Citation

Scott NA. Space Cult. 2013; 16(3): 397-410.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1206331213487062

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many wealthy societies have become dependent on the car for everyday transportation. This article contributes to a critical literature on automobility that examines the social, spatial, and cultural conditions that sustain car dependence. It argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can sharpen a critical and historically situated politics of mobility, particularly by mobilizing the dynamic theory of the production of space that underlies Lefebvre's various observations on the car. The article outlines the possible contours of such a politics by interrogating the heterogeneous relations of mundane mobilities and urban space. It contends that mobilities and space interact over time in uneven ways that produce distinctive and overlapping neighborhoods of mobility. After elaborating this conceptual approach, relying on critical geographic understandings of the neighborhood, and specifying how Lefebvre's theory of space helps elucidate neighborhood-mobility relations, the article moves on to address two relevant criticisms of Lefebvre's work as it pertains to the car. Finally, the article applies the notion of neighborhoods of mobility in an exploratory case study, examining how automobility has reassembled neighborhood in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Ottawa represents a critical case of this specific transition in neighborhoods of mobility, as it was conceived in a modernist blueprint and one of the most comprehensively implemented urban plans in Canadian history.

Language: en