Community-driven mobility practices: implications for designing sustainable mobility interventions

Abstract

A sustainable urban mobility transition often revolves around questions related to technical advancements, while there has been less focus on understanding the social aspects of (un)sustainable mobility behaviour. This research investigates daily mobility practices through a mobile ethnographic study in Espoo, Finland. By bringing subjective stories and experiences into the core of examining what kinds of mobility practices are formed through social relations and reciprocal interactions between close social community members (family and friends), the findings demonstrate that achieving a sustainable urban mobility transition is as much a social and practice-based challenge as it is a technical one. Different interdependencies between close community members, as identified in the study, set different kinds of spatio-temporal boundaries for subjective daily mobility practices. The paper highlights the need to understand how practices are socially formed to design effective interventions towards sustainable mobility.