Apart from its manifestation in the form of political ideology, the arts and the economic system, socialism also manifested itself in space. The socialist space did not only take shape ideologically, but was also influenced by societal limitations and possibilities. Because of this, it is important to shed light on everyday life in the Soviet Union, which did not necessarily consist of big slogans or open opposition, and which neither expressed loud support nor aversion in relation to the Soviet system. (...) In this article I take a look at the garage areas (which were usually built in clusters) as spatial elements, and the garage culture associated with them. I describe how the garage was a necessary part of the car culture in Soviet society, a part which at times comprised objects, practices and meanings of its own: in other words, a garage culture. Cars have had a major impact on cityscapes in the West, where the number of cars per capita was many times larger than in the Soviet Union, but car usage has left its mark in socialist cities as well. Getting around in a car inevitably means aneed to park it somewhere; this basic fact applied to both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, garage areas have carried more importance in socialist societies – there is more of them, and they feature a large amount of parking spaces (hundreds if not thousands). The reason for this popularity was societal limitations and possibilities: on the one hand there was an opportunity for extensive land use brought about by the state ownership of land untouched by free-market search for profitability, but on the other hand there were also obstacles, created by a deficit. By enabling the car owner to keep his vehicle going, the garage had a concrete role to play in the Soviet economic system. The garage was a place where you could repair your car, store spare parts and protect it from potential theft. The role of the garage in Soviet car culture as described in this article draws on correspondents’ replies to the Estonian National Museum’s survey nr. 198 ’Bike. Car. Radio. Television’ (1997) regarding car usage in the Soviet era, as well as interviews and conversations with garage users over the course of five years. From these replies it became clear that the car did not only mean freedom of movement, which is what it is usually associated with, but it also became clear that the car required maintenance and effort, such as hands-on repair work at the garage. This gave rise to a place-centered kind of culture – a garage culture which was formed from neighbours socialising with one another, masculine car-centered activities, and transactions taking place outside of the official economic system. (shrink)

Despite numerous ethical examinations of automated vehicles, philosophers have neglected to address how these technologies will affect vulnerable people. To account for this lacuna, researchers must analyze how driverless cars could hinder or help social justice. In addition to thinking through these aspects, scholars must also pay attention to the extensive moral dimensions of automated vehicles, including how they will affect the public, nonhumans, future generations, and culturally significant artifacts. If planners and engineers undertake this task, then they will have (...) to prioritize their efforts to avoid additional harm. The author shows how employing an approach called a “complex moral assessment” can help professionals implement these technologies into existing mobility systems in a just and moral fashion. (shrink)

This article attempts to foreground the importance of everyday life and habit to the reproduction of national identities. Taking issue with dominant linear depictions of the time of the nation, which have over-emphasized ‘official’ histories, tradition and heroic narratives, this article foregrounds the everyday rhythms through which a sense of national belonging is sustained. The article focuses upon institutionalized schedules, habitual routines, collective synchronicities and serialized time-spaces to develop an argument that quotidian, cyclical time is integral to national identity. In (...) conclusion, accounts that discuss the increasing dominance of a postmodern global time are argued to be hyperbolic, since the nation remains a powerful, if more flexible constituent of identity. (shrink)

This paper draws upon automobile semiotics and legal semiotics to argue that the car in Australian social security decisions becomes an avatar for the applicant that is then decoded into meaning streams concerning deservingness and prudence. It is suggested that this has two implications. The first it highlights the techniques where by a technical object and the ‘life’ of the applicant became bridged in law; and through that bridging life becomes ‘formatted.’ The second highlights the extent of automobile culture. The (...) car has meaning beyond the highways and parking lots. The paper shows how these meanings have become integrated into processes of biopolitical governance. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving (including freeways, motorways and autobahns) a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly (...) globalizing car system, conceptualized as a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production (Fordism) and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

Car cultures have social, material and, above all, affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobility, this article locates car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a broader physical/material relational setting that includes (...) both human bodies and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move (or fail to move). Drawing on both the phenomenology of car use and new approaches in the sociology of emotions, it is argued that everyday car cultures are implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling in which emotions and the senses play a key part – the emotional geographies of car use. Feelings for, of and within cars (‘automotive emotions’) come to be socially and culturally generated across three scales involved in the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers: embodied sensibilities and kinaesthetic performances; familial and sociable practices of ‘caring’ through car use; and regional and national car cultures that form around particular systems of automobility. By showing how people feel about and in cars, and how the feel of different car cultures generates habitual forms of automobilized life and different dispositions towards driving, it is argued that we will be in a better position to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of car consumption and the moral economies of car use. (shrink)