Exploring Mobility in Public Environments among People with Cognitive Functional Limitations—Challenges and Implications for Planning

Abstract

Mobility in public environments is an important part of people’s everyday life. However, living with functional limitations often means limited mobility. To plan for public environments that enable mobility for everybody, knowledge about various user groups’ mobility is important. Up until now, knowledge concerning the mobility of people with cognitive functional limitations has been scarce. The aim of this paper is to explore, from experts’ perspectives, mobility in public environments among people with cognitive functional limitations (target group). The findings of focus group interviews with experts showed that the target group had to keep external and internal challenges at a manageable level in order to maintain mobility. The target group’s mobility is interpreted as depending on both the individuals’ cognitive capacity in relation to environmental demands as well as the motility of the members of the target group, i.e. how they form their opinions about their possibilities for mobility. Both those aspects are important for planners to consider in order keep the target group mobile.     

Mobile Forms of Belonging

Abstract

Mobility is often portrayed as the antithesis of belonging. In this article, we challenge this perspective investigating how mobility and motility influence belonging in everyday life. We develop a perspective on belonging consisting of the dimensions of mobility, people and place and conditioned by the underlying dimensions of time, resources and structures of meaning. Applying this to interview material from a case study in Aalborg, we propose a tentative typology of mobile forms of belonging. It is discussed how different rhythms, conditions of mobility and variations in mobility resources result in different scales of belonging and modes of ‘centering’.     

Unraveling the Politics of Super-rich Mobility: A Study of Crew and Guest on Board Luxury Yachts

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the superyacht as a unique vessel, as a home and workplace to professional crew and holiday space for its super-rich passengers. Drawing upon the notions of motive, rhythm, and friction from Cresswell’s mobility constellation, this paper illustrates how the politics of super-rich mobility are performed by crew and guests on board. Rather than preserve the perception that super-rich individuals are hyper-mobile I in turn suggest that in the case of the superyacht the desire and to perform their mobility status when on board ultimately circumscribes or restricts super-rich mobility. Using data from an in-depth ethnographic study on board various superyachts, I suggest ways in which the mobility of the yacht can inform both super-rich and shipped mobilities as both fields continue to grow.     

Mobility and data: cycling the utopian Internet of Things

ABSTRACT

This article explores how cycling is currently considered in European policy documents related to transport aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), what kind of representation of cycling can be imagined for utopian EC IoT policies documents, and how a combination of empirical policy analysis and a utopian approach could inform future policy and research. Debates around smart/intelligent/data mobilities and the IoT – including policy debates – tend to be dominated by motorized modes such as autonomous and networked cars. This article explores the implications of this for more sustainable and active modes such as cycling, both for current policies and for utopian thinking. It draws on literature concerned with utopian thinking, mobilities studies and critical data studies. The methodology combines a content analysis and a visual analysis of the EC policy documents with creating text and images for utopian future versions of these documents. The results show the heavy automotive focus of EC IoT policy documents and suggest an alternative bicycle-focussed IoT utopia. The conclusion facilitates a debate around utopian societies where smart cycling products, infrastructure, policy and funding facilitate sustainable, active and data-responsible mobility at scale. This challenges the current continuation of automobile cultures in smart mobility and IoT policy discourses, and the data and associated power asymmetries between cars and cycling that highlight the significance of this research.     

Information and Communication Technology and International Business Travel: Mobility Allies?

Abstract

Like forecasts about the paperless office, technological solutions to the problem of international business travel continue to be deferred. As with the increased use of office paper, international business travel is defying predictions of its decline. There is growing evidence to suggest that business sectors which seem ideally placed to substitute information and communication technology (ICT) for travel, are actually generating more physical travel than other sectors. This paper develops a case study of the Irish software industry to exemplify why international travel is not diminishing in importance how and the ICT and business travel relationship is changing in this sector. The paper presents research findings that suggest that a cycle of substitution, generation and modification relationships have occurred as mobility interdependencies have developed.     

Embodying Flexibility: Experiencing Labour Flexibility through Urban Daily Mobility in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This paper’s objective is to contribute towards understanding the relationship between mobility practices and labour flexibility. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, it argues that an extremely flexible labour market, as in the Chilean case, affects the everyday lives of inhabitants which are compelled to ‘weave’ dispersed workplaces, articulate multiple-employments within a workday or use mobility time-space for tele-working. From an ethnographic perspective, we show how labour flexibility in Santiago de Chile is experienced and embodied through daily mobility practices. The article presents ethnographies in which flexibility changes mobility practices, giving rise to a specific time-space that becomes an intrinsic, yet seldom recognised dimension of the economic production process.     

Care moves people: complex systems and futures signals supporting production and reflection of individual mobile utopias

ABSTRACT

Futures of mobility are a pressing concern for cities addressing sustainability and climate change challenges. As cities renew their mobility systems and launch efforts to meet these targets, new sensitive qualitative methodologies are needed. This article discusses a focused mobility diary experiment that was conducted in May 2017 in Turku, Finland and its subarea, with a small set of participants. The goal of this study was to gain insights into potential developments in the city’s mobility systems and practices. This article utilises a multidisciplinary complex systems approach describing how we used the concepts of futures signals and mobile utopias as tools when analysing some prefigurative patterns in individual mobility practices. A key outcome of this methodological experimentation was the interconnections made between two research traditions and a notion of the various ways care underlies, effects, and contours the mobility practices of people–in other words, people are moved by care. This article demonstrates how with the concepts of futures signals, and mobilised utopias, we can reach the important aspirational and prefigurative practices and motivations of people, which permit us to interpret potential futures in particular urban settings characterised by daily life activities.     

Freedom as Mobility: Implications of the Distinction between Actual and Potential Travelling

This paper defines mobility as the potential transport of humans and explores the mobility aspect of freedom. Freedom as mobility is composed both of opportunities to travel when and where one pleases and of the feasibility of the choice not to travel. The essay further analyses the implications for the idea of freedom as mobility of distinguishing between actual and potential travel. It is also shown how mobility as a right is challenged by a central feature of democracy – namely, respect for unanimity – and how tracks left by travellers can be exploited for surveillance and control. Moreover, mobility leads to a potential absence and thus uncertainty. The paper evaluates how alternative responses to this problem have widely different consequences for the experience of freedom as mobility.     

Taming the road,tamed by the road: sense of road as place among Indigenous Bedouin in an ethnic frontier in Israel

ABSTRACT

We propose the concept ‘sense of road as place’ for an Indigenous group within an ethnic frontier, specifically in the case of the Israeli Bedouin. A road in this spatial context carries far greater meanings than elsewhere, particularly when also impacted by power relationships with the state. We reveal how Road 31 was/is subjectified by the Bedouin as a place prior to and after an upgrade. Initially they were able, through their Indigenous spatiality, to tame the road into their informal mobility and make it a place, but following the upgrade their informal mobility has been tamed into formal state-regulated mobility, making the road a non-place.     

Childhood Family Structure and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States

The declining prevalence of two-parent families helped increase income inequality over recent decades. Does family structure also condition how economic (dis)advantages pass from parents to children? If so, shifts in the organization of family life may contribute to enduring inequality between groups defined by childhood family structure. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, I combine parametric and nonparametric methods to reveal how family structure moderates intergenerational income mobility in the United States. I find that individuals raised outside stable two-parent homes are much more mobile than individuals from stable two-parent families. Mobility increases with the number of family transitions but does not vary with children’s time spent coresiding with both parents or stepparents conditional on a transition. However, this mobility indicates insecurity, not opportunity. Difficulties maintaining middle-class incomes create downward mobility among people raised outside stable two-parent homes. Regardless of parental income, these people are relatively likely to become low-income adults, reflecting a new form of perverse equality. People raised outside stable two-parent families are also less likely to become high-income adults than people from stable two-parent homes. Mobility differences account for about one-quarter of family-structure inequalities in income at the bottom of the income distribution and more than one-third of these inequalities at the top.     

(Mobility) Fixing the Taiwanese bicycle industry: the production and economisation of cycling culture in pursuit of accumulation

ABSTRACT

There have been recent calls in mobilities literature for greater engagement with how mobility regimes are shaped and governed at different scales. In relation to cycling-related mobilities scholarship, there are very few accounts situating cycling within broader bio-political and political–economic processes. This paper seeks to address this absence, situating contemporary formations of cycling culture within processes of capital accumulation and economisation. The research is based upon a series of interviews with industry stakeholders, participant observations at cycle events and analysis of policy documents and news media in Taiwan from 2015–2017. We demonstrate that in the last 10–15 years there has been a drive to create cycling subjects in the Taiwanese cycle industry, mass events and through public bike sharing with the loosely strategised goal of projecting an image of a cycling culture that it is hoped will be advantageous to the domestic bicycle industry. We demonstrate how this emergent process of fixing works through economisation of social cycling practices, themselves reliant on processes of division, classification and subjectification. We also show how the cycling subjects and cultures thus formed constitute qualculative framings that facilitate ongoing commercial re-evaluation of Taiwanese Brand manufacturers by other actors within the industry.     

Corporate Mobilities Regimes. Mobility,Power and the Socio-geographical Structurations of Mobile Work

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of mobility regimes and points out three discursive dimensions: the normalization, rationalization and time-space-compression of mobility. It concentrates on corporate mobility, business travel and mobile work, and gives a focused overview on current developments in research. Sociology has largely neglected the topic of spatial mobility. Dealings with distance and travel, however, are driving forces for the modernization of modern societies. Economic activity is based on mobility and companies deploy sophisticated mobility regimes to be present in markets. The increase in mobile work brings new issues centre stage such as the control of mobile workers, social cohesion and the spatial complexity of corporate activities. The author theorizes mobile work and business travel as signifiers for social change in the organization of work. He presents theoretical reflections based on empirical work conducted among mobile workers in the IT, mechanical and the chemical industries.     

Forum 4: the environmental privilege of borders in the anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Mobility can indicate a powerful or privileged relationship with one’s environment. The ability to exercise mobility or not (of oneself or others) is an exertion of power that demarcates where particular people belong and under what kind of environmental conditions. This essay focuses on the significance of borders in creating environmental privilege in the Anthropocene. Environmental privilege is accrued through the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that enables the construction of exclusive environmental amenities such as clean air and water, open space, and safe neighborhoods. For years, environmental justice scholars have revealed the burdens and oppressive conditions associated with environmental inequality, but few studies consider the flipside of that reality. We argue that environmental privileges enjoyed by some rest upon the manipulation of the mobility of others – human and nonhuman. We believe border making will come under greater pressure as the effects of climate change increase, and the volume of resources required to maintain exclusive spaces intensifies. Continued mass migration will bring heightened anxieties about national identity and calls for greater border enforcement, despite the reality that borders – both literal and figurative – consistently fail to alleviate migratory pressures while exacerbating the effects of climate change and environmental injustice. Our research shows that greater ecological instability increases efforts to create privatized places as pristine spaces untouched by global turmoil, thereby reinforcing those social forces that produce environmental injustices in the first place.     

Family involved or left behind in migration? A family-centred perspective towards Estonia-Finland cross-border commuting

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to find out how the active cross-border mobility of one family member changes the communication patterns inside the family and how it impacts those who stay behind. Concentrating on the case study of Estonian men working in Finland, this paper examines how families are maintaining relationships with people close to them and what kind of new practices are created to overcome the geographical distance. The importance of both active real-life and mediated communication, media usage, and social-media practices, but also new travelling practices are stressed. The perspectives of both the mobile members of the family and those who stay behind are covered with a focus on how all family members are involved in the migration processes. The fieldwork demonstrates that the mobility of one member of the family can influence the partner and children to take a more active position in maintaining communication during the period of working abroad. Through media usage and international visits, the partner and children gain a special kind of transnational lifestyle.     

Walking with technology: understanding mobility-technology assemblages

ABSTRACT

It is difficult to deny that technology – be it listening to music through headphones, engaging with smartphone apps or conversing through hands-free headsets – has become a ubiquitous part of everyday walking practices, influencing daily activities and shaping how these are operationalised. While digital technologies cannot replace conventional interactions with landscapes (e.g. the weather, clothing, street furniture, etc.), the intersections of people, places and technologies can converge in exciting and surprising ways to produce new forms of interrelating with(in) spaces. In this paper, I focus on the digital walking tour as a novel instrument through which to examine how mobility-technology assemblage assists with understanding how engagements with environments might produce various, contrasting assemblages of mobilities, bodies, affects, emotions and placemaking. I argue that participating within hybridised physical/digital spaces affects and is affected by different mobility practices. Through this paper, I propose that mobility-technology assemblage thinking provides new interventions into the ways in which people interact with technology, with each other and with(in) everyday spaces. Hence, while the person–technology interface may be considered a largely individual experience, I posit that the amalgamation of people, places and technologies can, in fact, greatly influence how pedestrian experiences are assembled, transmitted, received and interpreted.     

To move or not to move: mobility decision-making in the context of welfare conditionality and paid employment

ABSTRACT

The mobility and agency of the unemployed have rarely been examined together in welfare administration. Mobility research has much to offer the (im)mobility of low-skilled and unemployed workers. The article begins by critically examining dominant public discourse and policy reforms that stigmatise the assumed immobility of the unemployed. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with people on income support payments in Australia, it then offers a critical view on the mobility decision-making processes of these job-seekers. Building on previous research concerning the politics of mobility, it shows that structural inequalities impact mobility choices, making relocation difficult for many job-seekers. At the same time, it highlights the localised mobility that job search now involves, complicating orthodox associations between mobility and power – as well as assumptions that job-seekers are immobile.     

Changing Urban Spaces: Mobile Phones on Trains

Abstract

Mobility is changing the ways people routinely behave in public places. Since the appearance of digital mobile phone networks, mobile phones have become part of suburban and urban landscapes globally. Both the use of public transport and mobile telecommunications are integral for daily life and self‐presentation in most large cities such as London and Tokyo. Public places and spaces are being transformed into hybrid geographies through the introduction of new spatial infrastructure. In this paper, we present our analysis of the responses of our survey sample of commuters concerning their use of mobile phones on trains.     

Law and Mobility: Ethnographical Accounts of the Regulation of the Segregated Cycle Facilities in Mexico City

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the operation of and the reactions to the everyday regulation of the segregated cycling facilities in Mexico City. Specifically, through an ethnographic approach, this paper tries to illustrate how social practices, everyday legal interpretations, and police practices intersect so as to reinforce the preeminence of the automobile at the expense of other forms of mobility, such as cycling. This question is essential in the ongoing efforts to develop a more sustainable and inclusive world. Research findings suggest that, in contrast with an isolationist image typified by the recurring figure of the law as a static tool for encouraging a bike-friendly society, urban traffic regulation actually represents a complex aggregate of actors, practices, and institutions which are constantly in motion and in which alternative ways towards a more varied and sustainable world are recursively enforced or resisted.     

Bangkok flooded: re(assembling) disaster mobility

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates mobility options and practices of irregular migrant workers and international urban refugees during the 2011 flood in Bangkok, Thailand. Contributing to debates on disaster mobility and climate change induced displacement, the paper explores how citizenship and racialized differences unfolded during the flood event and how such differences had (de)mobilising effects for specific subgroups of Bangkok’s irregular population. Drawing on the concepts of assemblage and affect the paper proposes to perceive of race as emergent within concrete interactions between bodies, rather than a pre-given social category or a purely discursive trope. From this perspective the body itself may become a repository to subvert or manipulate racialized perceptions. The paper argues that approaching race as an emerging assemblage helps to shed light both on the demobilising effects race had on people’s mobility as well as on the fleeting moments of generosity and care between people that proliferated alongside such demobilisations.     

Mobility Regimes in Practice: Later-life Westerners and Visa Runs in South-East Asia

Abstract

Studies of Western migrants in South-East Asia emphasise the importance of privilege, work and location within national boundaries in the construction of contemporary subjectivities. This article examines the role and relevance of cross-border mobility through the eyes of older, Western ‘visa runners’ with limited financial resources. Drawing on migrant experience of dwelling in and moving through Penang, Malaysia, I address the ways in which the mobility regimes of immigration frameworks and visa regulations become a formative aspect or otherwise of social practice and belonging. In focusing on the personal and social experience of visa running, this article transcends a methodological nationalist focus on identities and subjectivities within national spaces and highlights the variable role of people, places and life history in the forming of multi-layered attachments across national spaces in South-East Asia.