Category: New Mobilities

Mobil­i­ty means get­ting from A to B. If a descrip­tion is always as sim­ple as pos­si­ble but no sim­pler, then this one is far too sim­ple. Mobil­i­ty is how we access the world; it shapes cities and land­scapes and sep­a­rates us from each oth­er. X (per­son, thing) gets from A to B via C with the resources of D, financed by E, uses the infra­struc­ture E, is dri­ven by F, in the style of G, some­times col­lides with H, with I brand tires — the alpha­bet is not enough to cov­er all aspects of mobil­i­ty. How we envi­sion it reflects our rela­tion­ship to the world; how we enable it cre­ates our world. Imag­in­ing new mobil­i­ties is per­haps one of the hard­est things to do. Mar­shall McLuhan, refer­ring to the inven­tion of the engine and the first auto­mo­biles, spoke of the "horse­less car­riage" — because once tech­ni­cal­ly fea­si­ble, it was long before auto­mo­biles ceased to be rem­i­nis­cent of their pre­de­ces­sors and became rec­og­niz­able as some­thing of their own. Despite new tech­nolo­gies, we always tend to serve out­dat­ed par­a­digms. With our work on new mobil­i­ties, we want to reveal these odd­i­ties and, at the same time, intro­duce new pos­si­bil­i­ties and rela­tion­ships with mobility.