Mobility Divides: ‘Staging’ and designing differential mobilities

Contemporary mobilities are cultural and social manifestations, and the mobile practices in the everyday life of billions of humans are re-configuring senses of place, self, other and relationships to the built environment. The way ‘mobile situations’ are staged in designed and built environments are increasingly becoming ‘second nature’ but also expressions of power, exclusion, and difference. In this talk I will be applying a perspective of ‘mobile situationism’ illustrating how mobile everyday life practices are staged ‘from above’ in planning and policy frameworks, design codes and architectural designs, but also how the situated and embodied mobile everyday life practices are staged ‘from below’ in concrete acts of choice concerning modes of mobilities, ways of moving and interacting. The ‘staging mobilites’ framework opens up to an understanding of the meaning of ‘mobilities design’ in the everyday life and cast light on how design and ‘materialities of mobilites’ are creating differential mobilities across societies, social networks, and communities of practices.