Moving bodies: Injury, dis-ease and the social organization of space

Abstract

This article develops an application of the social organization of space to the study of public health. The authors analyse the ways in which auto-centred transport, as a sociomaterial organization of space, structures the distribution of fitness, injury and death, and the ways in which actors experience space. The specific focus of this essay is the effects of auto-centred social organizations of space-time and technology on accidents, on the risk of injury, on the availability of safe places and secure access, and on fitness. The authors argue that the structures and processes of auto-centred transport are both social and material, and are important influences on public health. These structures and processes have impacts not only on the social distribution of risk but on the subjective experience of risk as well. There is thus an identifiable social ecology of vulnerability produced by what are now societally normative and materially embedded auto-centred transport systems.