Enabling Mobilities: Reinterpreting Concepts and Tools

Abstract

Mobility is fundamental for enhancing the individual possibility to pursue one’s own aspirations. Every person needs to be mobile to reach those opportunities she has reason to value, depending on her needs, attitudes and interests. Despite different individual habits, skills and attitudes, mobility has the same enabling role for any individual, an aspect that the prevailing operational approaches to urban mobility issues nonetheless still tend to overlook. Yet a growing stream of theoretical approaches in the field of mobilities seems to be working in the direction of enhancing individuals’ ability to move and, consequently, their ability to access the opportunities they have reason to value. In transport planning and policy approaches, these reflections produced some experiments that have not yet been consolidated as ordinary practice. To address the issue, this book intends to investigate how established transport planning tools can evolve to understand and plan for ever changing contemporary mobilities. As an introduction, this chapter discusses the main conceptual and operational approaches that consider mobility to be an enabling condition. The cases presented in the book intend to introduce how to revisit established tools in light of enhancing the enabling role of mobility, as well as how emerging and experimental tools may influence urban mobility planning and policy approaches.

This chapter was co-authored by Giovanni Vecchio and Paola Pucci.