Category Archives: Blog

WP2 Report on the Ethnographies of Mobilities and Disruption

Posted on by

Between Spring 2012 and Summer 2014, 23 families and 36 individuals in Brighton, and 16 families and 25 individuals in Lancaster participated in a major ethnographic study of their travel and mobility patterns, with particular focus on how disruptions to their lives affected these.

The work concluded that the  concepts of ‘normality’, ‘routine’ and ‘habit’ need to be discarded as the baselines for understanding mobility. People are constantly negotiating disruptions to their everyday mobility, and this suggests there is capacity for change that needs to be unlocked. Viewing mobility practice through ‘averages’ obscures our view of this capacity.

WP2 summary report (final) March 2015

WP2 Report (final) March 2015

Flexi-mobility

Posted on by

The Disruption project has now spent time considering the results of our research over the last 3 years and begun to assess how the data we have gathered can be interpreted in order to support transport policy.  To this end we have come up with a concept we call ‘Flexi-mobility’ which, we believe, represents a new and helpful way of thinking about how people travel, and how policy could move society towards more sustainable patterns of mobility.

Flexi-mobility recognises that almost everyone gets around by a range of transport options. Some of the time. At some points in their life.

Flexi-mobility supports the development of more flexible travelers and systems which allow for more flexibility in whether and how we get about. On this website we set out a vision where it is normal for people to consider making journeys by a range of modes.

Flexi-mobility builds on existing social trends, technological change and a recognition that lock-in to our existing policies will not solve the environmental, health, economic and social challenges we face.

We have set out details of the Flexi-mobility concept in a Green Paper available for download here.

We also have a short consultation survey that we would be grateful if you could fill in if you read the Green Paper.  It is available here.

 

Green Paper and Website on ‘Flexi-Mobility’

Posted on by

The Disruption project has published a draft Green Paper today about the concept of ‘Flexi-mobility’ that has arisen out of our research findings.

Much great detail can be found at our new engagement website www.fleximobility.solutions, but in short:

Flexi-mobility is a way of thinking that recognises that almost everyone gets around by a range of transport options. Some of the time. At some points in their life.

Flexi-mobility supports the development of more flexible travelers and systems which allow for more flexibility in whether and how we get about. On this website we set out a vision where it is normal for people to consider making journeys by a range of modes.

Flexi-mobility builds on existing social trends, technological change and a recognition that lock-in to our existing policies will not solve the environmental, health, economic and social challenges we face.

Department for Transport Resilience Review – Disruption Project Comments

Posted on by

This document (Transport Resilience Review final) contains a short response to the DfT’s Resilience Review Report. The document suggests the need to expand the framing of resilience. Whilst the infrastructural recommendations are certain to reduce the duration and severity of many extreme weather events, the absence of a clear understanding of the social response to disruption means that some potential solutions will be missed and some will be mistargeted.

The Transport Resilience Review can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/transport-resilience-review-recommendations

New paper on Discourses of Mobility

Posted on by

Karolina Doughty and Lesley Murray have just had a paper published in the journal Mobilities on “Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment.  The paper is open access and can be downloaded for free from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2014.941257

Doughty, K., & Murray, L. (2014). Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment. Mobilities, 1-20.  DOI:10.1080/17450101.2014.941257

Abstract:
This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.

Commuting practices: Time, space and implications for modal shift

Posted on by

Moel Cass and James Faulconbridge made a presentation at the 2014 RGS-IGB conference in London.  The presentation looked at the ‘practice’ of commuting and suggested the need for policy to:

  • address the structural barriers caused by the lack of availability of the elements that constitute bus- and cycle-commuting, and
  • intervene in the timing and spatiality of a range of social practices to reduce the tendency for commutes to have spatial and temporal characteristics that militate against the use of bus and cycle modes.

The presentation can be downloaded here: http://www.disruptionproject.net/?attachment_id=457