Automobility - the centering of society and everyday life around automobiles and their spaces - is one of the most contentious aspects of contemporary urban growth debates at the local, national, and global scale. The politics of automobility is a spatial struggle over how the city should be organized and for whom. Yet there is little research on how this struggle is unfolding, and how that politics is shaping urban space. Part of this stems from the essentialization of automobility in policy and academic discourses on cities. Moving beyond essentialization, this article will explore how contentious political struggles reveal nuanced and diverse discourses and ideologies surrounding automobility and space. Focusing on what I call 'secessionist automobility'- using an automobile as an instrument of spatial secession - I examine Atlanta, Georgia's contentious automobility debate. Secessionist automobility is bound with the blunt politics of race-based secession from urban space, but also more subtle forms of spatial secession rooted in anti-urban ideologies. Implications for local, national, and global contestation of automobility will be provided. Copyright (c) 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Recently a "mobility turn" has entered critical geographic discourse. This mobility turn recognizes that mobility is at once physical movement and contains social meanings that are manifested in a politics of mobility. In this paper I contribute to this emerging line of inquiry by exploring how the politics of mobility is manifested in localized urban processes. Mobility, as with the broader localized urban process, is political and ideological, and this is particularly true with contemporary debates about automobiles and parking in cities. I explore parking as an example of the broader contestation of urban space, using a case study of San Francisco, California. There are three broad factions in San Francisco's parking debates-progressives that advocate for less parking, neoliberals that advocate that market-based pricing determine the amount of parking, and neoconservatives that advocate for more parking. Throughout the paper, I provide thoughts on the relationship between parking, space, ideology, and the broader urban process.

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Urban walkability is influenced both by built environment features and by pedestrian demographics. Research has shown that factors influencing women’s walking differ from those affecting men’s. Using a mixed-method approach, this study creates a new women-specific, GIS-based walkability index using San Francisco as a case study, and answers two questions: Which variables most influence women’s propensity to walk? And Does the leading walkability index, Walk Score, reflect women’s walkability? Focus group participants (n=17) ranked crime, homelessness and street/sidewalk cleanliness as the three most influencing factors on women’s walkability, accounting for 58% to 67% of the Women’s Walkability Index’s total score. The least walkable areas in San Francisco, according to this index, are rated as some of the most walkable neighborhoods in the city by Walk Score, despite high crime and homelessness density. Walk Score is negatively correlated with the new Women’s Walkability Index (Spearman’s rho = -0.585) and inaccurately represents women’s walkability. If the new index accurately captures the reality of women’s walking, then some of the most widely accepted conventions about what kind of areas promote walking could be inaccurate when it comes to women.