Malene Freudendal-Pedersen

Applied mobilities, transitions and opportunities

The mobilities paradigm has, during the last decade, proven its usefulness in investigating how the socio-material mobilities of modern societies have transformed fundamental aspects of social interaction, communication and exchange (Cresswell 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Adey et al. 2013; Sheller 2014; Sheller and Urry this issue). The multiple dimensions of contemporary mobilities have been investigated by scholars from many different disciplines and it has been shown to be an ambivalent and reflexive phenomenon (Kesselring 2008; Freudendal-Pedersen 2014). Mobilities have brought about positive economic and social effects, such as wealth, international cultures of collaboration and exchange. But at the same time, issues such as increasing inequalities, climate change, urban sprawl and highly mobile energy-consuming lifestyles have put questions of sustainability centre stage. Historically, mobility has contained the idea and promise of frictionless movement, freedom and speed (Leed 1991; Urry 2007; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009; Jensen and Freudendal-Pedersen 2012), as that which would lead to better lives. Instead, visions of “seamless mobility” and a “zero-friction society” (Hajer 1999) intensify risks of congestion, noise, urban degradation and environmental disasters (Urry 2011; Adey et al. 2013). The spatial and technological extension and speeding up of mobility systems has also led to intensified mobile forms of working, living and tourism (Hannam 2006; Kesselring 2006; Urry 2007; Beaverstock et al. 2009; FreudendalPedersen 2009). On the one hand, this has opened up hitherto unforeseen spaces of opportunity for new mobilities regimes for economies, transnational cultures, forms of intimacy and love, communication, communities and social networks (Mai and King 2009). New “cultures of immediacy” (Tomlinson 2004), dealing with distance and connectivity are emerging. But on the other hand, the possibilities of facilitating interaction from almost every place in the world have propelled a sort of “banal cosmopolitanization” (Beck 2008) that has quietly changed the social routines and the spaces for lived everyday life (see Freudendal-Pedersen this issue). For example, the boom of peer-to-peer online platforms such as HomeExchange, CouchSurfing and Airbnb have arguably led to alternative models of hospitality (Russo and Dominquez 2016) which have in turn transformed entire urban neighbourhoods in major cities such as London, Barcelona, Paris and New York. The large number of new social opportunities and choices involve various complex mobilities to make them work and then often lead into further mobilities to secure their continuation – second and third-order mobilities. Nevertheless, people and materials have to be put in place and ordered so that occurrences can be planned for and made happen. This involves proactive planning which is shaped by the memories and disturbances of past events, management and organization in the present; and also involves projections into the future. In short, various mobilities inform systems, infrastructures and technologies which enable other mobilities which lead on to further systems, infrastructures and technologies in an on-going process of formation, critique, development and dissension (see Birtchnell this issue). Mobilities and the acquisition of them have become a defining feature of contemporary life, bound up with our pursuit of new identities (Kesselring 2008; Freudendal-Pedersen 2009; Elliott and Urry 2010; Salazar 2010; Kellerman 2012; Cohen, Duncan, and Thulemark 2013; Milbourne and Kitchen 2014; Taipale 2014).

Mixing Methods in the Search for Mobile Complexity

The world is moving. People are on the move. To many people auto-mobility is the cement of everyday life, and without the car, everyday life cannot be coherent (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2009; Freudendal-Pedersen & Hartmann-Petersen, 2006; Drewes Nielsen, 2005). Mobility and modernity are merged (Urry, 2000; Urry, 2007; Canzler et al., 2008). Late modern changes in everyday life spheres are complex, with our understanding of these transformations in a constant state of flux (Bauman, 2000). As this affects the way we perceive and analyse the world around us, it calls for new methodological approaches and new ways of collecting empirical data. Also important here is the role we, as researchers, play in the research process between research design, data collection and analysis.

Interactive environmental planning: creating utopias and storylines within a mobilities planning project

This article presents a research project on mobility management in Danish municipalities aimed at creating more sustainable mobilities. The project, called Formula M (2011–2014), worked within sciences, public and private sectors, and civil society. Often contemporary projects in both planning and designing sustainable mobilities fall short when it comes to changing praxis to limit CO2 emissions, where they just concentrate on technocratic elements. They often neglect the ‘why’ and ‘for what’ which is needed in order to drive such change. In the Formula M project, focus has been on supporting the planners involved in the project on their ‘why’ and ‘for what’. Based on a theoretical understanding of relational and collaborative planning the article contributes to an understanding of which approaches and methods can be used to facilitate the relationships and dialogues between many actors. Methodologically, this has been sought through a specific focus on the role of utopias as a tool for storytelling.

Mobilities, Futures & the City: repositioning discourses – changing perspectives – rethinking policies

Abstract The future of cities and regions will be strongly shaped by the mobilities of people, goods, modes of transport, waste and information. In many ways, the ‘why and ‘for what’ often get lost in discourses on planning and designing mobilities. The predominant planning paradigm still conceptualizes the future of cities and mobilities as a matter of rather more efficient technologies than of social cohesion, integration and connectivity. Sustainable mobility needs the mobilities of ideas and concepts and the reflexivity of policies. Communicative planning theory and the ‘argumentative turn’ have given significant attention to these shifts in societies’ discursive patterns and structures. For making up powerful and strong visions and policies for sustainable cities, ‘collaborative storytelling’ plays a key role. The theoretical outset for the research project ‘Mobilities, Futures & the City’, which grounds this article, was to explicitly provide an intersection for reflexivity, interdisciplinarity and exchange, to foster the creation of such stories.

Sharing mobilities. Some propaedeutic considerations

Abstract The sharing economy in general and the increasing number of sharing services in mobilities in particular stand, in many ways, for a phenomenon which is somehow bulky and unwieldy for classical economic theory. Within social sciences, these new practices of sharing rather than owning have been labelled in different ways highlighting distinctive characteristics of what sharing mobilities might mean for different people and networks. A common characteristic seems to be that sharing concepts are all highly ambivalent and often constitute a paradox between being part of the capitalist economy or providing an alternative to the capitalist economy. This special issue stands as an example of the many different approaches to sharing, with its point of departure being the twelfth Cosmobilities Network Conference in 2016 in Germany. The conference entitled “Sharing Mobilities. New Perspectives for Societies on the Move?” was a starting point for social-science-based debate on the future of new forms of mobilities. This special issue picks up some of the questions that were raised there and focuses on open questions with an outset in the mobilities turn. The authors critically investigate, think through and analyse a highly actual phenomenon, and discusses its urgency and relevance both socially and politically.

Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects

Sakakini’s life that might more successfully contribute to a sociological history—his struggles to reform the teaching of Arabic, for Ottoman constitutional reform and to Arabize the Orthodox Church—receive only passing attention. The final chapter, on the development of Jerusalem cafe culture, again focuses on Sakakini after his return to Palestine. As the self-styled ‘prince of idleness’, Sakakini for a few years presided over the ‘Party of Vagabonds’ from the Orthodox community—until he got a proper job. The chapter on Ishaq Shami, the Arab Jew who struggles to reconcile his Arab cultural identity with the Zionist European scene in Jerusalem, points to ‘the defeat of the possibility of an Arab-Jewish cultural tradition in Palestine’ (p. 164). The chapter on Omar Saleh Barghouti, whose modern sensibilities rejected feudalism but who was content to exploit its benefits, sheds light on the persistence during the early twentieth century of feudal relations of patrimony, obligation and privilege. Perhaps the weakest of the essays is the short chapter on Najati Sidqi, the Palestine Communist Party cadre whose memoirs, Tamari says, fail to do justice to his presence at momentous events like the fall of Ottoman rule, the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Together, these biographical essays present a compelling and original account of Jerusalem society, politics and culture in the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras. At its best moments, the social history of Palestine comes alive in the political projects, personalities, and triumphs and tragedies of the protagonists. Questions of tradition, cosmopolitanism and Palestinian interactions with modernity are explored with subtlety, and complex dynamics and schisms within Palestinian society are revealed. This is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Palestinian society before 1948, one that defies simplistic and reductive narratives. Less successful is the book’s structure, its two separate and rather disconnected halves, and the absence of a concluding chapter or statement to draw things together. The title theme, the schism between mountain and coastal cultures, is not developed in the biographies, which focus on Jerusalem elites. The lack of female voices is glaring. While enormously interesting, this book is likely to have a relatively limited audience in Geography: principally those working on Palestine and Palestinian history, Arab and Mediterranean modernity, and those interested in the use of biography in social history.