Sharing Mobilities: New Perspectives for the Mobile Risk Society

Sharing Mobilities focuses on the emergence of future sustainable and collaborative mobility cultures. At the intersection of physical and virtual capacity and access to people, goods, ideas, and services, this book poses fundamental challenges and opportunities for governance, economy, planning, and identity.

The future of new collaborative forms of consumption and sharing would play a key role in the organization of everyday life and business. Sharing mobilities is more than simply sharing transport, and its diverse impacts on society and the environment demand thorough theory-led sociological research. With an extensive global range, the contributors present radical manifestations of sharing capacities throughout diverse countries, including Germany, Denmark, Japan, and Vietnam. The phenomenon of mobility is highly actual and social as well as politically relevant and urging.

This collection focuses on open questions from the perspective of the mobilities turn while presenting state-of-the-art theory-based articles with applied perspectives. An ideal read for scholars based in social science and the interdisciplinary research on mobility, transports, and sharing economy. Sociologists, geographers, economists, urban governance researchers, and research students would also find this book of interest.

Sven Kesselring is a German sociologist. He studied sociology, political science, and psychology and holds a PhD in sociology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a doctoral degree (habilitation) from Technische Universität München. Since 2015, he has had a research professorship in ‘Automotive Management: Sustainable Mobilities’ at Nürtingen-Geislingen University, Germany and from 2011–15, he was Professor in ‘Mobility, Governance and Planning’ at Aalborg University, Denmark. Since 2004, he has been the Director of the international Cosmobilities Network (www.cosmobilities.net) and from 2014–16 he was Vice President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic & Mobility (T2M).

In 2016 he became the Co-Editor of the Routledge journal Applied Mobilities (with Kevin Hannam and Malene Freudendal-Pedersen). He was a Research Fellow at Hans Böckler Foundation, Erich Becker Foundation and in 2003 he won a research grant from the German Research Association. From October 2017 to July 2018 he was Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, Germany. His research focuses on mobilities theory, social change and reflexive modernization, corporate mobilities regimes, urban sociology, auto- and multi-mobility, aeromobilities, and future research. Sven is the author of Aeromobilities (Routledge) with John Urry and Saulo Cwerner.

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen is Professor in Urban Planning and Sustainable Mobilities at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has an interdisciplinary background linking sociology, geography, urban planning, and the sociology of technology. Her research has been strongly inspired by the mobilities turn. Previously her work was primarily focused on investigating everyday life praxis’s of mobilities and in her book Mobility in Daily Life: Between Freedom and Unfreedom was focused on the importance of comprehending the interrelations between praxis, technologies, and societies. Currently her foci are on understanding the interrelation between spatial and digital mobilities and its impacts on everyday life communities, societies, and cities. For a number of years she has been co-organizing the international Cosmobilities Network linking mobilities researchers in Europe and beyond. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Editor of the Routledge journal Applied Mobilities as well as the Co-Founder and Co-Editor of the book series Networked Urban Mobilities, also at Routledge.

Dennis Zuev is a Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, CIES-ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal and Lecturer at Nürtingen-Geislingen University, Germany in the international MSc program Sustainable Mobilities. He was an Associate Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany, the Institute of Social Futures, Lancaster University, UK and the Institute for Advanced Studies for Science, Technology, and Society, Graz, Austria. He is a Co-Founder (in 2006) and former Vice President (research) of the Research Committee RC57 Visual Sociology in the International Sociological Association. In 2013–16, he was involved in the Low Carbon Innovation in China project at the Centre for Mobilities Research, UK. He is the author of the first book-length study on e-bikes Urban Mobility in Modern China: The Growth of the E-Bike (2018). His first study on shared mobility received the young youth researcher award from RC 34 at the International Sociological Association and was published in the journal Young in 2008.