shift - the way you move': reconstituting automobility

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‘Shift – the way you move’: reconstituting automobility

Robyn Dowling* and Catherine Simpson

Department of Environment and Geography, Macquarie University, New South Wales,Australia

Largely unquestioned throughout the twentieth century, the connections between cars,mobility and notions of progress are beginning to unravel. This paper traces anargument that loosens the path dependence of automobility and hints at alternatives. Itbegins with a critical engagement of the burgeoning literature on hegemonicautomobility to develop our analytical lenses of multiple automobilities and ecologiesof the car. We then provide examples of two contemporary trends that try toreconstitute automobility. The first sees the major automotive companies attempt to re-position the car through advertising as an environmentally friendly mobility option.The second one, carsharing, poses more substantial challenges to hegemonicautomobility through its re-imag(in)ing of the car. These examples, we conclude,highlight the complex possibilities of technology and culture coalescing to shape futureforms of automobility.

1. Introduction

[T]he car cum driving of the 21st century is not the same knot of steely practices that it was inthe 20th century. (Thrift 2004, 48)

Throughout the twentieth century, the centrality of the car to mobility and notions ofprogress and human flourishing was largely unquestioned. As the broadcast documentaryWide Open Road (ABC TV, October 2011) demonstrates, Australia has often beenregarded as a nation of proud car owners, where the car is championed because of itsconnections to freedom, masculinity and national identity (Davison 2004). Discursively atleast, cars are still intimately connected to economic prosperity. When US PresidentObama bailed out the ‘big three’ car companies during the global financial crisis in 2009,the underlying rationale intertwining the success of the car industry with the progress ofthe nation echoed the former CEO of General Motors, Charles ‘Engine’ Wilson’s famous1952 quote; ‘what’s good for the country is good for GM and vice versa’ (Hirsch 2008).Facing a potential downturn during the same economic crisis, Prime Minister Kevin Ruddgranted a 6.2 billion dollar ‘green car’ package to Australian automotive manufacturerswith the justification: ‘Some might say it’s not worth trying to have a car industry, that isnot my view, it is not the view of the Australian government and it never will be the viewof any government which I lead’ (The Australian 2008).

But the country’s long romance with the motor vehicle is beginning to come unstuck.And ‘automobilism’, or ‘the liberty promised by the car to travel where, when and as oftenas we like’ as Davison argues, ‘may be ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable’ (2004,xii). Our reliance on the motor vehicle is widely recognized as the single most significantenvironmental challenge facing our cities, not to mention the associated economic, socialand health costs. Globally, automobiles are responsible for one-fifth of energy-related CO2

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2013Vol. 27, No. 3, 421–433, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.772111

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emissions (Dauvergne cited in Goodwin 2010). They cause congestion, choking themovement of goods and people, and effectively putting a handbrake on the Australianeconomy, costing an estimated $9 billion in 2005 (National Transport Commission 2011).The health and social costs of car dependence include: inactivity and obesity; prematuredeath from car-generated air pollution; road deaths and injuries (1370 deaths and 32,500serious accidents in 2010 Australia-wide); as well as social exclusion for people whocannot participate in society without a car like the aged, people under 18, those on lowincomes or with mobility impairment (National Transport Commission 2011). In thiscontext the car no longer unproblematically symbolizes progress, freedom andindependence, but is more often regarded as an (un)necessary evil as governments startlooking at ways to combat its many ills and construct more sustainable cities.

There are other signs showing that the hold of the car in Australian life is diminishing.For much of the twenty-first century, new car sales in Australia have increased annually,peaking at more than one million new vehicles sold in 2009. However, the SydneyMorning Herald reported that in the year to May, new car sales fell by 14.5% in Australia(Sydney Morning Herald 2011). International data suggest that not only private carownership but also car use has peaked and is now in decline in many of the developedcities around the world (Kenworthy and Newman 2011). Anecdotal evidence also suggeststhat cars, especially for young people, are losing their grip on identity formation asunderpinning progress, freedom, youthfulness and absolute autonomy. As Paterson (2007)and others have argued, computers and mobile phones are somehow now ‘more genuinesymbols of mobility and in turn progress’ than the car (157). This is especially so foryoung people in the US, where the number of teenage drivers has fallen below 10million(from a peak of 12million in 1978), despite the largest teenage population ever(Schwartzkoff 2011). As a news report recently commented, under the headline ‘CarGeneration Dying Out’:

People younger than 30 are showing increasing disdain for owning combustion-engine power.Saddled with university debt and concerned about the environment, fewer are bothering to getdriver’s licenses, more are moving to transit-friendly cities and new apps are expanding thearsenal of alternatives to owning a car. (Halsey 2012).

The shifting place of the car in the Australian quotidian and cultural imaginary, assignalled in our opening remarks, is our focus in this paper. We are concerned tounderstand and represent possible fissures in the logics of automobility, and in so doinghint at possible vehicular futures not widely imagined. We begin with a criticalengagement with the burgeoning literature on hegemonic automobility to develop ouranalytical lens that allows multiple automobilities and ecologies of the car to berecognized. We then explore two contemporary phenomena that reconstitute automobilityas a means of excavating logics of different vehicular futures. The first sees the majorautomotive companies attempt to re-position the car through advertising it as anenvironmentally friendly mobility option. The second, carsharing, poses challenges tohegemonic automobility through re-imag(in)ing the car as a shared commodity, ratherthan a privately owned asset, and is an example of a broader emerging phenomenon called‘collaborative consumption’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010). Throughout the paper, weemphasize that these are not especially Australian phenomena given that this massive shiftis occurring across the post-industrialized world, however, our examples emanate fromour experiences of living in Australia’s largest city, Sydney. In addition, given thatAustralia is still one of the most automobile-dependent countries globally (Newman andKenworthy 1999) and riven with its own unique driving cultures (Davison 2004; Frederick

422 R. Dowling and C. Simpson

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and Stefanoff 2011), overcoming automobile (and oil) dependence will provide its ownunique challenges and adaptive responses.

2. From automobility to ecologies of the car

Over the past decade, there has been a small, but growing, international body of researchon the contours and consequences of automobile-dominated travel (Newman andKenworthy 1999; Hagman 2003; Urry 2004, 2008a, 2008b; Paterson 2007). The conceptof automobility as a system provides the central framework for much of this literature.According to Urry (2004, 27), automobility is a ‘self-organizing autopoietic, non-linearsystem that spreads worldwide, and includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum suppliesand many novel objects, technologies and signs’. Over the course of the twentieth century,automobility became regarded as the pre-eminent form of daily mobility, ‘dominatingeven those who do not move by cars’ (Paterson 2007, 132), and perhaps even an ‘entireculture’ that has redefined movement in the contemporary world (Urry 2008a, 133).Equally importantly, this system of automobility, as Urry describes it, has been in a ‘path-dependent state of “lock-in”’ since the 1950s, whereby reliance upon an old and inefficienttechnology (the petroleum engine) is continually produced and reproduced’ (Urry cited inSchwanen and Lucas 2011, 23). It then becomes difficult to reverse as billions of agentshave adapted to it and built their lives around ‘automobility’s strange mixture of co-ercionand flexibility’ (Urry 2008b, 266). In other words, hegemonic automobility describes astate in which the petroleum-fuelled private car rules the spaces and rhythms of everydaylife and is supported by a range of institutions and infrastructures – transport networkssuch as highways, traffic rules, planning frameworks – as well as a set of social andcultural practices (Urry 2008a, 133).

In his ‘sociologies of the future’, Urry discusses two bleak scenarios that might emergeas a result of climate change and/or oil and resource scarcity. One is a world in which civilchaos ensues, ‘a Hobbesian war of all against all’ where ‘regional warlordism’ and themost brutish, barbaric aspects of human nature come to the fore (Urry 2008b, 261); ascenario epitomized in George Miller’s Australian filmMad Max II aka The Road Warrior(1981), where different tribes with their mutant cars battle it out for scarce oil resources.The other scenario that Urry proffers is a surveillance society, an Orwellian ‘digitalpanopticon’ in which other modes of transport, far more suited to a networked society,might emerge on a large scale and, in the long run, ‘might tip the system’ into post-car onebefore it is too late. But are there other alternatives? Imagining different futures reliesupon a more complex and open conception of automobility, which we develop in thissection.

The private car is not an inevitable outcome of a capitalistic, individualistic modernsociety, but has become so through the process of naturalizing a culturally dominant ideaof automobility on drivers’ horizons. One of the main reasons automobility has been sosuccessful, as Paterson (2007) claims, is because of its ability to reproduce capitalistsociety. It provided a commodity around which a whole set of symbols, images anddiscourses could be constructed which served to effectively legitimize capitalist society(Paterson 2007, 30). In art, literature, popular music and brand advertising, for example,the car has long been associated with seductive forms of identity, and societies have beenbuilt around a hegemonic culture of car ownership and driving as the pre-eminent, modernmode of self-expression. More than 50 years of a popular Hollywood film genre – roadmovies – have been devoted to glorifying the car as total freedom, or in its more nihilisticversion, ‘freedom on the road to nowhere’ (Corrigan 1991) as is more often the case in

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 423

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Australian manifestations (Simpson 2006, 2009). And as Davison argues, also in theAustralian context, the seductive appeal and symbolism of the car should not be extractedfrom its inherent utility: ‘If cars were worshipped . . . it was because they delivered realbenefits and enlarged their owners lives in highly valued ways . . . [and] the freedoms thatcame with the introduction of the car were real freedoms’, especially for those who lived inthe suburbs with limited access to other forms of transport (2004, xi–xii).

Paterson (2007) summarizes that ‘autonomous mobility of car driving is sociallyproduced . . . by a range of interventions that have made it possible’ (18), and, we wouldargue that, there are a number of elements, or logics, that produce and reproduceautomobility. Those of most relevance to this paper are technology and representations ofenvironmentalism. Fossils fuels and the internal combustion engine are the hegemonictechnologies of automobility, held together by economies, policies and cultures, as manyhave shown (Paterson 2007). Twentieth-century automobility was also produced throughpractices and representations in which indifference to the environmental consequences ofhuman action is hegemonic and environmentally conscious behaviour is marginalized.There is a need, however, to be able to conceptually loosen the bind of these logics.

Though complex and shifting, as we discuss below, Goodwin’s (2010) recent work ishelpful in understanding such logics of automobility and their reconstruction. Goodwinhighlights the reproduction of automobility through a chain of logic that inexorably tiescars to the flourishing of the human condition. As Goodwin describes (2010, 61), cars needgasoline, people use cars because they live mobile lives and people live mobile livesbecause mobility is central to the flourishing of the human condition. Such a chain isneither new nor profound. What is more important, argues Goodwin, is the precariousnessand inbuilt weaknesses of each link: ‘each link in this chain of logic of automobilityrepresents different challenges and opportunities . . . no step in this chain is an immutablelaw of the universe; each is a product of human actions’ (Goodwin 2010, 61). Each link inthe chain developed out of historically (and geographically) contingent circumstances andis reconstituted over time. As Thrift notes, ‘the car cum driving of the 21st century is notthe same knot of steely practices that it was in the 20th century’ (2004, 48). As a result:‘[r]ecasting automobility as the constantly shifting work of human hands suggests that thecar may not inevitably create “ever-deepening dependencies in itself”’ (62). To put itsimply, automobility is not only complex and historically variable, but also held togetherin potentially tenuous ways.

This point – that the links in the constituent chains of automobility are humanly andmore-than-humanly constructed – is critical to imagine how different forms ofautomobility might create not dependencies, but rather opportunities? There are somenascent and emerging trends that undermine and challenge not only our (up-until-now)taken-for-granted car-dependency, but also the way we think about cars. In particular,transformations in technology, environment and consumption are altering, and suggestthat automobility may be lessening its hold on urban lives (Millard-Ball and Schipper2011). Whilst conventions that support car dependence are still predominant, automobilityis, in theory and practice, riven with cultures and practices that undermine car dependence.Technologically, we are seeing the widespread adoption of hybrid electric and/or plug-inelectric vehicles (EVs), and the very recent emergence of autonomous or driverless cars.Like Freund and Martin (2009), we argue that the technology of the automobile itself is notthe problem, but rather the way it is deployed. To use their analogy, opening a can with agun is a serious misapplication of the technology of the gun. Likewise hegemonicautomobility – the single-occupant, owner-driver travelling short distances in a privatelyowned vehicle around constrained city spaces – is a serious misapplication of the


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technology of the car. Our ‘ecological approach’ necessitates an understanding of the‘whole-organism-in-its-environment’ which acknowledges the car’s interrelationshipswith other things (Rose and Robin 2004), its own agency in a Latourian sense, as well asthe car’s potential role in a less carbon-intensive future. Hence the car’s co-evolvingnature with other emergent technologies, such as the way carsharing exploits Web 2.0 andsurveillance technologies, is examined below. Instead of focusing on new fuel

Figure 1. Re-imagining cars and the environment: car advertisement on Sydney bus shelter (phototaken by Robyn Dowling).


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technologies or solutions revolving around policy and governance, our approach in thispaper underscores the networks, connections, collaborations and new knowledge aboutwhat can be, or might be, sustainable. This ecological approach also foregrounds a culturalway of thinking about cars which might lead to a richer conception of automobility thatidentifies the contestations, contradictions and multiplicities at play. This approach alsoforegrounds social transformations, which, as we show below, relate to the rise ofcollaborative consumption.

3. ‘Shift – the way you move’: reasserting hegemonic automobility?

One way in which relations of technology are being re-bundled is through the products ofmainstream car manufacturers and the advertising of their cars. Whilst gasoline wascentral to the car and notions of human mobility flourishing throughout the twentiethcentury, and the connections between cars and speed, performance, comfort andindividuality remain privileged, also evident is a shift towards promoting theenvironmental credentials of vehicles. However, as our examples mentioned belowdemonstrate, their challenges to the regime of automobility remain partial.

Recent car advertising has attempted to shift the technological and environmentalaspects of cars by emphasizing that cars produce lower emissions and less pollution. Forexample, ahead of the Australian launch of the new electric Leaf in June 2012, Nissancommissioned a conceptual art display in Sydney andMelbourne called ‘AWorld WithoutPetrol’, which featured 38 petrol bowsers re-imagined as ‘fountains, popcorn machinesand balloon blowers’ (http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/34923). Another ex-ample is a series of newspaper, internet and bus shelter advertisements for the VolkswagenGolf Bluemotion in which being green is both celebrated and maligned, something that isframed as necessary but hardly enjoyable (see bus shelter advertisement in Figure 1). Theprint advertisements begin on one page with an outrageous environmental gadget: a‘yumbrella’ that doubles as a rainwater tank; a shopping shirt that solves the problem offorgetting reusable shopping bags and a ‘magnifryer’ that saves electricity (see http://www.volkswagenaustralia.com.au/thinkblue/golf-bluemotion.html). The text suggeststhat the car is not only more practical than these inventions, but also more green: agreen product that’s fun whilst saving the environment:

Some green products can be off-puttingly impractical. That’s why Volkswagen has created acar that’s easier on the environment and fun to drive. Although it looks like a normal Gold, it’spacked with BlueMotion technology that focus on achieving efficiency and sustainability.Great news for those wanting to make less of an impact on the environment, but at the sametime, less of a fuss. (Volkswagen website, http://www.volkswagenaustralia.com.au/thinkblue/golf-bluemotion.html)

Driving then, is not only connected to human flourishing, but also to planetaryflourishing. The stated overarching philosophy of the campaign is that to beenvironmentally aware, we ‘need’ to protect our air and water, just as we ‘need’ tokeep things (and presumably ourselves) moving. Importantly, though, this is done byaccepting rather than denying the links between cars and mobility. Indeed, the Internetvideo of the campaign rewrites the history of Volkswagen as a progression from the Beetlethrough to the Combie Van, to the Blue Motion and, eventually, the electric vehicle.Practices that make less of an impact on the environment are naturalized and taken-for-granted, when Volkswagen tells us, ‘enviro-mental’ becomes ‘enviro-normal’. Whilstenvironmentalism may require too much ‘fuss’ (i.e. alterations to behaviour or challengesto hegemonic automobility), the Volkswagen appeals to convenience as well as fun.


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The Bluemotion advertisement is part of many campaigns, not just for cars, that use humourto do the ideological work of trying to separate ‘green’ from associations with ‘greenies’,‘hippies’, ‘enviro-nuts’ as part of mainstreaming green as a new ‘environ-normal’.

Similarly, a global television and Internet promotion for the Nissan Leaf, called ‘Shift– the way you move’, uses an affective register to put the environment centre stage in theirbranding. One of the Leaf’s advertisements (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼BneEVkhTutY) exploits the overused icon of climate change, the polar bear. Thebear escapes from its dwindling ice-bound natural environment and swims the ocean, thenwanders down a country road into a suburb and finally embraces a man about to jump intoa Nissan Leaf. Another uses well-known Tour de France cyclist, Lance Armstrong, toemphasize the environmental credentials of Nissan’s new electric vehicle (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ ICQnGcjisgw). Through association, one of the most sustainablemobility solutions of all, cycling, becomes connected to the electric car and is thereforepositioned as an attractive alternative to the dirty, old technology of petroleum-fuelled car,signified through the tail pipe, as it pumps out exhaust fumes. Likewise, the peakperformance of the world-class cyclist is equated with progress, innovation and thesuperior performance of this car. Armstrong tells us that:

For 20 years of cycling, even when I was ahead, I was always behind. Behind cars, behindtrucks, behind those guys. Tail pipe, after tail pipe after tail pipe . . . Until now, 100% electric,Nissan Leaf, no tail pipe, innovation for the planet, innovation for all.

And he assures us that this is not just a vehicle for the elite but will be accessible to allof us. But perhaps the most seductive advertisement of the campaign is called ‘what is thevalue of zero?’ (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼BhSqI77aLHU&NR ¼ 1&feature ¼ endscreen). Set against a montage of provocative natural and man-madeimages of ‘0’, the voice-over asks the audience to imagine a different kind of future:

What is the value of zero? Is it nothing? Imagine zero dependency on foreign oil, zeropollutants in our environment, zero depletion of the ozone, suddenly zero starts adding up,which is why we at Nissan built a car inspired by zero, because zero is worth more thannothing, zero is worth everything, zero gas and 100% electric Nissan Leaf, innovation for theplanet and innovation for all.

Advertisements such as these challenge one of the key elements of automobility – thelink between gasoline and cars. Provided they run on energy generated from renewables,electric cars do go some way towards addressing the issues of oil dependency, as well asair and noise pollution from cars idling around densely populated cities. Yet, in hailingtechnological solutions in isolation, other elements of automobility remain unchallenged.For example, EVs do not address many of the more fundamental environmental and socialconcerns associated with cars, issues that are often overlooked such as cars’ dominance ofurban space. When stationary, automobiles consume valuable land space, both public andprivate (which could be used for growing food or green space in urban areas), for garages,parking lots as well as public streets where they are parked because there are no garages.Cars also consume space in the form of roads and highways. Half of all US urban space isdevoted to car use (Urry 2004, 29).

The green car would also not reduce car use – or what Newman and Kenworthy (1999)have labelled as ‘automobile dependence’, nor alleviate traffic congestion or the road rageand road deaths and injuries that result. There is no other area in social life where such highrates of death and injury are tolerated. Nor does the green car go any way to addressing thehealth consequences of a less active society, or break down the individuality or the socialmarginalization and exclusion that Paterson talks about in the production of the automobile


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subject and spaces designed for automobiles: ‘The hyper-individualisation that the privatemotorcar produces; separation of individuals from one another driving in their own privateuniverses with no account for anyone else’ (Paterson 2007, 18). Private cars disenfranchiseother forms of mobility such as cycling and walking. Streets are designed to accommodatethe car, promoting the perception that it is unsafe to ride a bike (Pucher, Garrard, andGreaves 2010), and also relegating pedestrians to unattractive and impractical routes(Saelens and Handy 2008). The electric car also continues to consume valuable resourcesand precious metals in vehicle construction and fails to acknowledge the waste producedwhen disposed of (or the energy required to recycle car body and parts).

Even if engineers were able to produce a completely ‘green car’ (one that does notpollute at any stage of its life cycle), they are an ineffective technological fix. In mostcities, the sheer number of cars on the road provides the greatest challenge to making ourcities liveable. Rather than a technological solution solely focused on energy andemissions, behavioural and cultural change is necessary. More emphasis on decreasingautomobile dependence is required. In other words, we need to transform the way we usecars rather than just the energy they use. One emerging phenomenon that sees atransformation in car use is carsharing.

4. Carsharing

At dinners, instead of bragging about their new Prius, friends boasted how they had given uptheir cars altogether by becoming ‘Zipsters’ (members of carsharing service Zipcar).(Botsman and Rogers 2010, xiv)

Carsharing is an adaptive technology that does not do away with cars altogether, butrather transforms the notion of hegemonic automobility through the ways in which cars areused, thought about and promoted. Carsharing, not to be confused with ‘ride sharing’ or‘car pooling’, involves a registered community using cars that are parked in dedicated carbays around the city, typically the inner city. After becoming a member (much like a 6- or12-month gym membership), the cars can be booked (and extended) by the hour via theweb or phone, accessed via smart card and paid for electronically with a credit card.Unlike traditional car rental, the vehicles in carsharing are scattered through local streets ina network, within walkable distance from most local residents and businesses. Accordingto Botsman and Rogers, when the US government was bailing out the ‘big three’ carcompanies during the global financial crisis, carsharing membership increased by 52% inthe US. They quote an estimate that by 2015, 4.4million people in North America, and5.5million people in Europe, will be using carsharing services (2010, xvii). Whilstcarsharing was once the domain of small cooperatives operating in European countrieswith good public transport systems, the major automotive companies and global car rentalcompanies are now seeing the writing on the wall and exploring how they can tap into thisemerging phenomenon (e.g. Hertz). In Australia at this time, the convergence of climatechange discourse with that of the global financial crisis resulted in a focus in themainstream media on financially prudent and environmentally friendly technologies andpractices. For instance, a Channel 10 News story in May 2009 focused on the boom incarsharing in Sydney (see http://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼EPTT8vYVXro).

Carsharing was introduced in Zurich more than 60 years ago, when a cooperativecalled Sefage initiated services in 1948 (Botsman and Rogers 2010, 113) and it has beenoperating in large German cities since the 1970s. However, it has only become a viableoption for citizens in most developed cities around the world in the last 5–10 years(Shaheen, Cohen, and Chung 2009) and has a rapidly expanding presence across Asia


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(Shaheen and Cohen 2007; Shaheen and Martin 2010). If the growth in membership of100% per year of the world’s biggest carsharing company, Zipcar (which took over theUK-based Streetcar in early 2011), is any indication, soon carsharing may become a viablealternative to either owning a car or traditional car rental (Botsman and Rogers 2010, 113).In Sydney there are three carsharing organizations operating: Flexicar (http://www.flexicar.com.au/), GreenShareCar (http://www.greensharecar.com.au/) and Goget (http://www.goget.com.au/).1 Goget is the largest and oldest of these organizations in Australia,operating for nine years with over 20,000 members and 800 cars located predominantly ininner-city suburbs.2 Anecdotally, Goget claims its membership is primarily drawn fromprofessionals living in the inner-urban ring. Their motivation for joining is, first, theconvenience that carsharing provides in a congested, public transport-challenged city likeSydney; second, the financial savings derived; and third, members consider theenvironmental and social benefits axiomatic. Burkhardt and Millard-Ball’s (2006)research in the US similarly finds that carsharers are likely to be social activists, innovatorsor practical travellers.

Up until now, most of the critical literature has been devoted to the planning,environmental and business innovation aspects of carsharing (Cervero and Tsai 2004;Shaheen and Rodier 2005); however, very little has been written on its culturaldimensions. In an attempt to theorize carsharing and render more visible the ways in whichit reconstitutes automobility, we adapt Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT;Latour 2005). ANT acknowledges the agency of non-humans in the socialization processthat binds human and non-human systems together in networks at the same time and henceargues that both are shaped through those networks (Sofoulis 2009). Hence throughacknowledging the ‘more-than-human’, this analysis involves a paradigm shift that doesaway with dichotomous thinking and human-centred modes of enquiry that still tend todominate the traditional humanities and social sciences.

Our previous example suggested one way in which technology is becomingincreasingly important in car cultures, in particular through electric, hybrid and other fuel-reduction cultures. Technologies, and in particular mobile and web technologies, are alsowoven through carsharing. Carsharing is an adaptive, networked technology that has co-evolved with the web. Its success has been very much dependent on the widespread uptakeof the web, as well as on the development of mobile technologies that have made (remote,virtual) booking and extending cars possible. As Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar says:‘This was exactly what the internet was made for, an instant platform sharing excesscapacity among many people’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010, 84). An analysis of carsharingusing ANT brings into dialogue human geography and cultural studies to demonstrate notonly ‘the socially shaping effects of urban infrastructures . . . ’, but also how ‘ourtechnologies and infrastructures need to co-evolve into different configurations in order tomitigate climate change and other forms of environmental instability’ (Sofoulis 2009, 90).For instance, Botsman and Rogers (2010) argue that carsharing is one manifestation of thenew trend in ‘collaborative consumption’; whereby access, enabled through newcommunications technologies, to collaboratively used products and services without theattendant ownership, not only increases efficiency but also has positive environmentaloutcomes. By using an inclusive theoretical prism, and not, for example, proscribing thesocio-technical aspects of carsharing to another domain of enquiry, a new way ofunderstanding the car can evolve which is pluralistic and acknowledges, like Latour,different modes of existence.

The digital panopticon has been used to describe a dystopian, ‘big brother’ world ofvirtual surveillance through things such as web-enabled social networking sites, where


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personal information becomes public, or to use a transport example, the traffic surveillancesystem in London whereby the public can be constantly scrutinized through the centrallymonitored cameras that track people/vehicle’s movements on city streets. This verytransformation of mobile technologies plus the emergence of accessible Web 2.0technologies over the past decade has made carsharing a viable business model, and a greatexample, as Botsman and Rogers argue, of how we can use the internet to allocateresources where necessary (2010, 85). Through carsharing’s exploitation of an onlinebooking system, and cars that can be tracked, monitored and traced, we see the seeds of amobile ‘networked-subjectivity’ emerging, connected to a networked, accessible vehicle(Simpson 2009). Whilst for some this may be positive, for others the more problematicside to this is the car under surveillance. Global Positioning System (GPS) technologyinstalled in the car enables tracking of movement and speed. Therefore, it makes itpossible to fine a driver for every minute spent exceeding the speed limit.

Unlike the advertisements just discussed, where the environment is centre stage, thepromotional tactics of Goget and some other carsharing organizations often barelymention the environment. Instead they focus on carsharing as an axiomatic, convenient,lifestyle option, or focus on those aspects that link carsharing to futuristic, flexible andphilandering subjectivities. As Simpson has previously argued, these campaigns suggestthat owning a car is much like a monogamous relationship that engenders particularcommitments and responsibilities, whereas car sharing can just be a ‘flirtation’ or a ‘onenight stand’ and you do not have to come back if you find it a hassle (2009). InSwitzerland, where in comparison to Australia carsharing is more entrenched and anaccepted part of city living, one local Swiss organization, called Mobility (see http://www.mobility.ch/en/pub/how_it_works/this_is_mobility.htm), uses quite different tacticsto entice consumers. Mobility exploits humour to promote carsharing as an indisputable andsuperior option over other seemingly less attractive (but probably more sustainable) modesof transport through a series of 12-second TV advertisements, all using the curious Germantagline, ‘Wotsch en Chlapf?’ which translates either as, ‘Want a small car?’ and/or ‘Want aslap in the face?’ In one advertisement, called ‘Velo’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature¼endscreen&NR ¼ 1&v ¼ zq5o3IfT0es), a female cyclist weaves all over the roadon a bag-laden bicycle, desperately trying to escape a small barking Terrier whilst the malevoice-over asks ‘Wotsch en Chlapf?’ with Mobility car sharing being the obvious answer.Whilst another called ‘Date’, (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature¼player_embedded&v ¼ 7b6c7O6Y5VM) features a nervous young man arriving at his new date’shouse with a bunch of roses and a pink Vespa helmet only to be greeted with a look ofdisappointment, then utter disdain from his date who is sporting a beehive. The Australianidiomatic translation for this campaign might be something along the lines of, ‘It’s yourchoice, carsharing or a punch in the head?’ or in no uncertain terms, it’s a no-brainer.

Carsharing shifts the dominant conception of a car from being a ‘commodity’, whichpeople purchase and subsequently identify with, to a ‘service’ or network of vehicles thatare collectively used. It does this through breaking down the one-car-equals-one-person(or one family) ratio with one car instead servicing 20 or more people (Simpson 2009).Carsharing (and other associated trends such as peer-to-peer carsharing) involves acultural shift in the way people understand mobility, their own subjectivity and moreimportantly, the role of cars in our society. NETT Magazine’s feature on carsharing waspromoted on their front cover as ‘Goget’s web and mobile challenge to car owners’(Mehlman 2009). Carsharing taps into more contemporary understandings of whatmobility, flexibility and human flourishing might mean in the twenty-first century. In theirmarketing and promotion tactics, carsharing organizations often discursively exploit


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science-fiction terminology and generate a subjectivity much more dependent on networksand accessibility (Paterson 2007). In the suburbs, people park their cars in garages. Incarsharing, the vehicles are parked not in car bays or car parks, but in publicly accessible‘pods’, which promotes a futuristic, sci-fi experience. Even the phenomenologicaldimensions of swiping a smart card over the front of the windscreen to open the carengender a transformation in access to the car, instead of through a key (Simpson 2009).This is framed as a service technology of the future, whilst those stuck in car ownership arefrom the old economy and the ‘century of the car’ (Gilroy 2001).

5 Future ecologies of the car

Social networks, smart grids, and real-time technologies are also making it possible toleapfrog over out-dated modes of hyper-consumption and create innovative systems based onshared usage such as bike or carsharing. These systems provide significant environmentalbenefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of betterproducts, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and consumption. (Botsmanand Rogers 2010, xvi)

The contours of automobility in Australia are shifting, though their final destination isfar from certain. In this paper, we have begun to trace some of these shifts, consciouslyfocusing on cracks in the ‘foundations’ of automobility, especially those pertaining totechnology and the environment. We have investigated two contrasting instances ofreconstituting automobility, one of which, we suggest, has more potential in a carbon-constrained future than the other. In the case of contemporary car advertisements, we seeattempts to decouple cars and petrol, recalibrating the car as a status symbol through itsassociation with ‘green’ technologies and a mainstreamed, no fuss, environmentalconsciousness. Yet whilst invoking the benefits of alternative fuels and technologies,neither the need for mobility, nor the individualism of the car, are questioned.

Our second example – carsharing – challenges the individualism of car ownership anduse, signalling for some ‘a seismic shift from an unfettered zeal for individual getting andspending toward a re-discovery of collective good’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010, 225). Likeour car advertising examples, carsharing’s reconstitution of automobility does at timesappeal to environmental attitudes constructing carsharing as a practical compromise. Yet ituses technology differently to car advertising. Its path is dependent on technology – not ofgreater fuel efficiency or electricity rather than gasoline, but of smart cards, mobilecommunications and GPS. And, coming back to our consideration of the myriad culturallinks between cars, mobility and human flourishing, carsharing facilitates mobility in acollective rather than individual manner, suggesting that human flourishing (progress,freedom, satisfaction) can be achieved in ways tangential to, but not completely outside,hegemonic automobility. Carsharing is no panacea, and its political, socio-ecological andeconomic logics are the focus of our ongoing research. Nonetheless, returning to Urry’sdystopian imaginings, our paper suggests that a focus on the socialities and complexitiesof car use and networked technologies opens up possible paths heading not to a dystopianpost-car society, but to a post-private-car society.

Notes

1. Melbourne-based Flexicar has recently been taken over by a multinational rental car company(Hertz).

2. Catherine’s partner, Bruce Jeffreys, together with Nic Lowe, founded Newtown Car Share in2002, which is now called Goget.


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Notes on contributors

Robyn Dowling is an urban cultural geographer who has published widely on home and everydaylife in Australia, with recent attention on environmental sustainability.

Catherine Simpson recently set up Macquarie’s new Science Communication program. She is nowbased in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies.

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shift - the way you move': reconstituting automobility

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