Anthropocene Mobilities: Sustainable Travel and Caring for the Commons

by Peter Cox

Overview

Sustainable travel expert Peter Cox shows how individual choices about how to move from one place to another shape the ways we relate to the world and to each other, and in turn, how all this shapes us as people and ultimately affects worldwide problems. If we regularly opt for more physically active forms of transport, such as cycling or walking, we foster qualities needed for living less destructively: we foster good anthropocene citizenship, a way of being in the contemporary world that includes responsibility for the consequences of our actions and responsiveness to the changing needs we encounter. This has important knock-on effects on a global scale: it helps to combat climate change, poor global health, and widespread social inequality, all of which are significantly impacted by the everyday travel habits of ordinary people, and particularly those in the Global North.

For its emphasis on the personal impacts of individual transport decisions and their relations to global social and environmental instability, Anthropocene Mobilities is ideal for students and informed readers eager to contribute to positive change in the world. For its novel application of Hartmut Rosa's theories to the field of mobilities studies, and for its developments of the concepts of anthropocene citizenship and mobile anthropocene citizens, it is also a must-read for scholars of international development, sociology, and environmental studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350464742
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/24/2025
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Peter Cox is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Chester, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Setting the Scene
Chapter 2. Anthropocene citizenship
Chapter 3. Being-in-the-world: care and commoning
Chapter 4. Pedagogies and mobilities: Learning and perception
Chapter 5. Human scale movement: Walking, wheeling, cycling
Chapter 6. Passengers and drivers
Chapter 7. Towards Anthropocene Mobilities

Editorial Reviews

Emanating from an established scholarly track of cycling sociology, Peter Cox argues for a new global environmental and planetary ethics of individuals and institutions in a world of increasing global problems – Anthropocene citizenship – and specifies it for a different mobility behavior – Anthropocene Mobilities. This book will pilot you from a variety of pathways towards Anthropocene citizenship to the congruously necessary degrowth of motor mobilities. Thus, it will provide even adept mobility scholars with new perspectives and inspirational stepstones.” —Tadej Brezina, TU Wien Institute of Transportation

“Professor Cox brilliantly deconstructs the deeply entrenched automobile-dominated transportation planning paradigm, offering a nuanced, interdisciplinary approach to reimagining cities, systems, public spaces, and mobility. This work transcends traditional transportation research by integrating critical yet undermined and overlooked perspectives on power, social equity, and the human experience, providing a transformative framework for understanding systems - and therefore system change. By challenging existing norms in academia and practice, Cox offers a compelling and empowered vision for the future of research: as academics, as researchers studying sustainable mobility, we can no longer not take a stand.” —Meredith Glaser, professor of cycling, Ghent University, Belgium

From the Publisher