Mobility biographies and mobility socialisation

We invite you to participate in our workshop Mobility Biographies and Mobility Socialisation which is affiliated to the Dortmund Conference for Spatial Planning 2014 to be held at the Faculty of Spatial Planning in Dortmund.

The workshop is jointly organised by the Department of Transport Planning (Dortmund University of Technology), the endowed professorship for Mobility Research (Goethe University Frankfurt) and the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich).

In the context of increasingly complex household and family structures, changing labour markets and the individualisation of lifestyles, mobility research has focused on mobility biographies in recent years. This new 'biography approach' examines mobility behaviour (including residential choice and travel behaviour) in the context of key events in the life course, such as change of job or family formation, and life phases, e.g. adolescence or the family phase. Besides people's own experiences during their life courses, the influence of the social environment is of interest. The relevance of both the life course and the social environment are acknowledged in the theoretical discussions about mobility biography and

mobility socialisation. Yet still it is challenging to capture such ideas conceptually, methodically and empirically, and to identify the most influential factors in order to contribute to planning practice.

Conference themes:

‐ Concepts on causality issues regarding key events, life phases, cohort and inter‐generational

effects in mobility behaviour

‐ Methodical approaches to the analysis of individual and household longitudinal data

‐ Empirical studies on factors influencing mobility behaviour over the life course

‐ Empirical studies on the influences of family members, peer groups, school or media on mobility behaviour

For more information see the conference website.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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