Structuring Sustainable Mobility: A Critical Issue for Geography

Abstract

This article presents a geographical perspective on the concept of sustainable mobility. Meeting the challenge of sustainable mobility is a complex matter of promoting sustainable transportation technologies, influencing people’s travel behaviour and transforming society’s social and spatial structures. Arguably, a geographical perspective focuses on the latter, structural dimension of this interplay: how societal demands regarding people’s mobility are continuously shaped and reshaped, and how structuration processes can be transformed in more sustainable directions. This includes the transformation of: (i) physical structures, such as the spatial organization (e.g. the location of activities, land use and transportation systems) of cities and regions, (ii) social contacts and networks distributed in space and time and (iii) cultures of regularly held beliefs, norms and expectations regarding people’s abilities to travel fast and far for any purpose.

More or less travel: personal mobility trends in the Swedish population focusing gender and cohort

“…There is a continuous interplay between increased individual spatial reach, presenting people with new opportunities, and structural change implying successively higher levels of mobility as normal and necessary to life (Frändberg and Vilhelmson, 2010;Naess, 2006). This process can work simultaneously on several time-spatial scales, i.e.…”