Automobility

Automobility is a conceptual framework developed to understand the personal, social, political, cultural, geographical, and technical systems shaping, and shaped by, the automobile. At its core, the automobility system is the hub of numerous interdependencies and relationships between the larger society and the automobile. The automobility literature synthesizes scholarship from a wide range of fields necessary to understand these diverse but interlocking systems, including history, geography, public policy, planning, behavior, psychology, anthropology, culture and communication, and economics and finance, among many others. Automobility contextualizes the role of the automobile as a powerful and central driver of complex and diverse processes, creating new materialities across space and time. Automobility describes a social arrangement where the automobile system dominates and transforms almost everything in its path—one’s personal sense of self, identity, and mobility; relationships between human beings; the boundaries of public and private; and the broader social, cultural, and political forces at larger scales. Systems affected by the automobililty system become malformed by it, each moment then favoring it even more in a vicious cycle, while rejecting or destroying those systems incompatible with it. Automobility explores a society dispersed across space and time, forcing its subjects into a particular mode of being, seemingly free, but now saddled by the various demands of the automobile. For those not able to participate, automobility excludes, as opportunities become even more inaccessible by anything other than an automobile. These forces of inclusion and exclusion exacerbate existing social processes of discrimination, such as gender, racial and class divisions, and segregation. Furthermore, automobility implicates a vast process of urbanization; land conversion for automobile-related uses; and related environmental impacts like resource consumption, pollution, and climate change across a range of scales from the local to the global, from immediate to long-term.