, Amanda K. Phillips, and Javier Caletrío
The Contribution of Car Sharing to the Sustainable Mobility Transition
Emma Terama, Juha Peltomaa, Catarina Rolim, and Patrícia Baptista
Abstract
The popularity of car sharing as part of the urban mobility repertoire has barely increased from a niche contribution in recent decades. Although holding potential to address local issues such as congestion and air quality, but even more crucially to meet the urgent need to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions from traffic, car sharing often meets barriers stemming from local contexts, regulatory environments, and/or lack of political support or consumer awareness. In this article, we discuss the interdependencies of these barriers and provide some key elements to consider in the future when planning practical implementation, research initiatives, and policy support for car sharing in order to overcome the complex and interrelated barriers.
DEADARTIST.ME
An Experiment with Networks and Traps
Olga Lukyanova and André Mintz
Diverse Driving Emotions
Exploring Chinese Migrants’ Mobilities in a Car-Dependent City
Sophie-May Kerr, Natascha Klocker, and Gordon Waitt
Abstract
In the industrialized West, cars are considered an essential part of everyday life. Their dominance is underpinned by the challenges of managing complex, geographically stretched daily routines. Drivers’ emotional and embodied relationships with automobiles also help to explain why car cultures are difficult to disrupt. This article foregrounds ethnic diversity to complicate notions of a “love affair” with the car. We report on the mobilities of fourteen Chinese migrants living in Sydney, Australia—many of whom described embodied dispositions against the car, influenced by their life histories. Their emotional responses to cars and driving, shaped by transport norms and infrastructures in their places of origin, ranged from pragmatism and ambivalence to fear and hostility. The lived experiences of these migrants show that multiple cultures of mobility coexist, even in ostensibly car-dependent societies. Migrants’ life histories and contemporary practices provide an opportunity to reflection fissures in the logic of automobility.
Editorial
Peter Merriman
Keep Moving, Stay Tuned
The Construction of Flow in and through Radio Traffic Reports
Marith Dieker
Abstract
With the rise of privatized automobility and the increase of traffic jams, new sociotechnical systems have emerged that aim at traffic control. Radio traffic information has been a key element in these systems. Through a qualitative analysis of historical radio broadcasts of the largest Dutch news station between 1960 and 2000, this article explores the changing format and content of traffic information updates. I will show how the rather formal, detailed, and paternalistic narratives of the traffic reports in the 1960s gave way to more informal, witty, yet flow-controlling traffic information discourse in later decades. I will explain the dynamics involved by drawing on mobility and media studies and by developing two distinct notions of flow, one of which builds conceptually on Raymond Williams’s work on mobile privatization, the other is grounded in the field of traffic management. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of public radio broadcasts in our world of privatized automobility.
The “Mangle” of Human Practice
Museu do Amanhã’s Artistic Staging as a Socioscientific Narrative on Climate Change
Rodanthi Tzanelli
Micromobility, Space, and Indigenous Housing Schemes in Australia after World War II
Katherine Ellinghaus and Sianan Healy
Abstract
This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent scholarship on imperial networks and Indigenous mobilities, it explores Aboriginal people’s negotiation of those efforts through practices of both moving and staying put. We demonstrate the importance of micromobility—which we define as small-scale movements across short distances, in and out of buildings, along roads, and across townships—and argue that in order to fully appreciate the regulation of Indigenous mobility and Indigenous resistance to it, scholars must concentrate on the small, local, and seemingly insignificant as well as more drastic and permanent movement.
Mobile Lives, Immobile Representations
Raili Nugin
Abstract
The article looks at how cultural constructs of “urban” and “rural” are used in policy measures. The question is opened by analyzing twenty-five short films submitted for the competition Once upon a Time in Our Village organized by the Estonian Ministry of Agriculture and Just Film (a nonprofit organization). The competition calls for young people to “depict the future and possibilities of rural life.” The aim was to prevent out-migration of young people from the rural areas. As the data show, the films echo cultural constructions that depict the rural as opposed to the urban: traditional, quiet, and a haven of the national past. The future and technological possibilities are something that are constructed as an urban phenomenon, and thus, not present in the films.
“Two Wheels Bad”?
The Status of Cycling in the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales in the 1930s
Michael Cunningham
Abstract
The Youth Hostels Association (YHA) was founded to provide cheap accommodation for rural holidays. It catered to both walkers and cyclists. However, many perceived the organization as one that favored walkers and considered walking to be a superior form of travel. This perception is examined through the study of four areas; the dispositions and statements of leading figures, the literature of the YHA, the press response to its formation, and the policy interventions of the YHA. Despite this, the YHA had close institutional links with cycling organizations and many cyclists among its members. This article traces the YHA’s relationship with walkers and cyclists and, despite occasional tensions, shows that the two groups could be accommodated within the organization.