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.

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

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-).