Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Transport and mobility in the twentieth century hence has been centred on the automobile.
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The motor car has had a primary role in the location of homes and workplaces, and in access
to activities and social interactions, and has helped shape our cities. The manufacture and
consumption of the car has been at the heart of the Western and increasingly global develop-
mental model, and it has had major impacts on society, social interactions and cultural patterns;
on resource consumption, GHG and CO2 emissions, and environmental quality; on economic
growth and decline; and options for the spatial mobility and inclusivity of different sections
of society. To a degree, consumption has come to define 'happiness' and 'success' in life,
and we find ourselves inhabiting the city as part of the commercial imperative (Debord, 1967).
The response to the economic crisis is to encourage further materialism, as 'a matter of duty'
to 'kickstart' the economy.
As we have seen, the car is associated with both instrumental and affective emotions. For
many, ownership and use of a car is thus inherently desirable. Mobility is important to social
relations and activities, and very often this is delivered by the car (Freund and Martin, 1993;
Urry, 2007; Dennis and Urry, 2009). The complexities of modern day life are often only
achievable by use of the car (Sheller and Urry, 2004), but of course the resulting lifestyle can
be less than originally envisaged:
Automobility is a Frankenstein-created monster, extending the individual into realms of
freedom and flexibility whereby one's time in the car can be positively viewed but also
structuring and constraining the users of cars to live their lives in particular spatially
stretched and compressed ways.
(Sheller and Urry, 2004, p. 744)
All of this is at least partly a social construction.
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There are other possible attractive societal
arrangements, including a changed organisation of home, work and lifestyles, and means of
travel. Beyond the individual benefits, which are often perceived rather than real, there are
significant collective adverse impacts. The wider impacts of natural and built environmental
degradation, the health effects of inactive lifestyles, and the enormous casualty toll (World
cost - in a form of false consciousness - that society is prepared to pay for high (and fast)
levels of mobility. The dream sold is of freedom in terms of the 'zero friction society'
(Flyvbjerg et al., 2003) and of being able to visit the 'open road', but in reality, for the journey
at least, the individual is confined in a small box of steel. Individuals spend an increasing
amount of time on the road, alone in their cars; this doesn't appear to be a 'positive' spend
of time in social interaction terms. The finite resource consumption and CO2 emissions, of
course, are not viable in the longer term. The explicit policy of planning for the private car,
and of not planning for other means of travel, is almost an experiment of 'Non-Plan' (Banham
et al., 1969), but applied to the transport domain. There is a rejection of the public modes,
and instead a focus on personal liberty as delivered through the private car.
Baudrillard's (1981b; 1988; 1998) concept of 'hyperreality' refers to the virtual or 'unreal'
nature of contemporary culture and perhaps can be important here. It can be viewed in terms
of mass communication, consumption and materialisation, and perhaps also mass motorisation
- a heavily-mediated 'real'. For Debord (1967) this is seen as a 'spectacle' of the social
relation between the advertising and communicated image and the 'genuinely lived life'. The
mutation is into 'commodity fetishism'. We seem to have lost the capacity to comprehend
