Mobile Paradigm Research Articles

Transport innovations in the cracks: reading for potential post-growth transport and mobilities with Deleuze and Guattari

ABSTRACT The post-growth literature has recently started to engage with transport and mobilities in more depth. However, despite its radical societal critique, it has done so largely in ways that either reproduce recommendations of the sustainable mobilities paradigm or apply context-independent post-growth frameworks without sustained empirical analysis. The literature has thereby largely “closed down” more open-ended explorations of what kind of transport and mobility futures are desirable and possible from a post-growth perspective. This article seeks to remedy this by highlighting the role of innovative practices in bottom-up initiatives that have been invisibilised, in expanding our imaginaries of possible post-growth transport and mobility futures. It builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, an orientation towards difference-in-itself emerging immanently, to explore such innovative and experimental practices that may be of interest for post-growth transformations. We illustrate the minor’s usefulness by studying two bottom-up initiatives, a French railway cooperative and a German “rolling supermarket”, which we examine with a view towards “difference” that allows for open-endedness and the generation of questions. This article contributes to post-growth transport and mobility scholarship by advocating for a shift in three analytical focal points, building on the minor’s generativity: moving from a-contextual recommendations to examinations of socio-spatially specific transformation (1), from a concern for the “right” modes of transport to minorities (2), and from a near-exclusive focus on the public sector to a more diverse range of economic actors and practices (3).

Down and out but undeterred: A narrative on utilizing the new mobilities paradigm for contraint-based methodological research as an international student during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic led to lockdowns in Australia that inhibited the mobility of residents across the nation. While keeping many from leaving the country under a Covid Zero policy, the lockdowns also kept numerous international students from entering the country to commence their studies. Such disruption led to major constraints for a plethora of doctoral students and their graduate research projects. The constraints brought on by pandemic disruptions especially impacted every stage of the graduate research experience for aspiring ethnographers. Such challenges ranged from the stressful navigation of Covid restricted international travel, working around the university bureaucratic runaround in an ever-changing pandemic scenario, to discovering and utilizing the new mobilities paradigm to construct a doable thesis project under strict timelines. The reflective narrative presented here is a small contribution to the greater collection of stories about international graduate researchers making the most with very little during a constraint filled period of academic history.

A dynamic and critical approach to belonging as a dimension of occupation

ABSTRACT Doing, being, becoming, and belonging have been theorized as dimensions of occupation, yet belonging has received comparatively less attention from occupational scientists. The occupation-based literature tends to equate belonging with connectedness and to take a sedentarist approach in which (transnational) mobilities are considered as a challenge for occupational engagement and belonging. This paper critically examines belonging as developed through occupations and considers its constructed, dynamic, and multifaceted nature in the context of migration. Our theoretical framework is informed by transnational approaches, the mobilities paradigm, and transculturality. We draw from a cross-national comparative ethnography including 86 interviews with recent Vietnamese migrants in Vancouver, Canada, and Paris, France, as well as returning migrants in Vietnam. Our findings address participants’ belonging with regards to 1) routines, social ties, and familiarity; 2) mobile and immobile occupations; and 3) (post-)colonial politics of belonging. This study deepens understandings of the dynamic nature of occupation and belonging as well as how both are shaped by and can reproduce power dynamics. First, we contend that occupation and belonging are inherently situated, yet are not necessarily bounded to a single location. Belonging develops through routine occupations involving familiar people, objects, and amenities, which can themselves be mobile or accessible in multiple settings. Second, we emphasize how some occupations can become benchmarks for belonging, particularly in Western immigrant-receiving countries influenced by assimilationist and (post-)colonial dynamics. Lastly, we underscore individuals’ agency in employing occupations in ways to negotiate and claim belonging to their receiving and/or sending countries.

Operationalising the 15-minute city with New Mobility services

The 15-minute city concept has gained significant traction in recent years but faces implementation challenges across diverse geographical, spatial, and political contexts. This 15-minute concept proposes that primary functions should be accessible within 15 minutes by walking, cycling, or public transport. However, it provides little guidance on the placement of these functions or the modalities of access. Additionally, it does not consider various new mobility modes and services, nor emerging technologies such as telecommuting and e-commerce. The main challenge is that the 15-minute city presents an alternative planning paradigm to the existing automobility paradigm, which has dominated global city planning over the past century. While cars can facilitate all types of trips, no other transport mode can claim the same versatility. To transition to a new mobility paradigm, we must consider unbundling these trips to allow for the rightsizing of vehicles according to trip purposes, better aligning with factors such as cost, environmental impact, and spatial constraints. This article will showcase how the New Mobility Assessment Framework has been applied to the new development of Hinna Park, outside of Stavanger, Norway. The project provides insights for the public transport authority, Kolumbus, on optimising the deployment of shared mobility services such as bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, shared cars, and car-pooling. It also provided insights to allow key discussions between Kolumbus and the property developer to plan the new districts to support sustainable modes of transport. The framework aims to operationalise the mobility principles of the 15-minute city through public-private collaboration, assessing market potential, setting ambition levels for behaviour change, and developing pricing and investment strategies.

Exploring smart workers' willingness to sacrifice and its managerial entrepreneurship implications towards a new mobility paradigm

Exploring smart workers' willingness to sacrifice and its managerial entrepreneurship implications towards a new mobility paradigm

Governance of automated mobilities transition in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper explores how political-institutional factors influence the transition towards automated vehicles (AVs) in New Zealand (NZ). Using the lens of ‘mobilities paradigm’ and analysing policy documents along with interviews data from government officials, the findings reveal the complexity of governing AVs transition due to fragmented responsibility, contested visions, and high interdependency across government agencies. The findings suggest that strong political leadership coupled with infrastructure investments and building regulators’ capability are important catalysts of change towards AVs transition in NZ. The paper concludes that the complex governance environment, and the central government action and inaction to set priority for the AVs agenda, may hinder or facilitate a smooth transition towards AVs in NZ. This paper contributes to the mobilities paradigm by enriching our understanding of the political-institutional challenges associated with the emergence of AVs and offers illuminating policy guidance to better inform decision-making around governing the future transition towards AVs.

E-bike to the future: Scalability, emission-saving, and eco-efficiency assessment of shared electric mobility hubs

In car-dominated urban areas, shared electric micro-mobility offers a sustainable alternative to decarbonise and reshape mobility paradigms. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating Dublin’s e-bike sharing system, comprising 12 stations (eHUBs). Using six months of real-world riding data, it employs data envelopment analysis to assess the eco-efficiency of each eHUB in utilising nearby infrastructure, population in the catchment area, and location to achieve desired economic, social, and environmental outputs. Results indicate an upward trajectory for the system’s eco-efficiency. The returns-to-scale analysis provides insights into the system’s scalability, suggesting that expanding the e-bike sharing system, along with infrastructural enhancements, would significantly increase ridership. Analysing decarbonisation, usage patterns, and spatial factors of eHUBs reveals the substantial potential of shared e-bikes if optimally used. The research highlights the need to reevaluate car-centric policies in favour of more inclusive and environmentally sustainable alternatives and proposes actionable policy recommendations to achieve this transformation.

Reflection of the sustainable urban mobility paradigm shift in teaching at three European universities

Over the last few decades, the urban transport planning framework has changed significantly towards sustainable mobility planning. It brings new requirements for the education of transport experts. In the paper, we discuss the future of academic education concerning these changes based on case studies of two prestigious technical faculties in Germany and Poland and a social science faculty in Czechia offering study programmes related to sustainable urban mobility planning. We applied a self-assessment questionnaire to investigate how the study programmes prepare future mobility managers and present the concept of sustainable mobility to students. Our results show that the existing study programmes do not cover all steps of sustainable urban mobility plan development. We identified a few gaps common to the technical and social science faculties, such as consensus-seeking knowledge and methods, monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches, and the development of soft skills (presentation and communication skills and stakeholder involvement techniques).

Defining migrants

Abstract In contemplating multilingualism and mobility in the 21st century, several dimensions warrant attention in the emerging field of migration linguistics. First is the move beyond migration to thinking about mobilities, in particular, the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences which views human mobility as entailing a complex assemblage of movement, social imaginaries, and experience. Second, a study of the different waves of migration in a particular society, as well as concomitant and official language policies – using Singapore as a case in point – distinguishes the layers of, on the one hand, the older, and thus established migrants, versus newer migrants, in particular, transient populations of foreign workers, and, crucially, the differential statuses that these communities and their languages hold in society – including a potential invisibility of authentic multilingualisms. Such an examination allows the development of a typology of migrants in a statal narrative. Where lines are drawn is dependent on circumstance, with the periphery positioned differentially in times of celebration versus crisis, for example, in risk communication in this pandemic era. This holds significant implications for access and appropriation, and consequent (im)mobilities, and, in the bigger picture, for the crucial intersections – including how society is responding to the role of indigenous languages for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This is particularly timely for this International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032), noted to not be addressing the interactions between language and migration, as well as the challenge of migrant intergration, recognised as a central and important driver of sustainable development.

Carsharing Worldwide: Case Studies on Carsharing Development in China, Europe, Japan, and the United States

Carsharing has received considerable attention as a sustainable mobility paradigm. Various service designs and dynamic business environments have increased the decision complexity for the carsharing business. Therefore, carsharing operators require a tool for assessing business development from holistic perspectives. This research provides a framework for outlining the requirements of the carsharing system with holistic perspectives of stakeholders being considered, as well as to derive assessment metrics for examining carsharing development. To create the framework, the system modeling tool, context diagram, was adopted to map out the interactions of externalities with the system and the requirements of the system. Eight assessment metrics: the market condition, business advantage, parking condition, electric vehicle deployment, self-serving configuration, vehicle reservation, vehicle maintenance, and pricing scheme, were eventually identified from the system modeling. From these dimensions, we review 24 carsharing cases from China, Europe, Japan, and the United States, and we summarize discrepancies among different marketplaces and some managerial insights on carsharing development, such as carsharing motivators and inhibitors, innovations in respect of different business backgrounds, approaches of increasing parking privileges, approaches of increasing electrifications, essential digital features, reservation regimes, methods of vehicle maintenances, and service pricing regimes.

Investigating energy management of hybrid vehicle technologies to promote sustainable mobility paradigms

Analysing contemporary passenger cars' energy consumption and environmental impacts is a critical research area. This is particularly relevant in urban transport's dynamic and unpredictable environment, where vehicles' fuel consumption and emissions vary considerably. An in-depth understanding of such fluctuations is essential for innovative, efficient, environmentally friendly vehicle technology. In the present research, I investigated a 1.4-litre petrol hybrid vehicle, focusing on its energy supply chain under real-world urban driving conditions. The study focuses on policies that can promote the development of sustainable mobility, improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental pollution. The results can help to optimise hybrid vehicle technologies in an environmentally conscious way and explore possible new avenues for sustainable transport solutions.

Driving as a Service: Promoting a Sustainable Transition to Automated Driving

Automated vehicles (AVs) promise to make a revolution in the mobility paradigm and to bring benefits for traffic management and environmental quality, improving, in general, the quality of life in society [...]

Home reconsidered in transnational fiction: walking as alternative/oppositional mobility and landscape claiming in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

This article is greatly inspired by the mobilities paradigm in its investigation of the transnational novel Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita by paying attention to a particular form of mobility, walking, practiced by the marginalized migrants in the landscapes. It argues that the novel reveals walking firstly as an alternative mobility for those migrants to claim for the visibility of the overlooked landscapes where they inhabit; secondly as an imposed form of mobility on the migrants, who perceive mobility injustice in the construction of the taken for granted landscape, the freeway; and thirdly as an oppositional mobility to be used by the migrants to claim landscape and home. In this way, transnational fiction would enrich the studies on walking by drawing attention to the connection between walking, marginalized migrants and landscapes, taking into consideration mobility (in)justice; it would also contribute to the exploration of various forms of oppositional mobilities; but most important of all, it would add one more layer to the discussion about mobility by connecting the exploration of mobility to that of landscape construction and finally to the envisioning of a new approach to home.

A gift from travel: The shift of gift-giving in the new mobilities paradigm

This study explores the tourism gifting practices, examining their patterns, experiences and social benefits under the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP). Through interview and observations, it investigates Chinese domestic tourists' gift-giving practices with the destination of Dali, Yunnan Province, China. We reveal that tourists casually purchase lightweight, practical, and regionally featured tourism merchandise as gifts, engaging in gift exchanges-both online and offline-during fragmented time. Tourist gift donors and recipients tend to share and consume tourism gifts briefly, with easy opportunities to reacquire the same goods online. This dissolves traditional gift-giving, as represented by the three-stage tripartite circulation model, into a fluid relational network with decentralized and diversified experiences, which brings about “network capital” for all involved actors. By introducing the NMP perspective, this study enriches and extends the research boundary of the tourism gifting. It also refines the explanatory power of the NMP in the materiality studies of tourism mobilities.

Eastern paradigm of urban mobility: the case of Erbil city, Iraq

Eastern paradigm of urban mobility: the case of Erbil city, Iraq

Understanding accessibility as lived experience: the case of walking and cycling in Porto Alegre, Brazil

ABSTRACT Brazilian cities are typically unequal and car dominated, where poorer communities mainly rely on public transport, walking and cycling. Yet, understanding the experience of using these modes within specific contexts remains limited. In this paper, we illustrate how the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ can contribute to the ‘Accessibility Turn’ in urban research. Focusing on the low-income ‘Cruzeiro-Tronco’ neighbourhood in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we incorporate considerations of equity and social inclusion by applying Jensen’s ‘Staging Mobilities’ framework to examine how mobility is ‘staged from above’ by institutions and ‘staged from below’ by residents. We used biographical interviews and mobile methods to provide in-depth accounts of the lived experience of walking and cycling, showing how residents navigate the spaces and negotiate their mobility strategies in places deemed accessible by conventional ‘objective’ metrics. By applying Jensen’s framework as part of a mixed-methods research approach, we provide a more informative and context-specific account of the accessibility landscape, constructing knowledge with participants about the meanings of accessibility to support more inclusive policies and designs.

Approximate data mapping in refresh-free DRAM for energy-efficient computing in modern mobile systems

In the context of modern mobile and embedded communication systems, the increasing storage density of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) poses significant challenges in energy management, with DRAM refresh emerging as a major factor in energy consumption. Meanwhile, approximate computing is becoming an emerging energy-efficient paradigm for mobile and embedded systems involving the error-resilient applications of media processing, recognition, and data mining. This paper proposes to leverage approximate computing to eliminate all the unnecessary refreshes in DRAM and makes it as energy-efficient as “non-volatile” devices. The devised solution is based on the observation that mapping the virtual page of certain reusing distances into the memory rows of the particular retention time intervals can greatly decrease or even completely eliminate refresh operations for approximate computing workloads. In the proposed Non-Volatile DRAM (NV-DRAM), special page allocation and data mapping strategies have been developed for different types of systems to control the Quality of Result (QoR) of the system and best exploit the allowable quality margin (precision loss) for refresh removing. A static data mapping policy and a control-theory inspired PID controller are proposed to dynamically map approximate work-set to NV-DRAM rows without infringing the QoR constraint. The results show that the error rate of our predictive strategies can be controlled under 1%, and our proposal saves more than 99.9% of refresh energy consumption.

Digital nomadism and cities: exploring the production of mobility infrastructures in Barcelona

This study explores digital nomadism (DN) from the perspective of local service providers. Anchored in the new mobilities paradigm, it aims to explore the territorial impacts of DN in Barcelona, focusing on coworking and coliving businesses. How do service providers perceive digital nomads? How do they adapt their businesses to digital nomads? Three main findings emerge. Firstly, this article pinpoints the importance of shifting the focus from identity of digital nomads to the practice of working remotely while travelling in order to have a more nuanced discussion over the local impacts of DN. Secondly, it presents six adaptation strategies of local businesses and their broader implications for the city, including the emergence of new services, the reconfiguration of the built environment, and ongoing gentrification processes. Thirdly, the study sheds light on the complex interactions between public and private sectors in adapting urban services to digital nomads, often at the expense of the local communities.

Dispelling the New Mobility Paradigm: A Cutting-edge Look at the Mobility Turn

Dispelling the New Mobility Paradigm: A Cutting-edge Look at the Mobility Turn

A flexible approach for demand-responsive public transport in rural areas

Rural mobility research has been left aside in favor of urban transportation. Rural areas? low demand, the distance among settlements, and an older population on average make conventional public transportation inefficient and costly. This paper assesses the contribution that on-demand mobility has the potential to make to rural areas. First, demand-responsive transportation is described, and the related literature is reviewed to gather existing system configurations. Next, we describe and implement a proposal and test it on a simulation basis. The results show a clear potential of the demand-responsive mobility paradigm to serve rural demand at an acceptable quality of service. Finally, the results are discussed, and the issues of adoption rate and input data scarcity are addressed.