ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the auto-city as a social, political, ecological, and physical construct, as a marker and producer of contemporary urban inequalities, and as an object of policy reform from which a more socially just city might be built. Automobility is a path-dependent system with roots in specific places and times, stemming from the largely improvised and contingent history of automobile and petroleum development from the late 1800's through the 1910's in Western Europe and the United States. Dennis and Urry list five specific "small changes" that they argue have the potential to, in assemblage, trigger tipping points and system change. Political, technical, and social strategies for transforming the auto-city in these ways must be diverse and multi-faceted, and must deal not only with systems of mobility. Mobility will need to be democratized, not through the de-privatization of the automobile, although that could also occur, but through the de-privatization and democratization of the city itself.
