Automating the first and last mile? Reframing the ‘challenges’ of everyday mobilities

Abstract

In this article, we interrogate the utility of conceptualising the ‘first and last mile’ (FLM) as a ‘challenge’ to be addressed through automated and integrated mobility services. We critically engage with the concept through a design anthropological approach which takes two steps so as: to complicate literatures that construct the FLM as a place where automated, service-based and micro-mobility innovations will engender sustainable modal choices above individual automobility; and to demonstrate how people’s situated mobility competencies and values, shape social and material realities and future imaginaries of everyday mobilities. To do so, we draw on ethnographic research into everyday mobility practices, meanings and imaginaries in a suburban neighbourhood in Sweden. We show how locally situated mobilities both challenge the spatial and temporal underpinnings of the first and last mile concept, and resist universalist technology-driven automation narratives. We argue that instead of attempting to bridge gaps in seemingly linear journeys through automated systems, there is a need to account for the practices, tensions and desires embedded in everyday mobilities.