Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility

This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change.

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“…Ballard: see Bachmair, 1991;Eyerman and Löfgren, 1995;Graves-Brown, 1997). 6. the single most important cause of environmental resource-use.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘System’ of Automobility

Urry

2004

Theory, Culture & Society

1,205

520

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“…• The dominant culture that sustains major discourses of what constitutes the good life, what is necessary for an appropriate citizenship of mobility, and which provides potent literary and artistic images and symbols -such as E.M. Forster's (1931: 191) evocation in Howard's End of how cars generate a 'sense of flux', and J.G. Ballard's (1973) Crash, which describes the erotics of 'crash culture' (and see Bachmair, 1991;Eyerman and Löfgren, 1995;Graves-Brown, 1997;Creed, 1998). • The single most important cause of environmental resource-use resulting from the exceptional range and scale of material, space and power used in the manufacture of cars, roads and car-only environments, and in coping with the material, air quality, medical, social, ozone, visual, noise and other consequences of pretty well global automobility (see SceneSusTech, 1998).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The City and the Car

Sheller

Urry

2000

Int J Urban Regional Res

672

315

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The social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome consequences for social life, especially in their analysis of the urban. Urban studies in particular has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space 'scapes' of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Focusing on forms of mobility into, across and through the city, we consider how the car reconfigures urban life, involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, and through, an automobilized time-space. We trace urban sociology's paradoxical resistance to cultures of mobility, and argue that civil society should be reconceptualized as a 'civil society of automobility'. We then explore how automobility makes instantaneous time and the negotiation of extensive space central to how social life is configured. As people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete a series of activities within fragmented moments of time. Urban social life has always entailed various mobilities but the car transforms these in a distinct combination of flexibility and coercion. Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling which have reshaped citizenship and the public sphere via the mobilization of modern civil societies. In the conclusion we trace a vision of an evolved automobility for the cities of tomorrow in which public space might again be made 'public'. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.

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“…1-2;Morse, 1998, p. 112). From the perspective of homo viator [mobile person] (Eyerman and Löfgren, 1995), this displacement is practiced, experienced and embodied (Cresswell, 2006, p. 3). As such, mobility is a meaningful condition, implying progress, freedom, opportunity and modernity (Cresswell, 2006, pp.…”

Section: Mobility And/or Mobilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobility or mobilities: Terrestrial, virtual and aerial categories or entities?

Kellerman

2011

Journal of Transport Geography

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Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility

Cited by 58 publications

References 2 publications

The ‘System’ of Automobility

The ‘System’ of Automobility

The City and the Car

Mobility or mobilities: Terrestrial, virtual and aerial categories or entities?

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