Assessing the generational understandings of automobile futures

Abstract

Future trajectories of automobility are one of the most prominent issues facing transport planners and academics alike. Continual advances determine the ways people move around, evolving the way in which we interact with and conceptualise the facets and scales of mobility. This in turn creates numerous visions and imaginaries for the future of automobility. While much research has been conducted on conceptualising mobility futures, there is a critical need to engage with this field through a generational lens. While extant studies are imbued with implicit generational understandings that influence the societal positioning of individuals within these trajectories, there is a lack of explicit work on combining understandings of generation and mobility futures. The perspectives around how different generations engage with the forms of automobility futures result in contested understandings of generation, family and automobile futures between everyday individuals and policy and institutional sources. Further research is required on how an intergenerational approach can influence understandings of automobile futures.
This research project aims to develop the studies of generation and automobile futures through a qualitative, social constructivist approach by exploring how understandings of generation from intergenerational groups and policy/institutional sources may influence the possible trajectories for automobility futures. The project uses group and mobile interviews to collect understandings of generational practices and automobility futures from multiple generations of individuals within the same family, subsequently contrasting these understandings with those from a collation of textual sources from various political and institutional bodies.
Data was analysed using Social Actor Theory (Van Leeuwen 2012) to frame generation within discussions of automobile futures. The findings revealed contested framings of generation, with policy and institutional textual sources framing generation through an idealised, rigid lens that was then used to justify a technocratic (Sonneberger and Graf 2021) mobility trajectory. This approach carries the risk of under/misrepresenting these generations in future mobility policy/planning. This project seeks to provide scholars and policymakers with a more nuanced understanding of how automobility futures are produced through generation, informing how generation could be better framed in future mobility policy/planning.

Date of Award	May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Lesley Murray (Supervisor) & Mary Darking (Supervisor)