Mobility practices in a changing climate: Understanding shifts in car ownership and use across the life course

Henrike Rau and Antonia Matern

Mobilities, 2024, vol. 19, issue 5, 869-888

Abstract: Mobility practices in everyday life are often highly routinised and resistant to change. But they can also change significantly over the life course, reflecting sudden ruptures linked to incisive life events and more gradual shifts related to changing societal and environmental conditions. Combining insights from practice-theoretical mobility studies and mobility biographies research, this paper critically examines the role of material, social and cultural elements in transforming routine mobility practices, focusing on car ownership and use across the life course. Drawing on mobility-biographical interviews with people who live in Munich (Germany) and who do not own a car, it reveals the complexity of both one-off and daily decisions that help to establish and routinise carless mobility practices, linking them to social and material conditions past and present. The paper also documents the role of environmental and climate-related arguments in the transition towards carlessness, alongside shifts in infrastructure, social and economic circumstances and mobility-related skills and meanings. It concludes with some recommendations for sustainable mobility policy that works with the dynamics of car ownership and use across the life course and that incorporates both social and material aspects underpinning people’s decision to give up their private car.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2024.2389846 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:19:y:2024:i:5:p:869-888

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2389846

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().