Despite many efforts to move beyond automobile dependence, why does the prevailing system of automobility remain so pervasive worldwide, shaping built environments, cities, and mobilities?

The dominant system of automobility is not just a means of transportation that has shaped the built environment, but is an interlocking system of energy use, social practices, racial regimes, business networks, cultural meanings, and military domination. It is also a system that supports ongoing injustices across local and global mobilities, driving operational landscapes of energy production and consumption, land use and urban design, that create both inequities in accessibility and ongoing processes of disablement.

This talk will analyze recent geopolitical tensions over energy through the concept of “Carbon Empire”. It will show how global resource control by kinetic elites has been pitted against the pressing urgency of sustainable mobility transitions that are challenging the dominance of fossil fuel. Efforts to overthrow this profitable Carbon Empire must involve not just changing everyday mobility behavior and designing more accessible low-carbon transport infrastructure, but also deeper transformations of extended urban systems, infrastructural spaces, and extractive zones at a planetary scale. My thesis is that this will require a theory and praxis of mobile commoning across multiple scales. By coming together to assert the rights of the mobile commons – including the right to stay in place – we can wrest back more sustainable, ethical, accessible, and equitable mobilities for all.