In this paper, we examine the factors that contribute to the replication or reduction of automobility amongst young adults. Semi-structured interviews conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand, with 51 ...drivers and non-drivers, aged 18–35years old, form the empirical material. The findings build upon previous research and extend understandings of how seven explanatory factors; perceptual, value and preference, social, built environment, economic, legal/policy and technological, work both to continue the current automobility paradigm, and to challenge it by adopting alternative mobilities. We use the Energy Cultures Framework as an analytical tool to explore the ways through which materialites, norms, practices, and external context can replicate or reduce participation in the hegemonic mobility paradigm. This approach offers useful insights into the interactions between what the research participants think, have and do, and how this is resulting in a reduction in automobility norms amongst some younger people. It also identifies and highlights potential opportunities to leverage upon current change trends to assist a systemic transition away from automobility towards a culture of multi-mobilities.
•We empirically examine the factors that replicate or reduce automobility.•We find evidence of an emergent mobility culture of reduced car dependence.•New conceptualisations of independence and freedom contribute to this culture.
Meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature increases to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels demands rapid reductions in global carbon dioxide ...emissions. Reducing energy demand has a central role in achieving this goal, but existing policy initiatives have been largely incremental in terms of the technological and behavioural changes they encourage. Against this background, this book develops a sociotechnical approach to the challenge of reducing energy demand and illustrates this with a number of empirical case studies from the United Kingdom. In doing so, it explores the emergence, diffusion and impact of low energy innovations, including electric vehicles and smart meters. The book has the dual aim of improving the academic understanding of sociotechnical transitions and energy demand and providing practical recommendations for public policy. Combining an impressive range of contributions from key thinkers in the field, this book will be of great interest to energy students, scholars and decision-makers.
The domains of transport and tourism exist and operate together and apart from one another. They have complex, interesting but also largely unsustainable relationships. Despite this, research into ...sustainable tourism has often focused on that which is stationary, without due consideration of the wide-ranging implications of tourism-mobilities. Conventional conceptualisations of tourism-transport are often limited to the tourist's travel to, and occasionally around, tourism destinations - neglecting the various ways that actors, objects and policies are all (made) mobile. As an introduction to the special issue on 'Innovative Approaches to Sustainable Transport, Mobilities and Tourism', this paper adopts a broad framing of innovation to encourage research in new directions. After thinking through the role of innovation in sustainable tourism-transport, the paper points to some key, inter-related themes in transport and mobilities; dominant mobility systems (auto/aero-mobilities), the sustainable mobility paradigm and mobility justice. Following this, a number of potential research themes are identified which may help to galvanise sustainable tourism-transport scholarship: first, where, why, for whom, and with what implications immobilities occur in tourism-transport; second, tourism-transport beyond anthropocentrism; third, the social embeddedness of technological innovations; and fourth, intersections of work and labour for tourism-transport. These directions - and others besides - may contribute to, and potentially accelerate, transitions towards tourism-transport sustainability.
Crises and tourism mobilities Hopkins, Debbie
Journal of sustainable tourism,
09/2021, Letnik:
29, Številka:
9
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Crisis could be the descriptor of the era in which we live. Financial, health, climate and refugee crises abound, there is significant interest in reflecting on the implications of these intersecting ...crises for different geographies, human (and non-human) communities, economic sectors and at different timescales. The articles included in the special issue reflect on different forms of crisis, and allow us to see crisis as a condition that impacts differentially, and which is predicated on an assumption of non-crisis; the time 'before', which relates to a hypothesised 'after'. This assumption of a temporal (and often spatial) distinction between crisis and non-crisis requires further attention, as it has material implications for responses. The practice of researching crisis is discussed, where the all-too-real impacts and trauma of crisis for researchers, communities, and participants are central to our scholarship. Engaging more closely with the diverse range of scholarship on disaster, unnatural hazards and development, sustainable tourism literature can move beyond what to do in the event of a crisis, and how to prepare for a crisis, to thinking more critically about dispersed impacts and implications, underlying contributors to exposure, and intersections between different types of crises, through a lens of feminist crisis management.
Climate change is a critical sustainability challenge for alpine tourism and the ski industry. Climate change adaptation is characterised as identifying and taking advantage of new business ...opportunities plus reducing physical risks. For adaptation strategies to be sustainable they should consider the environment, economy and society. While several adaptive ski industry strategies have been identified, not all can fulfil these criteria; some adaptive strategies could be perceived as unsustainable, or maladaptive. This paper provides a qualitative, perceptual study of ski industry stakeholders in Queenstown, New Zealand, addressing perceptions of climate change adaptation by the core industry, wider industry actors, local community and tourists. It answers two research questions: What are perceived as the main climate change adaptation strategies for Queenstown's ski industry? How do ski industry stakeholders perceive current adaptation strategies in terms of sustainability? It finds snowmaking central to addressing both current weather variability and medium/long-term future climate change. Ski-field operators use snowmaking to ensure the industry's economic sustainability, to extend seasons even beyond traditional norms, but with little consideration for environmental or social sustainability. It finds some local people questioning snowmaking on ethical and environmental grounds, and skier acceptance of snowmaking connected to activity preference.
Meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature increases to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels demands rapid reductions in global carbon dioxide ...emissions. Reducing energy demand has a central role in achieving this goal, but existing policy initiatives have been largely incremental in terms of the technological and behavioural changes they encourage. Against this background, this book develops a sociotechnical approach to the challenge of reducing energy demand and illustrates this with a number of empirical case studies from the United Kingdom. In doing so, it explores the emergence, diffusion and impact of low energy innovations, including electric vehicles and smart meters. The book has the dual aim of improving the academic understanding of sociotechnical transitions and energy demand and providing practical recommendations for public policy. Combining an impressive range of contributions from key thinkers in the field, this book will be of great interest to energy students, scholars and decision-makers.
Automated vehicles (AVs) have the potential to cause profound shifts across a wide range of areas of human life, including economic structures, land use, lifestyles and personal well-being. Most ...current social science on AVs is narrowly framed. Research on public attitudes has focused on whether people are likely to accept and use AVs. We contend that failing to anticipate a wider range of profound social implications may have serious negative consequences, and that social scientists from a range of disciplinary perspectives can provide invaluable insights. Our conclusions are the product of a workshop in London held in 2018 to discuss the place of social science research in relation to the development of AVs. This paper summarises a core selection of our concerns, interests, theoretical and substantive points of reference and aspirations for a constructive role in this field of research and development.
•Automated vehicles are likely to have profound and far-reaching ramifications for society•The majority of research to date centres on impacts within the transport system•The role of social science in this research has been narrowly framed•A fuller role for social science would explore a wider range of social possibilities and enable better-informed policy
Preference for private, motorised transportation grew substantially throughout the global North, during the 20th Century. Through this time rates of licencing, and car ownership, and vehicle ...kilometres travelled (VKT) rose across age groups. This had a range of environmental and social equity implications, and ignited a priority for investment in road infrastructure. The system of automobility was cemented by lock-in through the assemblage of infrastructure, technologies, policies and behaviours supporting, and frequently requiring, car based mobility. Yet recent evidence has shown that generation Y (18–35year olds) are practicing mobility in different ways to earlier generations. Stabilising and declining rates of VKT, licencing and vehicle ownership have been identified in a range of industrialised countries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this paper draws from theories of social practice and the theory of planned behaviour, as two traditions to examine what people ‘do’, focusing on the social and the individual respectively. It examines the motivations to learn to drive (LTD), and the preference for driving in New Zealand, a highly car-dependent country, empirically drawing from 51 qualitative interviews. A series of meta-themes are presented and used to explain intended and actual behaviour relating to driving practices. The empirical research finds a diversity of highly nuanced interpretations of LTD, some of which reflect individual characteristics, whilst other interpretations are best understood grounded in a wider societal reading of contemporary trends and meanings. Frequently, justification for learning to drive goes beyond the competency and capacity to drive independently. Implications for policy and planning are detailed.
Automated vehicles have become a popular topic of conversation. Initially, these conversations were limited to technology developers, innovators and engineers, as they worked to progressed the ...various technologies and systems that are required to create automated vehicles. Then, over time, these conversations extended to other communities; lawyers, insurers, planners, policymakers, social scientists, and various publics all began hearing, and talking about automated vehicles – also known as ‘driverless’, ‘self-driving’, and ‘autonomous’ vehicles. Levels of automation emerged as a way to depict gradations or categories of autonomy, with tasks divided between those for the machine and those for humans. In this paper, we critically reflect upon the dominance of levels of automation – up to seven sequential ‘steps’ - proposed by a number of industry organisations. Focusing on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Standard J3016, we signal the intended and unintended performative effects of these levels. We argue that current discourses on automated vehicles have been underpinned by a techno-centric, expert-dominated logic, and point to the benefits of more dispersed, geographically contingent, and socio-technical perspectives in re-framing the dominant discourse and allowing for more nuanced spatial and temporal understandings on future systems of (automated) mobility.
•Levels of automation have become a dominant framing in discussions of vehicle automation.•We show how this contributes to a narrow conceptualisation of automated futures.•Broadening the scope of conversation may allow alternative futures to emerge.
This paper uses empirical material gathered with young adults in New Zealand to examine a potential sustainability transition-in-practice. It draws from two frameworks; the actor-centred Energy ...Cultures Framework to explore mobility behaviours, and the multi-level perspective (MLP) to situate behaviour change within the socio-technical transitions literature. The MLP has traditionally been used to analyse historical transitions (e.g. from the horse and cart to the motor vehicle), but in this paper, it is used to explore an on-going change trend; the emergent mobilities of young adults who appear to be aspiring for different types of mobility. A series of mobility trends are described, which emerged from a programme of qualitative interviews (n = 51). The material culture, norms and practices that constitute these trends are articulated. These are then considered through the lens of the MLP. The evidence points to emergent trends of multimodality that, if leveraged upon and supported, could contribute to a systemic sustainability transition.
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