The City and the Car*
MIMI SHELLER AND JOHN URRY
Introduction
According to Heidegger, machinery ‘unfolds a specific character of domination . . . a
specific kind of discipline and a unique kind of consciousness of conquest’ over human
beings (quoted in Zimmerman, 1990: 214). In the twentieth century this disciplining and
domination through machine technology is most dramatically seen in the system of
production, consumption, circulation, location and sociality engendered by the ‘motor
car’, what Barthes describes as ‘the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals’
(1972: 88).
Indeed, the car is a particularly good illustration of a putative globalization. One
billion cars have been manufactured in the twentieth century. There are currently over
500 million cars roaming the world, a figure that is expected to double by 2015 (Shove,
1998). However, the car is rarely discussed in the ‘globalization literature’ (see Albrow,
1996), although its specific character of domination is as global as the other great
technological cultures of the twentieth century, the cinema, television and the computer,
which are seen as constitutive of global cultures. Contemporary ‘global cities’, and cities
in general, remain primarily rooted in and defined by automobility as much as by newer
technologies. Thus, to understand the ways in which social life might be reconfigured by
new technologies of information and communication will require that social analysts take
seriously their relation to the car.
Yet the social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome
consequences for social life. Three ‘disciplines’ that ought to have examined the social
impact of the car are industrial sociology, the analyses of consumption practices and
urban studies. Within industrial sociology there has been little examination of how the
much-analysed mass production of cars has extraordinarily transformed social life. It did
not see how the huge number of cars being produced through ‘Fordist’ methods,
especially within the US, were impacting upon the patterns of social life as car ownership
became ‘democratized’ and generalized. Within the study of consumption there has not
been much examination of the use-value of cars in permitting extraordinary modes of
mobility, new ways of dwelling in movement and the car culture to develop. The main
question for consumption analyses has concerned sign-values, with the ways that car
ownership in general or the ownership of particular models does or does not enhance
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108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 238 Main Street, Malden, MA 02142, USA.
* We are very grateful for the comments and suggestions of Sarah Franklin, Paul Heelas, Elizabeth Shove, Jane
Hunt, Linda Woodhead and John Law (all colleagues at Lancaster University), as well as the participants in the
‘Mobilizing Forces’ workshop in Go¨teborg, Sweden.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 24.4 December 2000
people’s status position. The car as the locus of consumption normally remains on the
drive of the house (see Shove, 1998).1
In this article it is the absence of the car in the analysis of the urban that is our
particular concern. It was in the modern city that the founders of sociology first
envisioned the contraction of social space, the density of transactions and the
compression of ‘social distance’ that comprised modernity. Yet sociology’s view of
urban life has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in
transforming the time-space scapes of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Indeed, urban
studies have at best concentrated upon the sociospatial practice of walking and especially
upon flaˆnerie or ‘strolling’ the city. It has been presumed that the movement, noise, smell,
visual intrusion and environmental hazards of the car are largely irrelevant to deciphering
the nature of city life. Many urban analyses have, in fact, been remarkably static and
concerned themselves little with the forms of mobility into, across and through the city
(although see Lynd and Lynd, 1937; and Hawkins, 1986; Lynch, 1993, on the linearity of
traffic). Where such mobilities have been taken into account, it is generally either to
lament the effects of the car on the city (Jacobs, 1961; Mumford, 1964) or to argue that a
culture of speed replaces older cultures of urbanism (Virilio, 1997).
In general, then, cars have been conceived of either as a neutral technology,
permitting social patterns of life that would happen anyway, or as a fiendish interloper
that destroyed earlier patterns of urban life. Urban studies has omitted to consider how the
car reconfigures urban life, involving, as we shall describe, distinct ways of dwelling,
travelling and socializing in, and through, an automobilized time-space. We argue that
mobility is as constitutive of modernity as is urbanity, that civil societies of the West are
societies of ‘automobility’ and that automobility should be examined through six
interlocking components. It is the unique combination of these components that generates
the ‘specific character of domination’ of automobility across most societies across the
globe (see Freund, 1993; and Whitelegg, 1997, on many of these). Automobility is:
• The quintessential manufactured object produced by the leading industrial sectors
and the iconic firms within twentieth-century capitalism (Ford, GM, Rolls-Royce,
Mercedes, Toyota, VW and so on); hence, it is the industry from which key concepts
such as Fordism and post-Fordism have emerged to analyse the nature of, and
changes in, the trajectory of western capitalism.
• The major item of individual consumption after housing which (1) provides status to
its owner/user through the sign-values with which it is associated (such as speed,
home, safety, sexual desire, career success, freedom, family, masculinity, genetic
breeding); (2) it is easily anthropomorphized by being given names, having rebellious
features, being seen to age and so on; and (3) generates massive amounts of crime
(theft, speeding, drunk driving, dangerous driving) and disproportionately preoccupies
each country’s criminal justice system.
• An extraordinarily powerful machinic complex constituted through the car’s technical
and social interlinkages with other industries, including car parts and accessories,
petrol refining and distribution, road-building and maintenance, hotels, roadside
service areas and motels, car sales and repair workshops, suburban house building,
1 A proliferation of recent conferences on automobility and car culture suggest that this is rapidly changing.
Just a small selection includes: ‘Speed: A Workshop on Space, Time and Mobility’ (October 1999),
sponsored by the Danish Transport Council; ‘Destination Anywhere: The Architecture of Transport in the
20th
Century’ (8 March 2000), a conference of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, in London;
‘Mobilizing Forces: Social and Cultural Aspects of Automobility’ (5–6 May 2000), an international
workshop organized by researchers at Go¨teborg University, Sweden, and sponsored by the Swedish
Transport and Communications Research Board; ‘The New Jersey Turnpike: Exit Into the American
Consciousness’ (4 November 2000), a conference organized by the New Jersey Historical Society.
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738 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
new retailing and leisure complexes, advertising and marketing, urban design and
planning.
• The predominant global form of ‘quasi-private’ mobility that subordinates other
‘public’ mobilities of walking, cycling, travelling by rail and so on; and it reorganizes
how people negotiate the opportunities for, and constraints upon, work, family life,
leisure and pleasure.
• 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 Lo¨fgren, 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).
We use ‘automobility’ here in order to capture a double-sense. On the one hand,
‘auto’ refers reflexively to the humanist self, such as the meaning of ‘auto’ in notions like
autobiography or autoerotic. On the other hand, ‘auto’ often occurs in conjunction with
objects or machines that possess a capacity for movement, as expressed by terms such as
automatic, automaton and especially automobile. This double resonance of ‘auto’ is
suggestive of the way in which the car-driver is a ‘hybrid’ assemblage, not simply of
autonomous humans, but simultaneously of machines, roads, buildings, signs and entire
cultures of mobility (Haraway, 1991; Thrift, 1996: 282–4). In the following we outline a
manifesto for the analysis of ‘auto’ mobility that explores this double resonance, of
autonomous humans and of autonomous machines only able to roam in certain time-space
scapes. Such a manifesto, we argue, will transform current understandings and analyses of
contemporary cities (it should be noted that most examples in this article are taken from
North America and western Europe).
Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and
ways of dwelling, not in a stationary home, but in a mobile, semi-privatized and hugely
dangerous capsule. In what follows we argue that automobility has reshaped citizenship
and the public sphere via the mobilization of modern civil societies. We begin by tracing
urban sociology’s paradoxical resistance to cultures of mobility, and the implications this
has had for theories of civil society. In particular, we argue that civil society should be
reconceptualized as a ‘civil society of automobility’, a civil society of quasi-objects, or
‘car-drivers’ and ‘car-passengers’, along with disenfranchised ‘pedestrians’ and others
not-in-cars, those that suffer a kind of Lacanian ‘lack’. There is not a civil society of
separate human subjects which can be conceived of as autonomous from these allconquering
machinic complexes. 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 cardrivers:
at home in movement, transcending distance to complete series of activities
within fragmented moments of time. The car is thus not simply an extension of each
individual; automobility is not simply an act of consumption since it reconfigures the
modes of especially urban sociality. Urban social life has always entailed various
mobilities but the car transforms these in a distinct combination of flexibility and
coercion. In the conclusion, we will begin to trace a vision of an evolved automobility for
the cities of tomorrow in which public space might again be made public.
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The city and the car 739
Automobility, civil society and the city
The material fabric of cities substantiates a static architectonic that is shot through with
‘ways’ of mobility. Cities are encrusted with ramps and overpasses, bridges and tunnels,
expressways and bypasses, roundabouts and ‘gyratories’ (see Morse, 1998: Chapter 4 on
liquidity). Hemmed in by this physical infrastructure of mobility, urban architecture has
become a function of movement. City-space is dominated by intersecting quasi-objects in
their disorganizing semi-autonomy. Classical urban architecture was designed from the
point of view of the pedestrian, using visual perspective to guide the walker through
arcades and squares defined by fountains, to open, wider vistas defined by the spatial
vanishing points created by judiciously placed obelisks and domes (Sennett, 1990).
Postmodern architecture’s emphasis on quickly-read signs and surface quotation, in
contrast, arose in part out of the experience of driving along the ‘strip’ with its billboards
and neon signs, as epitomized by learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al., 1972; and see
Freund, 1993: 104–6).2
Yet urban studies clings to the humanist figure of the pedestrian
and cars are often seen as the enemy of urbanism, of civility, even of citizenship — an
intrusion from the suburban borderlands. Here we will consider two traditions of
theorizing the urban that have contributed to the perception of mobility as inimical to
civility and citizenship: urban studies in the Chicago School tradition, and theories of
civil society.
Urban studies have not ignored mobility altogether; indeed, the diversity, density and
stimulus of urban social life have long been associated with forms of mobility.
Nevertheless, an excess of mobility has often been blamed for urban degeneration and
danger. In the Chicago School’s early ecological approach to cities mobility played a
central part in diagnosing urban pathologies. Burgess argued that mobility was ‘perhaps
the best index of the state of metabolism of the city. Mobility may be thought of in more
than a fanciful sense, as the ‘‘pulse of the community’’ ’ (Burgess, 1925: 59). However,
too much mobility and the stimuli that it entailed, he suggested, ‘tends inevitably to
confuse and to demoralize the person’, resulting in a host of urban ills that undermined
the city as a social organism (ibid. 58). Robert Park, even more than Burgess, placed
personal mobility at the centre of his understanding of urban social life. He proposed that
along with the basic human urge to dwell in a place, ‘that other characteristic ambition of
mankind [is], namely, to move freely and untrammelled over the surface of mundane
things, and to live, like pure spirit, in his mind and in his imagination alone. . . Mind is an
incident of locomotion’ (Park, 1925: 156).
However, he too saw the need for a balance between locality and mobility. For Park
the figure of the Hobo was emblematic of the uprooted, rudderless, footloose human, with
no place in the world and no vocation. ‘Society is, to be sure, made up of independent,
locomoting individuals’ he argued:
But in order that there may be permanence and progress in society the individuals who compose
it must be located; they must be located, for one thing, in order to maintain communication, for
it is only through communication that the moving equilibrium which we call society can be
maintained. All forms of association among human beings rest finally upon locality and local
association (Park, 1925: 159).
Modern urban social life — or what might more broadly be called civil society — was
therefore seen as attached to the city, located in neighbourhoods and associational spaces,
2 While some urban architecture tries to reinvent the pedestrian scale (such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris)
or avoid the car altogether (such as the Millennium Dome in Greenwich), all buildings exist in relation to a
streetscape and a flow of social practices that remain overdetermined by the car.
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740 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
and rooted in places of dwelling. Mobility was a necessary feature of growth and
modernization, but had to be stabilized by association and anchored within place.
This understanding of association as an outgrowth of locality, that is, as
architecturally located and opposed to mobility, is closely related to the conceptualizations
of civil society grounded in the history of urbanization, which has also seen
automobility as a threat to the public sphere. Civil society is typically defined as a ‘realm’
of association, mediating either between individuals and the state in the Hegelian
tradition, or between economy and state in the Gramscian tradition (Cohen and Arato,
1992). It is understood as located in specific spaces of sociality, rooted in urban
architecture rather than in mobilities, at best connected by newspapers and the imagined
communities of ‘print publics’ (Anderson, 1991). This static conception of civil society
originates in nineteenth-century notions of urban society, but has been built into latetwentieth-century
social theory. Crucially, the civil society concept has been elaborated
on a model of refined urban sociality, the realm of bu¨rgergesellschaft.
The power of civil society crucially depends on the democratic ‘social space’
created by the temporal syncopation and movement between two separate ‘spheres’, the
private and the public, through which individuals can develop their deliberative
capacities as citizens (Benhabib, 1992; Cohen and Arato, 1992). In the idealized urban
public spaces of, for example, Arendt’s polis (1958), Tocqueville’s voluntary
associations (1835), or Habermas’s coffee-houses (1992), an informed rational debate
could supposedly take place — at least among the elite men who could gain entry to such
‘public’ places (Landes, 1988). Thus, as is often noted, we find the linguistic root of
citizen, civil and civic in city (civitas), and of politics and polity in polis. While these
theorists draw a sharp distinction between what is private and what is public, there is an
unexamined blurring between the ‘public sphere’ (of citizenship) and the ‘public space’
(of the city).
Because of this common slippage, the spatialization of ‘publicity’ has not in itself
been systematically examined. Indeed, the word public itself takes on a multitude of
overlapping but at times mutually contradictory meanings within different discursive
traditions (Weintraub, 1997). Given this confusion of institutional ‘spheres’ with physical
‘spaces’, these models of civil society attend little to how people actually move between
the private and the public spaces. Indeed, a crucial issue might be how people play with
and upon that blurred boundary while moving through urban space (though some theorists
of the ‘performative’ dimensions of the public touch upon such questions; see Keane,
1988). Attention to the mobility of urban publics raises new questions about how such
mobility is unequally available, gendered as masculine, or racialized as ‘white’ (but see
Ryan, 1990; and Kelley, 1996). Most importantly, there is an implicit underlying threat
that is barely addressed by theorists of civil society: that the very freedom of mobility
necessary to publicity somehow also holds the potential to disrupt public space, to
interfere with the more stable associational life and to undermine proper politics. Mobility
is the enemy of civility.
This fear of mobility (and of the unsettling encounters it may bring) betrays a failure
to remember that mobility is in some respects constitutive of democracy — it is a
democratic ‘right’. From the autonomous public emerged what Habermas describes as ‘a
sphere of personal freedom, leisure, and freedom of movement’ (1992: 129). Yet it was
the process of democratization of that freedom of movement — enabled partly by motor
cars — which led to the collapse of the very distinction between what is private and what
is public through transforming the flows of people in time-space scapes. When many
commentators outline the decline of a public sphere of civil society, they often focus on
the mass media, but seldom link this ‘structural transformation’ of the public sphere to
this other great transformation of modern civil society, namely, the emergence of various
logics of personal mobility/liquidity. In modern western societies, as Turner notes, ‘the
growth of mass transport systems brought about a democratisation of geographical
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The city and the car 741
movement so that the ownership of a motor car became, along with the ownership of a
home, a basic objective of modern democracies’ (1994: 128), though not one achievable
by all. From the railway in the nineteenth century to automobility in the twentieth, the
geography of urban public and private space — and with it the networks of civil society
— have been fundamentally transformed by mass ‘democratic’ movement.
Like Burgess and Park, analysts of the public sphere depict a fundamental conflict
between urban civility and democratized mobility. Both the intimate sphere of the private
family and the related public sphere of old urban forms of dwelling are perceived as being
drowned-out in the modern urban built environment centred on traffic flow:
[The] meaningful ordering of the city as a whole . . . has been overtaken, to mention just one
factor, by changes in the function of streets and squares due to the technical requirements of
traffic flow. The resulting configuration does not afford a spatially protected private sphere, nor
does it create free space for public contacts and communications that could bring private people
together to form a public (Habermas, 1992: 157–8).
The urban public sphere disintegrates ‘into an ill-ordered arena for tyrannical vehicle
traffic’ (ibid.: 159). Sennett, likewise, touches on automobiles in The fall of public man,
where he suggests that the unfortunate ‘idea of public space as derivative from motion
parallels exactly the relations of space to motion produced by the private automobile’
(1977: 14). People ‘take unrestricted motion of the individual to be an absolute right’, he
argues. ‘The private motorcar is the logical instrument for exercising that right, and the
effect on public space, especially the space of the urban street, is that the space becomes
meaningless or even maddening unless it can be subordinated to free movement. The
technology of modern motion replaces being in the street with a desire to erase the
constraints of geography’ (ibid.).
Lefebvre makes a similar point about the negative effects of the car on urban public
spaces, and the high social costs of turning over public space to private cars:
[C]ity life is subtly but profoundly changed, sacrificed to that abstract space where cars circulate
like so many atomic particles. . . [T]he driver is concerned only with steering himself to his
destination, and in looking about sees only what he needs to see for that purpose; he thus
perceives only his route, which has been materialized, mechanized, and technicized, and he sees
it from one angle only — that of its functionality: speed, readability, facility (Lefebvre, 1991:
312–13).
This destruction of urban public space and introduction of a superficial built environment
reflects a ‘strategy of the state bureaucracy’, as seen in the Haussmanization of Paris or
the building of Brasilia (ibid.: 312), married to the interests of oil companies and car
manufacturers (ibid.: 359, 374). The end result, he argues, is that ‘urban space tends to be
sliced up, degraded, and eventually destroyed by . . . the proliferation of fast roads and of
places to park and garage cars, and their corollary, a reduction of tree-lined streets, green
spaces, and parks and gardens’ (ibid.: 359).
What these widely-accepted formulations of modernity and urbanism thus neglect,
and analyses of the decline of publicity only hint at, is what we call the mobilization of
modern civil societies. The focus on urbanization as a mode of location, of dwelling, of
architecture and of association has deflected attention from the ways in which movement
also constitutes cities as civil spheres. If urbanization leads to the intensification of
human habitats, the concentration of places in space, and the unification of condensed
temporal flows, then automobilization, by contrast, leads to the extension of human
habitats, the dispersal of places across space, the opportunities to escape certain locales
and to form new socialities, and the fragmentation of temporal flows, especially through
suburbanization. On the latter, Morse (1998: 106) notes that the freeway is not so much a
place but a vector. Both processes, urbanization and automobilization are together
characteristic of modernity and of the culture of cities. Meeting places require that people
get to them. Mobility cannot simply be conceived as the enemy of civitas; however much
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742 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
we may despair of vehicular traffic and busy roads, the auto-freedom of movement is part
of what can constitute democratic life.
That this has not been appreciated is because analyses of the modern have normally
been in terms of ‘structure’ rather than ‘mobility’, and have viewed civil society as
essentially ‘reflective’ and/or ‘residual’ (Emirbayer and Sheller, 1999). Mobility and the
technologies associated with it have generally been understood as arising from capitalism,
while non-economic and non-state processes of mobilization have been overlooked.
Automobility, the coercive yet flexible freedom of civil actors, is, we suggest, a crucial
dimension of processes of democratization and reflexive modernization on the one hand,
and of the deeply contested constraints and unintended consequences of modernity on the
other. Civil society is thus not to be viewed as simply or principally a ‘structure’. Civil
societies are sets of mobilities flowing over roads which have only been civilianized as
more and more social actors have demanded rights of personal mobility. Civil actors draw
on structures such as the road system in ways that may be unexpected and contestatory.
This deployment of such ‘structured’ resources can result in socially innovative practices
that are neither residual nor reflective of these larger structures. The logic of
communication is also embedded in transportation systems as civic (as well as economic
and political) networks. Civil society is thus a site, or perhaps a ‘crossroads’, where
mobilities have been sought by many actors and groups struggling to establish their place
of movement within civil society and, in particular, to move within and between cities
using the established routeways of capital and the state. In the next section we go on to
consider some of the more detailed transformations of time and space that such an
automobilized civil society presupposes and produces.
Time and space in the city
Raymond Williams’ novels interestingly bring out how twentieth-century social life
exists through interconnecting time-space paths linking place with place. Williams
elaborates how many socialities of civil society are sustained through technologies of
movement which, literally and imaginatively, connect peoples, and especially families,
over significant, complexly structured, heterogeneous distances. In Border country,
Williams is ‘fascinated by the networks men and women set up, the trails and territorial
structures they make as they move across a region, and the ways these interact or interfere
with each other’ (Pinkney, 1991: 49; Williams, 1988). Williams mainly considers the
connections made possible by the railway. But these are now less significant than those of
automobility. ‘What was central now was the fact of traffic’, as Williams puts it (quoted
in Pinkney, 1991: 55).
Automobility permits multiple socialities, of family life, community, leisure, the
pleasures of movement and so on, which are interwoven through complex jugglings of
time and space that car journeys both allow but also necessitate. These jugglings result
from two interdependent features of automobility: that the car is immensely flexible and
wholly coercive. We elaborate some of the temporal and spatial implications of this
simultaneous flexibility and coercion for the constitutive nature of urban life.
Automobility (in some respects) is a source of freedom, the ‘freedom of the road’. Its
flexibility enables the car-driver to travel at speed, at any time, in any direction along the
complex road systems of western societies that link together most houses, workplaces and
leisure sites. Cars, therefore, extend where people can go and hence what as humans they
are literally able to do. Much of what many people now think of as ‘social life’ could not
be undertaken without the flexibilities of the car and its availability 24 hours a day. It is
possible to leave late by car, to miss connections, to travel in a relatively timeless fashion.
People find pleasure in travelling when they want to, along routes that they choose,
finding new places unexpectedly, stopping for relatively open-ended periods of time, and
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The city and the car 743
moving on when they desire. They are what Shove (1998) terms another of the
‘convenience devices’ of contemporary society, devices that make complex, harried
patterns of social life, especially in the city, just about possible, at least, of course, for
those with cars.
But, at the same time, this flexibility and these rights are themselves necessitated by
automobility. The ‘structure of auto space’ (Freund, 1993) forces people to orchestrate in
complex and heterogeneous ways their mobilities and socialities across very significant
distances. The urban environment built for the convenience of the car has ‘unbundled’
those territorialities of home, work, business and leisure that have historically been
closely integrated (Sassen, 1996).
Automobility has fragmented social practices that occurred in shared public spaces
within each city (see SceneSusTech, 1998). In particular, automobility divides
workplaces from homes, so producing lengthy commutes into and across the city. It
splits homes and business districts, undermining local retail outlets to which one might
have walked or cycled, thereby eroding town centres, non-car pathways and public
spaces. It also separates homes and various kinds of leisure sites, which are often only
available by motorized transport. Automobility turns access zones on urban fringes into
wastelands, necessitating ever-further travel to escape the urban prison of cement and
pollution. Members of families are split up since they will live in distant places
necessarily involving complex travel to meet up even intermittently. People are trapped in
congestion, jams, temporal uncertainties and health-threatening city environments, as a
consequence of being encapsulated in a privatized, cocooned, moving environment that
uses up disproportionate amounts of physical resources. At the same time, automobility
disables those who are not car-drivers (children, the sight impaired, those without cars) by
making their everyday habitats dangerously non-navigable (Kunstler, 1994).
Automobility thus coerces people into an intense flexibility. It forces people to juggle
tiny fragments of time so as to deal with the temporal and spatial constraints that it itself
generates. 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 time-compressed ways. The car, one might suggest, is Weber’s
‘iron cage’ of modernity, motorized, moving and privatized. It coerces almost everyone to
juggle tiny fragments of time in order to put together complex, fragile and contingent
patterns of social life, especially within the city. J.G. Ballard in Crash describes a carbased
infantile world where any desire can be instantly satisfied (1973: 4; Macnaghten
and Urry, 1998: Chapter 5).
Automobility thus develops ‘instantaneous’ or ‘timeless’ time that is to be juggled and
managed in highly complex, heterogeneous and uncertain ways. Automobility involves an
individualistic timetabling of many instants or fragments of time. The car-driver thus
operates in instantaneous time that contrasts with the official timetabling of mobility that
accompanied the railways in the mid-nineteenth century (Lash and Urry, 1994: 228–9).
This was modernist clock-time based upon the public timetable, or what Bauman terms
‘gardening’ rather than ‘gamekeeping’ (1987). As a car-driver wrote in 1902: ‘Travelling
means utmost free activity, the train however condemns you to passivity . . . the railway
squeezes you into a timetable’ (cited in Morse, 1998: 117). The objective clock-time of the
modernist railway timetable is replaced by personalized, subjective temporalities, as
people live their lives in and through their car(s) (if they have one; Lash and Urry, 1994:
41–2). There is involved here a reflexive monitoring, not of the social, but of the self.
People try to sustain ‘coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives . . . in the
context of multiple choices filtered through abstract systems’ (such as that involved in
automobility; Giddens, 1991: 6). Thus, automobility coerces urban dwellers to juggle tiny
fragments of time in order to put together complex, fragile and contingent patterns of
social life, which constitute self-created narratives of the reflexive self.
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744 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
As personal times are desynchronized, spatial movements are synchronized to the
rhythm of the road. The loose interactions and mobilities of pedestrians are forced to give
way to the tightly controlled mobility of machines, especially in the human and machinic
density of urban areas. Automobility dominates how both car-users and non-car-users
organize their lives through time-space. Driving requires ‘publics’ based on trust, in
which mutual strangers are able to follow shared rules, communicate through common
sets of visual and aural signals, and interact in a kind of default space or non-place
available to all ‘citizens of the road’ (see Lynch, 1993). Yet car-drivers are excused from
the normal etiquette and social coordination of face-to-face interactions. Car travel rudely
interrupts the taskscapes of others (pedestrians, children going to school, postmen,
garbage collectors, farmers, animals and so on), whose daily routines are merely obstacles
to the high-speed traffic that cuts mercilessly through slower-moving pathways and
dwellings. Junctions, roundabouts and ramps present moments of carefully scripted
intercar action during which non-car users of the road present hazards or obstacles to the
drivers intent on returning to their normal cruising speed.
Automobility also generates new scapes that structure the flows of people and goods
along particular routes, especially motorways or interstate highways (see Urry, 2000, on
scapes and flows). There is a rewarping of time and space by advanced transportation
structures, as scapes pass by some towns and cities while connecting other areas along
transport-rich ‘tunnels’. Such tunnels also shape urban geographies of social exclusion
and ghettoization (see Urban Taskforce, 1999). Public housing estates in the UK or socalled
‘projects’ in US cities are often cut off from bus, rail or subway links to
employment-rich business districts within the city and from automobile roadways linked
to more desirable (middle-class) residential and leisure areas outside the city. At the same
time, tolls and parking fees can deter rural and suburban dwellers from entering the city
too easily. Thus, the inequalities among multiple publics are entrenched in urban spaces
of unevenly distributed access and exclusion.
Dwelling in mobility
The shortage of time resulting from the extensive distances that increasingly ‘have’ to be
travelled means that the car remains the only viable means of highly flexibilized mobility.
Also, other forms of mobility in the city are, by comparison with the car, relatively
inflexible and inconvenient, judged, that is, by criteria that automobility itself generates
and generalizes. In particular, the car enables seamless journeys from home-away-home.
It does away with the stationary pauses necessitated by ‘stations’, apart from the
occasional stop at the gas station. And this is what the contemporary traveller has come to
expect. The seamlessness of the car journey makes other modes of travel inflexible and
fragmented. So-called public transport rarely provides that kind of seamlessness (except
for first-class air travellers with a limousine service to and from the airport). There are
many gaps between the various mechanized means of public transport: walking from
one’s house to the bus stop, waiting at the bus stop, walking through the bus station to the
train station, waiting on the station platform, getting off the train and waiting for a taxi,
walking though a strange street to the office and so on, until one returns home. These
‘structural holes’ in semi-public space are sources of inconvenience, danger and
uncertainty. And this is especially true for women, older people, those who may be
subject to racist attacks, the disabled and so on (see SceneSusTech, 1998). There are gaps
for the car-driver involving semi-public spaces, such as entering a multi-storey car park or
walking though strange streets to return to one’s car or waiting by the side of the road for
a breakdown vehicle, but these are much less endemic than for other kinds of travel.
Not only do car-drivers gain the comparative benefits of relative mobility and
seamless travel, making older ways of travel seem slow and inflexible, but also the matrix
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of automobility undermines other forms of mobility. The predominance of the car in
government policy and planning afforded seamless car journeys while breaking down
those linkages that once made other forms of transport possible. In the US, car
manufacturers such as General Motors bought and dismantled electric tramway systems
in order to make suburbs car-dependent (see Flink, 1988; Wolf, 1996). Zoning laws and
building codes enforced suburban sprawl through the separation of business and
residential districts, mandatory large-lot sizes and set-backs from kerbs, which destroyed
town centres and the public spaces that they once provided (Kunstler, 1994). Autointensive
middle-class suburbanization resulted in ‘auto sprawl syndrome’ in which cars
make urban suburbanization/sprawl possible and in so doing they make those living in
such areas dependent upon the use of cars (SceneSusTech, 1998: 100). Freund argues that
‘Modernist urban landscapes were built to facilitate automobility and to discourage other
forms of human movement. . . [Movement between] private worlds is through dead public
spaces by car’ (1993: 119).
Indeed, large areas of the globe now consist of car-only environments — the
quintessential non-places of super-modernity (Auge´, 1995). About one-quarter of the land
in London and nearly one-half of that in LA is devoted to car-only environments. And
they then exert an awesome spatial and temporal dominance over surrounding
environments, transforming what can be seen, heard, smelt and even tasted (the spatial
and temporal range of which varies for each of the senses). Such car-environments or
non-places are neither urban nor rural, local nor cosmopolitan. They are sites of pure
mobility within which car-drivers are insulated as they ‘dwell-within-the-car’. They
represent the victory of liquidity over the urban. One such non-place is the motel,
immortalized in the UK by the TV soap Crossroads. Clifford notes that the ‘motel has no
real lobby, and it’s tied into a highway network — a relay or node rather than a site of
encounter between coherent cultural subjects’ (as would, he implies, be found in a hotel;
1997: 32). Motels ‘memorialize only movement, speed, and perpetual circulation’ since
they ‘can never be a true place’ and one motel is only distinguished from another in ‘a
high-speed, empiricist flash’ (Morris, 1988: 3, 5). The motel, like the airport transit
lounge or the motorway service station, represents neither arrival nor departure, but the
‘pause’, consecrated to circulation and movement and demolishing particular senses of
place and locale. This ‘sense of sameness and placelessness’ is accompanied by a ‘social
organization of space that helps to further auto-dependence and to mask any realistic
alternatives to automobility’ (Freund, 1993: 11).
As a rolling private-in-public space, automobility affords dwelling inside a mobile
capsule that involves punctuated movement ‘on the road’ from home-away-home.
Domesticity is reproduced on the road through social relations such as the ‘back-seat
driver’ or the common dependence upon a partner for navigation and map-reading; the car
creates a transpersonal mobile agent. Moreover, a variety of services have become
available without leaving the car, as the ‘drive-in’ becomes a feature of everyday life.
Since the 1950s halcyon days of the drive-in movie and the drive-in ‘automat’ where ‘fast
food’ is served, more recent car-dwellers, especially in the US, have been treated to the
conveniences of drive-through banking, drive-through car washes, drive-through safari
theme parks, and even drive-through beer distributors in some states (not to mention
drive-by shootings and drive-up mail delivery). Thus, fragments of time are increasingly
compressed into taskscapes that can keep people inside their cars, while the ‘coming
together of private citizens in public space’ is lost to a privatization of the mechanized
self moving through emptied non-places.
Protected by seatbelts, airbags, ‘crumple zones’, ‘roll bars’ and ‘bull bars’, cardwellers
boost their own safety and leave others in the city to fend for themselves in a
‘nasty, brutish and short’ world. In each car the driver is strapped into a comfortable
armchair and surrounded by micro-electronic informational sources, controls and sources
of pleasure, what Williams calls the ‘mobile privatization’ of the car (see Pinkney, 1991:
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55). Many aspects involved in directing the machine have been digitized, at the same time
that car-drivers are located within a place of dwelling that insulates them from much of
the risky and dangerous urban environment that they pass through. The Ford brochure of
1949 declared that ‘The 49 Ford is a living room on wheels’ (Marsh and Collett, 1986:
11). Features such as automatic gearboxes, cruise control and CD-changers ‘free’ drivers
from direct manipulation of the machinery, while embedding them more deeply in its
sociality. Yet it is a room in which the senses are impoverished. The speed at which the
car must be driven constrains the driver to always keep moving. Dwelling at speed,
people lose the ability to perceive local detail, to talk to strangers, to learn of local ways
of life, to stop and sense each different place (see Freund, 1993: 120–1). The sights,
sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells of the city are reduced to the two-dimensional
view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by railway journeys in the
nineteenth century (see Schivelbusch, 1986). The sensing of the world through the screen
has, of course, become the dominant way of dwelling in contemporary experience. The
environment beyond the windscreen is an alien other, to be kept at bay through the
diverse privatizing technologies incorporated within the contemporary car. These
technologies ensure a consistent temperature (with the standardization of air-conditioning),
large supplies of information, a relatively protected environment, high-quality
sounds and sophisticated systems of monitoring. They enable the hybrid of the car-driver
to negotiate conditions of intense riskiness on high-speed roads (roads are increasingly
risky because of the reduced road-space now available to each car). And as cars have
increasingly overwhelmed almost all environments, so everyone is coerced to experience
such environments through the protective screen and to abandon urban streets and squares
to the metallic cages-on-wheels.
The driver’s body is itself fragmented and disciplined to the machine, with eyes, ears,
hands and feet all trained to respond instantaneously, while the desire to stretch, to change
position, or to look around must be suppressed. The car becomes an extension of the
driver’s body, creating new urban subjectivities (see Freund, 1993: 99; and Morse, 1998:
Chapter 4, on the overlaps between driving, shopping and viewing television). A
Californian city planner declared even in 1930 that ‘it might be said that Southern
Californians have added wheels to their anatomy’ (cited in Flink, 1988: 143). The
machinic hybridization of the car-driver can be said to extend into the deepest reaches of
the psyche. A kind of libidinal economy has developed around the car, in which
personalities are deeply invested in the car as object. There is a sexualization of the car
itself as an extension of the driver’s desirability and fantasy world. The car takes part in
the ego-formation of the driver as competent, powerful and able (as advertisers have
tapped into). Various ‘coming-of-age’ rituals revolve around the car, at least since the
discovery of bench-seats and ‘lover’s lanes’. Car-sex has itself become an element of
fantasy in everything from music videos to ‘crash culture’ (see Ballard, 1973). At the
same time, the car feeds into our deepest anxieties and frustrations, from fear of accident
and death at one extreme, to the less life-threatening but nevertheless intense frustration
of being stuck behind a slow vehicle while trying to save precious fragments of time.
Within the private cocoon of glass and metal intense emotions can be released in forms
that would not otherwise be socially acceptable. Outbursts of ‘road rage’ represent a
breakdown in ‘auto-regulation’ of the driver, in the double sense of both self-control and
of following the rules of the road.
Given these powerful restructurings of time, space and self within the car-driver
matrix, urban life and the civil society that arises out of it have to be rethought. Our first
step is to reconsider the kinds of inequalities produced by the dominant form of
automobility.
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Inequalities of automobility
Automobility, we have suggested, is a key component of civil society in the contemporary
world. Yet, like other aspects of civil society, the automobilized civil society is also
productive of new kinds of social inequalities despite efforts at its democratization. Such
inequalities are centrally important to the urban experience (as the UK White Paper on A
new deal for transport brings out: DETR, 1998; and see Towards an urban renaissance,
Final Report of the Urban Taskforce, 1999). It is both the deficits of mobility in some
places, as well as its excess in others, that are symptomatic of contemporary urban
inequalities and problems of social exclusion. As Freund argues, although the car ‘has
been widely hailed as the quintessentially democratic means of transport, the auto
actually is not usable by, or available to, large sectors of the population, even in the most
auto-saturated societies’ (1993: 7; and see his discussion of social inequalities in Chapter
3). Here we discuss two such forms of inequality, those of gender and those of being
without a car.
Gender and automobility
Women have a very different relation to cars than do men as a group. In the interwar
period automobility was generally organized around a cosiness of family life, both in
Europe and the US (Taylor, 1994: Chapter 4). In the latter, this was the period of massive
suburbanization that was predicated upon low-density family housing with a sizeable
garden, many domestic production goods for the ‘wife’ to use, and a car to enable the
‘husband’ to travel quite long distances to get to work. The automobilization of family
life not only brought the newest and most expensive car models first to male ‘heads of
families’, while women had to settle for second-hand models or smaller cars, but also led
to the uneven gendering of time-space. While working men became enmeshed in the
stresses of daily commuter traffic into and out of urban centres, suburban ‘housewives’
had the greater burden of juggling family time around multiple, often conflicting
schedules of mobility epitomized by ‘the school run’ and mom-as-chauffeur. Once family
life is centred within the moving car, social responsibilities tend to push women towards
‘safer’ cars and ‘family’ models, while men have greater luxury to indulge in
individualistic fantasies of the ‘Top Gear’ fast sports car or the impractical ‘classic
car’. Cars were originally designed to suit the average male size and have only recently
been designed to be adjustable to drivers of various heights and reaches. The distribution
of company cars has also benefited men more than women, due to continuing horizontal
and vertical segregation in the job market, which keeps most women out of positions with
access to such ‘perks’. Actuarial statistics also show that male drivers are more likely to
externalize risks onto others through dangerous driving practices (see Meadows and
Stradling, 2000).
Given these inequalities, for many women exclusion from automobility has
become a crucial political issue, both because it limits their capability to work outside
the home and because it makes movement through public spaces difficult. In most
countries women became eligible to be licensed drivers later than did men, and in some
countries they still face severe restrictions on their ability to drive. Women working in
domestic service jobs (often from racialized minority groups or recent immigrants)
faced (and still face) a gruelling journey on unreliable public transport between the city
and the suburbs. Single mothers without cars are among the groups most dependent on
public transport and most likely to find their particular ‘taskscapes’ fraught with gaps
and inconveniences. The male drivers’ domination of public space appears in the
practice of ‘kerb crawling’ in the city, one of the most tolerated forms of prostitution,
which compounds the difficulties of the female ‘street walker’ as ‘flaˆneuse’ (Wilson,
1995).
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748 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
In line with the notion of the ‘democratization’ of automobility, therefore, greater
access to automobility may be seen as empowering women. In some respects women’s
‘emancipation’ has been predicated on the automobile. Cars afford many women a sense
of personal freedom and a relatively secure form of travel in which families and objects
can be safely transported, and fragmented time-schedules successfully intermeshed.
Women’s access to cars has had a major impact on the integration of women into the
labour market by better enabling the juggling of the conflicting time disciplines of paid
and unpaid work (see Wajcman, 1991). Although the sense of freedom of movement that
comes with automobility has been largely a masculine prerogative as well as a masculine
fantasy, it is nevertheless a ‘structure of feeling’ that reaches beyond Eurocentrism and
androcentrism (Thrift, 1996). Women have therefore struggled to claim automobility, and
in doing so have in part reshaped and paradoxically enhanced car culture.
Carless living
Automobility has also shaped and encoded the physical relation of the city to surrounding
suburban and rural environments, of urban-dwellers to non-urban dwellers, and of cardwellers
to others in civil society. Distinctions can be drawn by not having a car. Living
without a car has become a significant lifestyle choice for both environmentalists and for
a small cosmopolitan elite able to live in expensively gentrified city-centres. ‘Global
cities’ (Sassen, 1991), increasingly polarized between ghettos of wealth and of poverty,
may no longer have a place for the car-bound middle classes. The carless urban poor and
growing population of new immigrants (who may actually want cars) are often cut off
from cheaper out-of-town shopping, from many public facilities accessible only by car,
and from a host of job opportunities in urban fringes and ‘edge-cities’. Freedom of
mobility is restricted even further by practices of institutional racism, which lead to
racially segregated residential areas and disproportionate stopping of black male drivers
by police.
Resisting the coercive features of automobility is nearly impossible, given the extent
to which even the lives of non-car-users in the city are transformed by cars. The nostalgic
retreat to a romantic lifestyle ‘in the country’ is an option for some, especially when
combined with ‘telecommuting’ to work, yet country life is especially car-dependent.
Automobility has accelerated the collapse of rural and small-town local shops and
services, which cannot compete against cheaper ‘superstores’ on the outskirts of cities.
The choice of an alternative lifestyle with voluntary limitations on car use is most feasible
in medium-sized regional towns where a mix of cycling, walking and public transport can
develop (as in Cambridge, UK). Nevertheless, such towns remain clogged with both
moving and stationary cars apart from those small ‘pedestrian zones’ of civility left to the
walker. Attempts to introduce pedal-rickshaws and more bike lanes are still constrained
by the imperatives of the car-driver matrix against which they must compete.3
New processes of urbanization are also reshaping automobility in the city, and with it
new inequalities. Soja, using Los Angeles as his example, has identified several
geographies of postmodern urbanization, which have important implications for an
automobilized civil society. In the radically restructured postmodern city — described by
neologisms such as ‘megacities, outer cities, edge cities, metroplex, technoburbs,
postsuburbia, technopolis, heteropolis, exopolis’ (Soja, 1995: 131) — Soja envisions ‘a
combination of decentralization and recentralization, the peripheralization of the center
and the centralization of the periphery, the city simultaneously being turned inside out
and outside in’. Although he does not relate this directly to the system of automobility, it
is clear that the car and freeway system is central to the changing geography of Los
3 Experiments in restricting car use in cities have been proliferating recently. Car-free days have been
promoted throughout Europe, with leadership from Italy in particular. Many town centres have been
pedestrianized or have attempted to ban cars from their roads (e.g. Oxford).
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Angeles. This city, above all others, is what Banham has described as an ‘autopia’ in
which ‘the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent
state of mind, a complete way of life. . . The freeway is where Angelinos live a large part
of their lives’ (cited in Jacobs, 1992: 255). As the polymer city reshapes itself, strings of
traffic are the most solid structure remaining to fuse the urban sprawl into a bounded
entity. This newly emerging urban form, according to Soja, is ‘shaped by a very complex
redistribution of jobs, affordable housing, and access to mass transit, and modified
significantly by income, racial, and ethnic differentiation’ (Soja, 1995: 132). Together
these processes are leading to two further trends, ‘the development of new patterns of
social fragmentation, segregation, and polarization’, as well as ‘an increasingly
‘‘carceral’’ city’.
As the control of mobility into and out of regions of the city becomes a central
concern of the state, the ‘tactics of mobility’ emerge as a potential form of resistance
(Thrift, 1996). In accordance with early urban sociology’s pessimistic view of the car in
the city and political sociology’s understanding of the car’s effect on the decline of the
public sphere, many analysts of contemporary social formations understandably continue
to equate automobility with inequalities, exclusions, risk proliferation and, of course,
environmental degradation. It is no surprise, then, that automobility involves massive
contestation. In the following section we consider some of the ways in which political
mobilization and social movements have developed around automobility and have
simultaneously been transformed by it.
The politics of protesting automobility
Civil society’s mobilization around automobility began in relation to consumer
protection. In the US, consumer advocates like Ralph Nader represented ‘the public
interest’ in demanding car safety, road safety, ‘lemon laws’ to protect consumers against
unscrupulous car-salesmen, and industry-wide standards for recalls of defective models
and fair pricing (Nader, 1965). The oil-crisis of the 1970s sparked public concern over
energy use and the growing demand for ‘greener’ cars with higher fuel economy and in
some instances interest in the recycling of the metals, plastics and rubber that make up the
car. As the wider environmental movement developed, the petroleum industry became a
target of protest. There were campaigns against the expansion of oil extraction into
wilderness areas such as Alaska or various off-shore sites; there were protests against
pollution caused by oil extraction, processing and shipping (e.g. the Exxon Valdez oil
spill); and there were eventually protests against the transnational corporations that
controlled oil production (culminating in the Greenpeace campaign against Shell Oil in
the early 1990s). Finally, with the Gulf War, many critics of the car culture recognized the
extent to which American and European foreign policies are driven by the petroleum
interests driving the global economy. Dependence upon oil and the lengths to which
societies would go to protect access to oil were highlighted in public debate.
Furthermore, the unavoidable flexibility necessitated by the fragmented time-space of
automobility has become an issue not only of personal management, but also of public
policy. In the 1970s, urban quality of life became a crucial political issue as cities were
choked with fumes and smog, as well as beset by traffic flow and parking problems. In
this period the car began to be viewed as more polluting than the train (Liniado, 1996:
28). Many cities such as Amsterdam, Stockholm and Portland, Oregon, developed explicit
policies to upgrade and prioritize cycle lanes and public transport, in order to wean people
away from their cars. Later, cities such as Athens attempted to control access of private
cars in and out of the city centre, with some success, while others imposed commuter
restrictions or incentives such as park-and-ride schemes or enforced car-pool lanes with
four occupants required per car. More symbolically, some European cities have instituted
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an annual ‘leave your car at home’ day. The debate over better provision of public
transport (and overall urban design) has moved to the fore in a number of countries as
various governments wrestle with controlling traffic and many drivers seek to find viable
alternative means of transport. Integrating better mass transportation into urban design
has been crucial to planning burgeoning new metropolises such as Singapore and Hong
Kong (Owen, 1987). Questions of congestion pricing systems, taxation of car use and of
petrol have become key aspects of government transport policy from California to
Britain. It is only in thinking about what it would take to get people out of their cars that
we can see the enormous transformations that automobility has wrought in the social
organization of time, space and social life.
Overall, although many people may ‘love’ their car, the system that it presupposes is
often unloved, resisted and raged against. Civil society is significantly remade through
contestations over the power, range and impact of the system of automobility. The same
people can be both enthusiastic car-drivers, as well as being very active protesters against
schemes for new roads (see Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: Chapter 6, on how cars generate
intense ambivalence). By 1994, in the UK, the scale of grass-roots protest against the
construction of new roads had risen to such a level that it was described as ‘the most
vigorous new force in British environmentalism’ (Lean, 1994). There were by then an
estimated 250 anti-road groups, a movement significantly impacting upon civil society.
The array of direct actions has also diversified as protesters have become more expert,
through the use of mass trespass, squatting in buildings, living in trees threatened by road
programmes and digging tunnels (hence the iconic Swampy who tunnelled underground
to stop a road from being built in Britain). Stopping traffic has itself become a significant
form of symbolic direct action, as practised in ‘Reclaim the Streets’ events. Protesters
also became more sophisticated in the use of new technologies, including mobile phones,
video cameras and the internet. These have enabled almost instantaneous dissemination to
the media (see Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: Chapter 2). Thus, the politics of automobility
is generating new forms of public protest and changing civil society’s repertoires of
contestation. The recent protests over petrol prices across Europe demonstrate that the
traffic-stopping impacts of new styles of direct action are both against and in favour of an
automobilized society.
As analysts of the decline of the public sphere have lamented, politics itself has been
transformed, ‘hollowed out’ and ‘colonized’ due to changes in the media of
communication. What they have been less clear about, however, is the way in which
changes in communication media are also linked to changes in the spatiality of the urban
environment and public space. Urban public spaces and public networks of association
and ‘legitimate’ political communication increasingly occur in virtual forums, rather than
in ‘real’ spaces. Public outdoor gatherings and old-fashioned demonstrations are
increasingly criminalized in the ‘carceral city’, and political protest is framed as riot.
Thus, many have connected the new technologies of surveillance and digital information
to this carceral aspect of the city (such as Davis, 1990). However, new technologies are
not only controlled by the state or by media corporations. We want to suggest that the
‘communication revolution’ takes on a further dimension when it is inserted into the
system of automobility. At the turn of the twenty-first century the simulacra of copresence
created via new information and communication technologies have broken free
of hard-wiring and spatial location. Like Park’s Hobo, civil society has embraced
mobility.
Redesigning the city of automobility: a vision of the future
For too long transport has been theorized and planned as if it were a free-standing system
disconnected from other technologies and socialities. True, for most of the twentieth
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century the revolution in communication technology was driven by the separation of
information transmission from the physical means of transportation, as implicit in the
Chicago School’s analysis of urban ‘metabolism’ at the beginning of the twentieth
century. However, the current trend, in contrast, is toward the re-embedding of
information and communication technologies (ICT) into moving objects: satellites,
mobile phones, palmtop computers and so on. At the same time that information has been
digitized and released from location, objects such as cars, roads and buildings have been
rewired to send and receive digital information — for example in the building of
‘Intelligent Transport Systems’ (ITS). We consider very briefly here what effects the
convergence of ICT and ITS will have on urban geographies and the culture of cities.
Until now this has been considered a question of interest only to urban planners and
car manufacturers — a question of traffic control or car and road safety, for example
through computer-assisted operation control systems, dynamic route guidance and traffic
information systems (see Sparmann, 1992). However, if civil societies consist of modes
of mobility as well as modes of communication, then there may be crucial processes of
contention and democratization at work in the reflexive social adaptation of these new
technologies, which will contribute to the further (post)modernization of cities. Emerging
technologies are not only creating new human-machine hybrids like the car-driver, but are
also grafting together existing machines to create new intermodal scapes and hybrid
flows: PCs with telephones, televisions with satellites, mobile phones with cars. It is
worth noting that highly complex information, communication and simulation systems
designed for military vehicles are already making the jump to civilian applications, as
have previous military technologies.4
Given the environmental pressures on the current system of automobility, including
political contention around the control of pollution, traffic reduction, management of risk
and addressing social exclusion, we would predict that the politics of urban sustainability
will play a major part in the design of new built environments. Thus far, environmentally
friendly policy initiatives have focused on reducing car use, stemming the flow of traffic
and shifting people onto public transport and non-motorized mobility through penalties
for car use and incentives for biking, walking or riding the bus, tram or train. These will
still be crucial tools in transforming the existing car-driver matrix and we would not argue
against such policies.
However, such policies still fail to address the continuing production of a system of
automobility — of cars, roads and drivers — which continues to dominate both the built
environment of cities and their hinterlands and the scapes of time-space through which
people organize and literally mobilize their lives. Until these fundamental social aspects
of mobility are addressed, we will continue in a deadlock between the profit-making
imperatives of car manufacturers and the decaying semi-public infrastructure of
transportation starved of investment and of the necessary time-horizons and physical
space in which to expand. More encompassing approaches to changing cultures of
automobility and of cities include the creation of auto-free zones in city centres, fostering
‘access by proximity’ through denser living patterns and integrated land-use patterns, and
promoting greater coordination between both motorized and unmotorized transport
systems (see Freund, 1993, Chapter 9).
The question remains, though, how these changes will intersect with changing ICT
scapes. Some futorologists have proclaimed the ‘electronic cottage’ to be the way out of
4 The Mercedes S-Class, for example, is equipped with voice telemetry, GIS positioning, a television screen,
and card-operated ignition. Such machinic hybrids will be increasingly internet-capable given the
development of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). At the recent Detroit Motor Show both Ford and
General Motors introduced new car models that are designed as ‘portals to the net’. Ford plan to make ‘the
internet on wheels’ realistic by introducing voice-activated telematics as standard on all new models (see
Gow, 2000). Fiat is also developing a dashboard that can access the internet (The Guardian, 26 February
2000: 29).
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the traffic, as well as out of the city and its urban problems. This would be unfortunate for
the public life of cities, and for those marooned in them. Rather than the replacement of
physical travel by virtual or ‘weightless travel’ (see Urry, 2000), what may be starting to
occur is a convergence between the two. This is suggestive of another way forward out of
the impasse of the limits of ecology, time-space and inequality. Through an interlocking
of ‘smart’ transportation systems and the urban ‘info-structure’ a new mode of
automobilization could be created that would integrate private and public transport,
motorized and non-motorized transport, and information transmission and human
mobility. Crucial to this detraditionalization of urban transportation will be a redesign
of both public mass (and mini) transportation systems and of private or semi-private
vehicles. Smaller, smarter, information-rich, communication-enhanced vehicles that are
better integrated into the public transport system and public space will be indispensable in
the city of the future and to the civil societies that might flourish within them.
Telecommuting will not be the key to transforming urban life because, as Park and
others recognized, people do like to be physically mobile, to see the world, to meet others
and to be bodily proximate, and to engage in ‘locomotion’ (see Boden and Molotsch,
1994, on the compulsion to proximity). Current developments such as the huge popularity
of mobile telephones instead suggest that many people want to engage in communication
simultaneously with locomotion — to walk and talk or to drive and jive, as it were.
Mobile ICT is also increasingly central to work-practices and information-gathering in
contexts of unavoidable time-space distanciation and fragmentation. The introduction of
flexitime in order to smooth out and redistribute rush-hour peaks of transportation
demand, for example, would be enhanced if communication could occur in transit. It is
already possible to check voicemail from a mobile phone, but soon e-mail will be found
in the car or train, electronic memos will be sent, and mobile banking and electronic
shopping will be commonplace.
The crucial question is how these technological developments can be used to
redesign urban public spaces in ways that will address the negative constraints, risks and
impacts of automobility. This will require the intermodality of multiple transport and
communication flows to allow various mobile publics to switch across a range of spaces
and zones easily. Creating a smaller, lighter, fuel-efficient car is a start, but would not be
enough. Car manufacturers have already begun production of various micro-cars that are
ideal for crowded urban spaces where parking is at a premium and environmental issues
are paramount. However, such micro-cars would have to be truly integrated into a mixed
transportation system that allowed more room not only for bikes, pedestrians and public
transportation, but also for modes of travel that we have only begun to imagine. This
would require the redeployment of existing urban zoning laws to exclude or severely
delimit ‘traditional’ cars (as has already begun to occur in many cities; see Owen, 1987)
and to place lower speed limits on them (as is currently being suggested in the UK). The
aim would be not only to free up space for new kinds of intermodal flows but also time
for new socialities that would juggle the complex timing of schedules in more flexible
ways.
There would also have to be incentives to both car manufacturers and consumers to
produce a new culture of automobility (through extensions of already existing legislation,
taxation and penalties). Through such means a number of key objectives could be met:
• Reduced energy consumption and polluting emissions through design of smaller
vehicles, use of fewer private vehicles, and curtailment of traffic proliferation and
road building;
• Redirection of investment to new and better modes of public transportation, bike and
‘soft’ vehicle lanes, and more diversified multifunctional stations and public spaces;
• Reduced risks to human safety inside and outside the slower and lighter car;
• Minimizing social exclusion through better planning of networks and intermodality.
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The city and the car 753
The key to such a system could be the use of a multifunction ‘smart-card’ that would transfer
information from home to car, to bus, to train, to workplace, to web site, to shop-till, to bank
(a system already under development). Cars for cities could then be partially deprivatized by
making them available for public hire through using such a smart-card to pay fares on buses,
trains, or more flexibly routed collective mini-vans; cards for welfare recipients, students,
families with young children and the elderly could be partially subsidized.5
But all of these
vehicles would have to become more than technologies of movement — they would also
have to be hybridized with the rapidly converging technologies of the mobile telephone, the
personal entertainment system and the laptop computer.
The ‘carrot’ for car manufacturers is that small cars would no longer be at the bottom
of the profit scale; the innovation of new ICT applications would provide an endless
source of novelty, desirability and profitability. The hook for car-drivers is that the microcars
and all other forms of transport would be personalized with their own communication
links (e-mail addresses, phone numbers, world-wide-web addresses etc.) and entertainment
applications (digitally stored music, programmed radio stations etc.), but only when
initiated by inserting the smart-card. Thus, any public vehicle could instantly become a
home away from home: a link to the reflexive narratives of the private self in motion
through public time-space scapes. The streetscapes of global cities could thus be
transformed through a more mixed flow of slow-moving, semi-public micro-cars, bike
lanes, pedestrians and improved mass transport.
Public-friendly cars would allow people to travel lighter, if not weightlessly (as
‘virtual’ electronic travel is often depicted), and would restore some of the civility to
urban public space that has been destroyed by current traffic flows and by the spatial
patterns of segregation and fragmentation generated by automobility. Could such an
urban smart-car be the best way to lure twentieth-century speed-obsessed car-drivers to
give up their dependence on dinosaur cars and fossil fuels, a system that is unsustainable
on every conceivable measure and is really a very old-fashioned Fordist technology?
Urban planning that recognizes the need for a radical transformation of transport can use
existing legislation and regulation in new ways, to build truly ‘integrated’ and
‘intermodal’ public transport systems. Rather than trying to stifle mobility, however,
which has been the strategy until now, cities must draw on the power of the democratic
urge to be mobile. Civil society can itself be mobilized to demand this radical
automobilization. Overcoming the terrific constraints of automobility will require us to
recognize and harness its peculiar auto-freedom.
Conclusion
We have shown how automobility, as currently constituted, fosters a civil society of
hybridized ‘car-drivers’, accelerates a collapse of movement between the public and the
private, generates a new theme and style of political contestation, and points toward a
complex interweaving of mobility and communication within the urban infrastructure.
Car-drivers dwelling within their cars, and excluding those without cars or without the
‘license’ to drive such cars, produce the temporal and spatial geographies of cities as a
function of motorized mobility. Pedestrians and cyclists, to a significant extent, are
confined to small slivers of the urban public, while many public-transport users are
relatively disenfranchised and excluded from full citizenship. Only those moving
(however slowly) in cars, taxis and trucks are public within a system where public spaces
have been democratically seized, through notions of individual choice and personal
flexibility, and then turned into the ‘iron-cages’ that deform public roads and the people
disciplined within them.
5 On forms of car-sharing already being used in Germany and Switzerland, see Canzler (1999).
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754 Mimi Sheller and John Urry
The civil society of automobility that arises within contemporary cities involves the
transformation of public space into flows of traffic, coercing, constraining and unfolding
an awesome domination which analysts of the urban have barely begun to see even as
they sit staring through their own car windscreens. Smith writes of the analogy with
modern scientific thought: ‘We get into this mode very much as the driver of a car gets
into the driving seat. It is true that we do the driving and can choose the direction and
destination, but the way in which the car is put together, how it works, and how and where
it will travel structure our relation to the world we travel in’ (1987: 73). We have
suggested some brief ideas at the end of this article that might just save towns and cities
from this awesome Frankenstein-created monster of ‘auto’ mobility.
Mimi Sheller (m.sheller@lancaster.ac.uk) and John Urry (j.urry@lancaster.ac.uk),
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK.
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