ABSTRACT
Mobility and urban transport are issues that have traditionally received relatively little attention within urban geography. Discussion of them has tended to be restricted to the sub-discipline of transport geography (Knowles et al. 2007) and has typically made only a limited impression on the literatures of urban geography, rarely appearing as substantive discussions within urban geography textbooks, for example. Transport, mobility and related issues were similarly marginalized within the broader realms of urban studies and sociology (Hawkins 1986). However, we can recognize the beginnings of a change in the treatment of these issues within the social sciences generally and urban geography specifically. This is resulting in discussions of transport and mobility seeping across the traditional disciplinary boundaries within which they have been contained and emerging as central concerns, or at least significant contemporary issues, within a number of disciplines such as urban geography and sociology. The reasons for this are numerous and include the almost universal recognition of the
impacts of emissions associated with transport on the environment and their role in processes of climate change; the acceptance that the world is approaching peak oil and that cities must adapt accordingly (Atkinson 2007a, 2007b, 2008); a widening recognition of the role of transport and mobility as dimensions of social exclusion; and the emergence of a ‘mobilities’ paradigm within the social sciences that sees mobility as more than the functional expression of the need to get from A to B but as something central to contemporary culture and senses of identity (Sheller and Urry 2000, 2006).
