Narratives of urban mobility in Germany: on the threshold of a departure from the car-centered city?

Abstract

The mobility sector poses multiple challenges for sustainable development. Its large contribution to climate change, its impacts on the local environment through noise, pollutants, and land consumption, and its ambiguous role as both a facilitator of social participation and a potential multiplier of social inequalities reveal the necessity for structural transformation. In order to gain a better understanding of the mobility transitions to come, this article takes the capability of language to construct perceptions of reality as a starting point. Building on the mobility culture framework, it employs narrative analysis to understand not only how the current mobility sector is perceived, but also what kind of future changes are envisioned in discourses on urban mobility. It does so by comparatively analyzing German daily newspapers and public events on mobility over the course of one year to illustrate that the car-centered city may be a persistent guiding principle, but transformational urban mobility narratives are increasingly emerging in public debates. These transformational narratives could ultimately lead not only to a change of discursive structures and constructed meanings, but a transformation of urban mobility culture itself.

Aspects of social innovation promoting sustainability in the mobility sector

“…This requires the integration of the energy, transportation, and information sectors to develop data-driven, digitalised mobility systems, an idea investigated by Tuncer et al (Tuncer et al, 2022). The narrative framework used by Kallenbach (Kallenbach, 2020) to analyse mobility culture shows the contrast between established car-centred urban narratives and emerging transformative discourses, implying a potential transformation in mobility culture. Moreover, Tun et al (Tun et al, 2021) emphasize the significance of private investments in advancing sustainable mobility solutions.…”

Examining the Public Acceptability of Transportation Policy Through the Lens of Positioning Theory. A Case of the City Council Debate in Kraków, Poland

“…Similarly, Theresa Kallenbach presents her research on transformational urban mobility as employing "narrative analysis to understand not only how the current mobility sector is perceived, but also what kind of future changes are envisioned in discourses on urban mobility" (Kallenbach, 2020). Cleary discursive and interactional is the research of Van Der Meulen and Mukhtar--Landgren, who seek to deconstruct the accessibility discourse.…”

Framing the mobility transition: public communication of industry, science, media, and politics in Germany

“…Since Germany's prevailing mass media and political discourse focused on the hegemony of automobility, attention was only occasionally drawn to the necessity of transforming transport and mobility or questioning its existence at all. The future was portrayed as perpetuating the current state, coloured by technical innovations [ 8 – 10 ]. In order to investigate socio-technical transition processes in the transport sector, as accumulated in the notion of a mobility transition, it is therefore essential to analyse how different actors in the dominant regime as well as in the various niches communicate about the mobility transition.…”