Book Launch - Sharing Mobilities: Questioning Our Right to the City

Join Davide Arcidiacono (University of Catania) and Mike Duggan (King's College London) for the launch of their recently published book, Sharing Mobilities: Questioning Our Right to the City in the Collaborative Economy (Routeledge, 2019).

Location: King's Building (Room K2.40), King's College London, The Strand, London, WC2R 2LS

Event outline:

18:00 - 18:20: Davide and Mike will give a presentation outlining the key arguments in the book

18:20 - 18:45: Zeena Feldman will act as a discussant and lead a discussion on the book

18:45 - 19:00: Audience Q&A

18:45 - 20:00: Wine reception

About the book:

Sharing mobilities: questioning our right to the city in the collaborative economy provides a critical introduction to, and a historical and contemporary mapping of, the kinds of services available and the contexts in which they have emerged and operate. Grounded in a sociological analysis of sharing mobilities, the book gives an up to date evaluation and critique of the impact that these services are having with regard to everyday urban mobilities, working practices and transportation policy. Framed by the notion that urban citizens should have a right to shared forms of mobility in order to address the pressing issues of mobility (in)justice, the book brings together primary and secondary data from around the world to argue that sharing mobility has the potential to reshape shared urban mobility as a sustainable and socially just practice through the development of socially driven platforms that prioritise reciprocity and community development. Nonetheless, the book argues that this potential is unlikely to be realised if we do not move away from the pervasive models of technologically determined disruption that prioritise rapid growth and individualised forms of consumption that currently dominate the sector. Ultimately, Sharing Mobilities outlines and critiques the current state of shared mobilities around the world and offers recommendations as to how it’s potential could be realised. As such it will provide a useful introduction to the topic for academics, policy makers and technologists working in fields ranging from urban planning and transportation policy to urban sociology, mobility studies and digital geography.

About the authors:

Davide is a researcher in Economic Sociology at the University of Catania, Italy. His research focuses on the issues of digital transformation and the sharing and platform economy.

Mike is a Teaching Fellow in Digital Media and Culture. He joined the Department of Digital Humanities in September 2017, before which he was awarded a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London in 2017, which examined everyday digital mapping practices. His research is broadly interested in the digital and cultural geographies that emerge from the intersections between everyday life and digital technology. Recently he has turned his attention towards urban environments to examine the cultural geographies that emerge from the sharing economy and to examine how data-driven geo-visualisation technologies guide practices of urban planning and governance in the so-called ‘smart city’.

About the discussant:

Zeena is a Lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. Her research investigates intersections between communication, technology and everyday life. Her work is motivated by questions around how digital technologies interface with traditionally analogue concepts – for instance, work, subjectivity, romance, conflict, self-care, cooking and eating. Her work has also traced the birth and evolution of the contemporary ‘sharing economy’. Previously, she proposed the key concepts passion-based social networking sites and templatisation – two theoretical frameworks aimed at locating the power and limits of social media participation.

Zeena’s work has appeared in Information, Communication & Society; TripleC; Cultural Policy, Criticism & Management Research; OpenDemocracy, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her edited collection, Art & The Politics of Visibility (IB Tauris) was published in 2017 and she is currently working on a monograph, Belonging in a Social Networking Age. She also leads the Quitting Social Media project.