Presentation at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual International Conference
From 1 to 4 September 2026, the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG), one of the largest international conferences in the field of geography, took place in London. Under this year’s theme, “Geographies of inequalities: towards just places”, researchers from around the world discussed how spatial and social inequalities emerge, reinforce one another, and can be overcome.
For the Saarmila project, the conference provided an opportunity to bring current findings into a more strongly theoretical debate on mobility, power, and social inequality. In the presentation “Against the inevitability of cars: power, gender, and authoritarian mobility”, Dr Andrea Amri-Henkel explored why car-based mobility appears so self-evident and which social power relations are reflected in it.
Wanting a car or needing a car?
The presentation started from the premise that the dominance of the car cannot be explained solely by individual choices. Mobility does not take place in a vacuum. Settlement structures, infrastructures, and everyday routines that have developed over decades make the car a practical necessity for many people. As a result, what has been socially produced can, over time, come to appear self-evident or even inevitable.
At the same time, car-based mobility is about more than practical considerations. Cars can represent independence and freedom, be associated with particular ideas of status or gender, or simply be perceived as a necessary part of a functioning everyday life.
Using data from a representative nationwide survey conducted as part of the Saarmila research project, we therefore examined how different attitudes towards car-based mobility relate to broader social orientations. The findings show that attitudes towards cars do not exist independently of other social attitudes. There are systematic associations with, among other things, authoritarian and anti-feminist attitudes, an instrumental understanding of nature, and environmental awareness.
Similar patterns can also be observed in support for specific transport policy measures. Whether people support, for example, better public transport, safer cycling and school routes, traffic calming, or speed limits is not solely a matter of their personal mobility situation, but is also connected to broader social orientations.
Mobility Transition as a Societal Transformation
For mobility research, this means that the mobility transition cannot be reduced to the question of which means of transport we will use to get from A to B in the future. Transport systems are part of broader social relations. They reflect ideas of freedom and independence, as well as questions of gender, social participation, the use of public space, and our relationship with nature. Questions of how public space is distributed, who should have access to it and who should not, and who is entitled to which spaces are not discussed independently of broader relations of social power and dominance.
The many contributions and discussions in London showed how productive it can be to consider spatial structures and social inequalities together. For our work towards a socially just mobility transition, this also means questioning things that are often taken for granted: Which forms of mobility appear “normal” to us? Which infrastructures make certain behaviours necessary in the first place? And who actually has the opportunity to move around differently?
A just mobility transition therefore does not mean prescribing individual mobility choices to people. Rather, it means creating structures that provide genuine choices and thereby reduce dependence on cars where this dependence today primarily results from a lack of alternatives.
