Designing Mobilities

Book excerpt: How is the width of the pavement shaping the urban experience? How is the material design of transport infrastructure and mobile technology affording social interaction in everyday life spaces? How are people inhabiting these spaces with their bodies and in accordance to social and cultural norms? These are some of the questions that this book raises in order to explore how the design of mobile sites and situations affect people's everyday life. Designing Mobilities takes as its point of departure the author's book Staging Mobilities (Routledge, 2013) in which it is argued that mobility is much more than simple movements of people, goods, and information 'from A to B.' Accordingly, the ways in which people, goods, and information move shapes the way we understand our built environment, other consociates, and ourselves. The book contributes a new and critical-creative gaze on what might seem to be trivial and mundane acts of movement around in the city. Designing Mobilities is based on more than a decade of academic research by Ole B. Jensen, a professor of urban theory. The book will be a must-read for students and scholars with an interest in urban studies, urban design, architecture, urban planning, transport planning and geography, urban geography, anthropology, design studies, interaction design, and urban sociology.