Cities have changed their pulse, their pace, and reach, and the urban scale is an interconnected element of the global “network society” with new forms of social, cultural and economic life emerging. The increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable solutions are in sight. This paper focuses on the discussion around smart cities, with a specific focus on automation and sustainability. Discourses on automated mobility in urban spaces are in a process of creation and different stakeholders contribute in shaping the urban space and its infrastructures for automated driving in the near or distant future. In many ways, it seems that the current storylines, to a high degree, reinforce and (re)produce the “system of automobility”. Automobility is still treated as the iconic and taken-for-granted form of modern mobility. It seems that most actors from industry, planning, and politics consider it as being sustained through smart and green mobility innovations and modifications. The paper discusses the implication of these techno-policy discourses and storylines for urban planning. It presents preliminary results from ongoing research on policy promotion strategies of automated driving in the region of Munich, Germany.

Since the World Health Organization's (WHO) declared the Coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, the virus has invaded lives around the globe. The ongoing health, social and economic crisis that followed forced urban life, business, culture, community etc. into idle mode for weeks resulting from mandated immobility. What was once taken for granted as the essence of urban experience such as cultural activities, meeting friends, relatives and colleagues in public space or in professional encounters, disappeared overnight. Free movement became significantly restricted all over the world. It seemed that immobility, social and physical distancing, and isolation were the only antidote to the fast-moving virus. For many people, working from home while also schooling their children and providing social care at a distance, peak activity at maximum physical immobility became the "new normal." A culture emerged where rules and norms of mobilities previously taken for granted were re-negotiated and re-defined. Before the crisis and despite the negative ecological side effects, mobility has been positively connotated as a signifier for progress and success. Under the Corona regime mobility turned into a life-threatening risk. The theory of reflexive modernization, risk society and the mobilities paradigm are used to discuss these contemporary shifts and transformations.

The mobilities paradigm has, during the last decade, proven its usefulness in investigating how the socio-material mobilities of modern societies have transformed fundamental aspects of social interaction, communication and exchange (

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