Imagining post-fossil tourism mobilities with Norwegian tourists

Abstract

Sustainable mobility has become a catch-all term to describe forms, modes, policies and practices of mobility that are thought to have a lower environmental footprint and/or fewer social exclusions than the contemporary mobility system which is reliant on fossil fuels and private ownership. As a result, its main application has been in urban mobility contexts, often focused on everyday commuting journeys. In this paper we re-visit sustainable mobilities through the lens of tourism sustainabilities, a concept that opens space for multiple, contingent operations of sustainability for tourism mobilities. We draw empirically from qualitative interviews with 26 residents from Oslo (Norway) undertaken in 2020 to answer two questions: (1) How are tourism sustainabilities imagined and enacted by residents of the Oslo region, Norway, and (2) What (re)imaginings of tourism sustainabilities are made possible? Attentive to the sociomaterial nature of tourism sustainabilities and drawing from critical sustainabilities scholarship, we present three enactments of tourism mobilities: Forming sustainabilities; Fragmenting sustainabilities; Fracturing sustainabilities, and three (re)imaginings: Stripped Back; Having a Go; Stuck in the Mud. The social geographies of tourism mobilities are made visible, and these open space for an expansive reading of sustainable mobilities which may enable deeper understandings of the possibilities for alternative forms of mobility in a climate constrained world.