ABSTRACT
Thinking about the “new urban mobilities,”— especially the interplay between the emerging technologies of transportation and communication within the larger contexts of globalism, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic dislocationsdemands a new level of understanding, both practical and theoretical, of how urban communities change over time and how those changes in turn contribute to on-going personal, political, and cultural transformations. Keeping those simple human concerns primary in discussions of mobility infrastructure and policy is what Lewis Mumford meant when he insisted to an audience of urban planners in 1937 that the principal responsibility of their profession must always be to nurture, not frustrate, what he called the “urban drama”—the day-to-day life of individuals, families,
and communities as they go about the diurnal tasks of living, working, raising families, and governing themselves in cities.
