Estructura de la Propuesta

In the remainder of this chapter we will go deeper into how practitioners conduct their mobility practices and which elements are necessary to be able to participate in mobility practices. According to the methodology suggested by Giddens in the context of his structuration theory, social practices can be analysed from two different angles. First, in the mode of ‘institutional analysis’, the focus is on the rules and resources as chronically reproduced features of social systems (Giddens, 1984, p. 288, 375). In this type of analysis attention for the structural properties of social systems is favoured over the skills, awareness and actions of individual actors. Visualized in Spaargaren’s social Table 5.2. Continued.

practices model this means that practices are analysed from the right side of the model (Figure 5.3). When pursuing an institutional analysis of the reproduction of social practices, the researcher is bracketing the motives, values and interests of the situated agents and their lifestyles as they are involved in the reproduction of the practices. These ‘actor-related elements and questions’ are the central focus of the second mode or modality of researching social practices: the analysis of strategic conduct. In this mode the focus is on how actors reflexively monitor what they do and draw upon rules and resources in the constitution of interaction (ibid., p. 288, 373). This means that in the latter primacy is given to the discursive and practical consciousness of human agents, their motives and their strategies within specific contexts. Similar, this means that in terms of the social practices model, practices are analysed from the left side. Though methodologically the institutionalized properties of the practices are bracketed or taken as a given in the analysis of strategic conduct, Giddens reminds us that these properties are still subject to the reproductive capacities of human agents. Vice versa, human agents remain subject to the (changes in) institutionalized properties and their influence on human agents’ ability to participate in social activities (see Appendix B).

In order to be mobile, practitioners need to acquire and put to use various modes of mobility. Part of this competence refers to the point that throughout their lives practitioners become acquainted with various systems of mobility. What is interesting about the conduct of human agents in mobility practices is that on the one hand it can be characterized by a clearly existing inertia; this refers to the difficulty that policy-makers experience in trying to influence people’s everyday mobility patterns in order to reduce congestion, to improve traffic safety, and to reduce environmental impacts. Thus, practitioners seem to be persistently resistant to change once a particular habit has been established. On the other hand, throughout their lives people continuously give shape to their mobility patterns, often in a changing infrastructural context. The development of (social and technological) innovations continuously makes new modes of mobility available to practitioners, thereby increasing the possibilities to be mobile. In a historical analysis Pooley et al. (2005) describe how in various UK cities citizens have, apparently without much difficulty, throughout their life- course integrated various modalities into their mobility patterns. So, human agent’s conduct in

Analysis of strategic conduct

Human agents Discursive & practical consciousness Institutional analysis Social- material structures Rules and resources Temporal dimension Symbolic

dimension dimensionMaterial

Spatial dimension

mobility practices is both inert due to the routinized character of daily mobility, while simultaneously human agents adopt and adapt to the new mobility options (made) available to them.

An important question is how the variation in the conduct of human agents in mobility practices can be conceptualized. Especially the material dimension, involving how people travel, is relevant because herein lie important possibilities for the reduction in the environmental impact of mobility practices. Partially this conceptualization clearly involves the ownership of various ‘mobility tools’ by human agents such as cars, bicycles and public transport passes. Beige & Axhausen (2008) have indicated that through the ownership of mobility tools people to a certain extent commit themselves to a specific type of travel behaviour. Due to the habitual nature of mobility patterns and because of the investment costs put into acquiring these mobility tools, the specific set of mobility tools available to practitioners can have a substantial influence on how people travel. In their analysis they have identified how the ownership of automobiles and various public transport passes shifts during the life course. However, while the concept of ownership of mobility tools is interesting, it does not quite grasp the complexity in the available modalities and the conduct of mobility practices. Firstly, as has been described, for instance by Jeremy Rifkin in ‘The age of access’ (2001), access to modalities is broader than the mere ownership of mobility tools. The widespread existence of car-leasing and the more recent development in the collective use of private transport modes such as car-sharing and bike-sharing, increasingly blur the boundary between mobility ownership and mobility services. Instead of ownership of mobility tools, the concept of ‘access’ better accounts for all the different modalities that human agents may put to use in order to be mobile. Secondly, as we described in Chapter 3, the conduct of practices involves more than the access to different modalities. It is also related to the knowledge and competences of human agents, and the evaluation of the different transport modalities.

A much more rich concept to understand the logic of human agent’s conduct in mobility practices has been develop by Kaufmann (see Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006; Kaufmann, 2002, 2004; Kaufmann et al., 2004). His notion of ‘motility’, which focuses on human agent’s potential to be mobile, encompasses and integrates the various elements which are important to be able to participate in practices. Motility is defined as ‘how an individual or a group takes possession of the realm of possibilities for mobility and builds on it to develop personal projects’ (Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006, p. 168). The motility or mobility potential of human agents is constructed out of three components: (1) access to different forms of mobility; (2) the competence and knowledge to recognize and make use of these forms of mobility; and (3) the cognitive appropriation which describes how human agents assess and evaluate (perceived) access and skills. In short, motility therefore is about the ways that human agents access and appropriate the capacity for mobility (Kaufmann, 2004).

In order to broaden the scope of ownership of mobility tools, Flamm & Kaufmann (2006) use the term ‘personal portfolio of access rights’ to indicate all the mobility products and services available to individuals or households. This mobility portfolio includes the privately owned automobiles and light vehicles (bicycles, scooters, etc.), and access to mobility services provided by mobility providers (through public transport passes, membership(s) of new mobility services such as car-sharing, bike-sharing, etc.). Evidently, access is also heavily influenced by the specific mobility context such as the spatial morphology (population density, number of parking spaces, etc.) and the available public transport networks within a geographical area.

Competence refers to the physical ability, the acquired skills and the organizational capacity of human agents to make use of the available modes of mobility. For example, as indicated in Chapter 4, the lack of a bicycle culture and the lack of cycling skills is an important barrier for (female) immigrants in the Netherlands to use a bicycle. Similarly, Kaufmann indicates that the act of travelling involves a complex set of cognitive and physical activities which not only involves the obvious skills of driving a vehicle, but also the skills of planning and timing a trip with a specific modality. Especially when one has the choice between different modalities and/or when one is unfamiliar with the destination of the trip the organization of a journey can be a highly complex decision process in which different modalities and uncertainties need to be weighed. In particular multi-modal trips can be difficult to organise for inexperienced multi-modal travellers, while these trips are also surrounded with uncertainty in the travel schedule in cases of delays. Especially the last ‘chain’ in a multi-modal trip is considered the weakest link as it is surrounded with high levels of uncertainty. While, the supply of new mobility services could strengthen the links in multi- modal trips, most travellers have no knowledge about, or access to, these mobility innovations. Also, research on multimodal traveller information has repeatedly revealed that most travellers do not consider their modal choice for the majority of the trips (see also Kenyon & Lyons, 2003).

The final component of motility refers to the human agent’s strategies, values and representations of the various systems of mobility. This cognitive appropriation is based on the social and individual representation and the evaluation of the extent in which various modes of mobility suit the realization of everyday activities in the domain of mobility. Because this process of appropriation involves a normative assessment of the functional and symbolic suitability of various forms of mobility, it is the most subjective component of motility. Cognitive appropriation is mainly dependent upon one question: ‘which criteria are people likely to apply when evaluating a particular means of transportation to satisfy their way of organizing daily life, taking into account their overall lifestyle?’ (Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006, p. 178). The criteria’s used to assess the functional suitability of a trip predominantly refer to aspects such as travel time, flexibility, accessibility, reliability, travel costs, comfort and the capacity to convey goods. While it is evident that some modalities are better suited to fulfil these criteria, more important is the question how certain habits in the use of modalities are constructed. Flamm & Kaufmann indicate that personal experiences are very important because of the way that skills and cognitive appropriation are constructed. Skills are to a large extent specific to a certain travel mode and these skills need to be maintained with regular conduct. The authors indicate that on the individual level the learning-process of acquiring skills and cognitive appropriation of travel modes is often a self-reinforcing process. The more a human agent becomes acquainted with a travel mode, the more skilful the agent becomes at travelling with this travel mode and the more this means of transport is appreciated. This relation is also confirmed by Harms (2008) who indicates that there is a positive relation between the use and the evaluation of a mode of transport. Nevertheless, the functional characteristics of public transport are assessed much more negatively than the car and the bicycle, even by frequent public transport users.

Why is this conceptualization of human agents on the basis of motility such a promising approach? Clearly, motility allows us to conceptualize differences between groups of human agents in the conduct of mobility practices on the basis of meaningful characteristics. One of the interesting aspects of the portfolio of access rights (and of the concept of motility in general) is that the choice for a specific (component of a) portfolio is part of an individual’s or a household

mobility strategy. Flamm & Kaufmann (2006, p. 185) see this strategy in the light of controlling uncertainty. What these authors mean is that certain access rights are not purchased because of a desire to use them immediately, but more to be able to deal with uncertain or exceptional situations. Comparable with a savings account ‘excess motility’ may be acquired only or primarily to be used in times of need. In addition, it is clear that there a major differences in the motility of human agents: ‘Depending on context, individual actors, groups and institutions differ in access, competence and appropriation, and have thus at their disposal different motility options’ (Kaufmann et al., 2004, p. 754). As mobility serves human agents to accomplish personal projects and plan, motility is an important factor in social positioning. The authors use the concept of motility therefore as much to explain and conceptualize social stratification as they do to understand spatial mobility (in that sense they focus both on the vertical and horizontal dimension of social position). Social and spatial mobility, they argue, are highly interrelated and because of it motility can be seen as a (new) form of capital, comparable to economic, cultural and social capital. Because of this argumentation motility is highly relevant for studying social in- and exclusion in relation to mobility.

Thus, motility influences human agent’s (possibilities) to participate in mobility practices. On the one hand we intend to use the notion of motility, especially the concept of portfolio of access rights, to understand which mobility portfolios are prone to more sustainable mobility practices. Can we distinguish greener or less green mobility portfolios on the basis of accessibility to sustainable mobility innovations? Are green mobility portfolios in any way related to green attitudes and lifestyles? And, when mobility innovations become part of the mobility portfolio of human agents, thereby increasing the possibilities of the green conduct in mobility practices, does this indeed lead to more sustainable mobility practices? These specific questions will be addressed in full detail in chapter seven.

On the other hand we aim to use the concept of motility to better understand whether changes in the mobility portfolio of human agents lead to greener conduct in mobility practices. While Kaufmann analyses motility from the viewpoint of individual human agents in relation to a specific geographical area with a specific supply of transport modalities, we want to add the focus on the role of mobility providers and stakeholders in shaping human agent’s motility. This addition not only makes the rather static concept of motility much more dynamic, it also provides information on how the system of provision has a structuring influence on how motility is constituted. Under the heading of mobility management increasingly stakeholders from the public and private sector (such as employers, lease companies, and governmental agencies) aim to influence the mobility choice of human agents. Often in these cases mobility innovations are ‘made’ accessible to human agents. While it is unproblematic to assume that in theory the motility of human agents may increase in such a changing context, the question is whether this newly acquired green mobility portfolio automatically leads to more sustainable mobility practices. For example, Weert Canzler, on the basis of an innovative car-sharing project, concludes that: ‘the tendency of road users to consciously weigh the various transport possibilities does not automatically grow with the range of those services’ (Canzler, 2008, p. 113). This corresponds with one of the theoretical starting- points of the CONTRAST-project, namely that merely increasing the supply of sustainable socio- technical innovations does not guarantee that sustainable consumption practices will emerge. As important is the question if and how sustainable innovations become integrated into mobility practices. This question will be addressed in the next chapter.

Chapter 6.