TiP&EnergyFuture’s #EnvironmentalFutures Seminar Series
presents
Unpacking the multiple temporalities of urban mobilities for configuring low-carbon futures
11th November @ ITU, Room 3A08, 12noon
by Dr. Katerina Psarikidou, Department of Sociology, Centre for
Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK
This paper focuses on the multiple temporal aspects that we need to take into consideration for configuring low carbon socio-environmental futures. Drawing on mobilities research conducted for the Liveable Cities Programme it aims to not only address the centrality of the usually ignored temporal dimension in the prevailing socio-technical understanding of sustainability transitions, but also unpack the multiplicity of ‘the temporal’ in configuring such futures. By exploring the both chronological and kairological, calculative and qualitative temporalities of urban mobilities, it provides an account of different dimensions of time (e.g. speed, weather, age, duration, periodicity, synchronisation, etc.) and the traditional dichotomies associated with them (e.g. fast/slow, cold/hot, new/young/old, long/short, day/night, etc.). But, it also attempts to challenge the dominant understandings of such temporal dichotomies by indicating the relative perceptions, associations and values that can be attributed to them (e.g. cycling as both slow and fast, waiting as both productive and unproductive, day as both energy-saving and energy-consuming), and that can help us situate sustainability transitions in the transcendence of such conventional understandings and experiences of time.
More on the seminar series at http://itu.dk/tip/environmental-futures/