Satisfying everyday mobility

This paper engages with theoretical insights on understanding everyday travel (from the mobility turn and theories of social practice) in an analysis of everyday mobility using data from ethnographic research. The analysis of mobile performances draws attention to how travellers incorporate valued dispersed practices into mobility. We argue that incorporating such contingent practices into travel generates affective satisfactions consistently sought across transport mode changes through the life-course. These findings complement existing abstract analyses of modal choice and are explored to draw out the implications for the attractiveness of different modes and the potential for broader transitions to lower carbon mobility

Commuting practices:new insights into modal shift from theories of social practice

The automobile commute makes an important contribution to carbon emissions but has proven stubbornly resistant to modal shift policy initiatives. In this paper we use theories of social practice to develop insights into why this stubbornness might exist, and what might help accelerate transitions to bus- and cycle-commuting. By analysing qualitative data about everyday mobility in two UK cities, we examine how the availability of the constituent elements of bus- and cycle-commuting practices is crucial for modal shift to occur, but they are often absent. We also draw attention to time-space contingencies that render recruitment to low-carbon commuting practices more or less likely, including how commuting is sequenced with other social practices and how the sites of these practices interact with the affordances, and spatial infrastructure, of bus- and cycle-commuting. These insights lead us to argue that choice and land use planning focussed policy initiatives designed to invoke modal shift need to coexist in integrated policy configurations with initiatives designed to reshape both mobility and non-mobility practices. This means addressing the structural barriers caused by the lack of availability of the elements that constitute bus- and cycle-commuting, and intervening in the timing and spatiality of a range of social practices so as to reduce the tendency for commutes to have spatial and temporal characteristics that militate against the use of bus and cycle modes

Local authority responses to climate change:a discursive and cultural analysis

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Energy-related standards and UK speculative office development

Non-domestic buildings have great potential for energy-related emission reductions in response to climate change. However, high specification office buildings in the UK demonstrate that regulation, assessment and certification (‘standards’) have not incentivised the development of lower energy office buildings as expected. Making use of the concepts of ‘qualculation’ and ‘calculative agency’, qualitative case studies of 10 speculatively developed office buildings in London, UK provide new insight into why this is the case. Interview data (n = 57) are used to illustrate how ‘market standards’ substitute for user needs, and ratchet up the provision of building services to competitively maximise marketability. The examples of energy modelling and the market’s (mis)use of British Council for Offices guidelines are used to explain how such standards perversely bolster energy-demanding levels of specification and building services, and militate against lower energy design, in the sector researched. The potentials for alternative, performance-based standards and new industry norms of quality are discussed. It is concluded that at least the London speculative office market by its very constitution and operation, including the reliance on standards, continues to create increasingly energy-demanding buildings

Time, Practices and Energy Demand:Implications for flexibility

The timing of energy demand is increasingly important given the pressure to decarbonise energy systems, accommodate more intermittent forms of renewable energy supply and reduce peak load. In the transport sector, rush hours and periods of congestion present problems of their own also related to the synchronisation and the sequencing of social practices. This document brings together DEMAND research on the social-temporal ordering of what people do and considers the implications of this work for ‘demand management’ and for efforts to develop more flexible energy system

Participatory Design as the Temporal Flow of Coalescing Participatory Lines

This paper argues that the existing literature on participatory design (PD) tends to focus on frontstage design interactions (workshops, participants, methodologies, techniques, etc.) to facilitate PD ‘here and now’—referred to as the interactional approach. In contrast, the paper proposes to contribute to an evolving literature, referred to as the transformational approach, that takes a more longitudinal line and which attends to both the frontstage and backstage within an extended temporal frame. To do this the paper draws on the work of the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, in particular, his concept of the happening of ongoing life as a bundle of flowing lines. The paper argues that PD becomes possible when ongoing participation is conceived of as a set of corresponding (or coalescing) and conditioning lines of flow—each line with its own history, attentionality, rhythms, tempos and so forth. To illustrate what this reorientation might mean for PD the paper draws on an in-depth action research study of a PD initiative that sought to develop a digital service to address loneliness and social isolation in a rural location in the UK. The paper explores how project members, individual participants, non-governmental organisation, government representatives, evaluators and funders co-responded to each other (or not) as they engaged, or became implicated, in the PD process. The paper concludes with some practical implications of what such an Ingoldian reorientation might mean for the ongoing development of PD as a transformational methodology

Changing Energy Demand:Concepts, metaphors and implications for policy

Meeting the UK’s 80% carbon reduction targets (HM Government, 2008) depends on reducing energy demand, of that there is no doubt. There is much less clarity about the types of changes this entails, or how these might come about. This cross-cutting DEMAND research insight reviews alternative methods of conceptualising and steering changes in energy demand. Each of the five approaches we describe has practical consequences – favouring, or cautioning against specific types of policy intervention. Before outlining these strategies we begin with a few words on the fundamental meaning of ‘energy demand’, that is, on what it is that is or ought to be changing

Changing mobility practices – can we learn from crises?

Die moderne Gesellschaft und ihre Mobilitätssysteme sind auf komplexe Art und Weise miteinander verwoben. Materielle Infrastrukturen, Ressourcenflüsse und Artefakte interagieren mit den sozial ausdifferenzierten Systemen des Alltagslebens. Diese können als Bündel von Alltagspraktiken verstanden werden, wobei Alltagspraktiken selbst sozialen Mustern, Normen und Erwartungen unterliegen. Praxistheorien eröffnen eine konzeptionelle Perspektive auf die Muster geteilter und sozial geformter Verpflichtungen, Routinen und Lebensweisen. Aufgrund der komplexen Verwobenheit von Materialitäten, Zeitlichkeiten und Sozialverhältnissen zählen viele qualitativ unterschiedliche Ereignisse und Situationen als Krisen, Störungen oder Notfälle, die Mobilitätspraktiken beeinflussen sowie die mit ihnen in Raum und Zeit verbundenen Praktiken. Die Klimakrise, die Covid Pandemie und Krise der Lebenshaltungskosten sind gegenwärtige Beispiele, die vor diesem Hintergrund reflektiert werden können. Anhand des Beispiels der Veränderung von Mobilitätspraktiken und anderen Praktiken aufgrund der Covid-19 Pandemie stellen wir konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu einem praxistheoretischen Verständnis von des Wandels von (Mobilitäts-)praktiken an und werfen dabei drei kritische Punkte auf. Diese betreffen das Definieren und Sprechen von Krisen, den Wandel von Mobilitätspraktiken und die politische „Steuerung“ des Wandels von Praktiken.  Modern society and its mobility systems interweave in complex ways. Material infrastructures, resource flows and devices interact with socially differentiated systems of everyday life. These are bundles of common everyday practices, themselves subject to social patterning, norms and expectations. Practice theories provide a way of thinking about this level of patterning, of shared and socially shaped obligations, routines, and ways of living. Because of this complexity of interweaving of materiality, temporality, spatiality and sociality, many qualitatively different events and situations can count as crises, as disruptions or emergencies, which affect mobility practices and the practices they connect in time and space. The climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis are contemporary examples on which we can reflect. We reflect on how mobility and other practices have changed in response to Covid as the basis of a conceptual reflection on practice theory’s understanding of mobility practices and practice change, and conclude with three critical perspectives. These are on defining and talking in terms of crises; on change in mobility practices; and on policy ‘steering’ of practice change. (peer reviewed