Mutable mobiles? Making space for an access-based car sharing market

Abstract

How is space made to matter in contemporary access-based markets? Drawing on the geographies of marketization and constructivist market studies, we examine how space is framed as a relevant quality to take into account in market exchange and how that qualification process itself is spatially situated. We trace a failed attempt to create an access-based car market in Stockholm, involving parallel but poorly synchronized site-specific effects of marketization across public and private realms. Our findings show how DriveNow sought to render its envisioned market spatially homogenous and the spatial interdependencies between this envisioned market and other (market and nonmarket) uses of space. We highlight the performation struggles between such alternative but overlapping spatial demarcations in specific microgeographies and show how seemingly similar spatial imaginaries can be materialized in different ways in one spatial realm.