THE CITY AND THE CAR. IN: DELIVERING SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT. A SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

The chapter argues that automobiles, as currently constituted, foster a civil society of hybridized 'car drivers', accelerate a collapse of movement between the public and the private, generate a new theme and style of political contestation, and point toward a complex, interweaving of modality and communication within the urban infrastructure. Pedestrians and cyclists are seen as confined to small slivers of the urban public, and many public transit users are relatively disenfranchised and excluded from full citizenship. The civil society of automobility is seen as involving the transformation of public space into flows of traffic, coercing, constraining and unfolding a domination which urban analysts have barely begun to see. Some brief ideas are suggested in this chapter that might save towns and cities from the awesome monster of 'auto' mobility.