Community Carsharing and the Social–Ecological Mobility Transition

Luca Nitschke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000614213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

This book investigates how practices of community carsharing are influencing everyday mobility. It argues that hegemonic practices of automobility are reconfigured through practices of community carsharing, thereby challenging capitalist mobilities in the realm of everyday life.

Through a detailed empirical study of practices of community carsharing and its practitioners in the rural regions around Munich, Germany, this book reveals how the practice contributes to the emergence of alternative automobile practices, meanings, identities and subjectivities. It also explores the embedding of automobility into its ecological context, the connection of function and community in practices of community carsharing and the changing of ownership relations through a process of commoning mobility. This reconfiguration of everyday practices of automobility takes place through processes of everyday resistance, re-embedding and commoning, and ultimately results in the emergence of an alternative mobility culture, thereby facilitating the dissemination of an alternative common sense of community carsharing.

This book on community carsharing provides a valuable insight into carsharing in rural settings and exemplifies how carsharing specifically, and sharing mobilities in general, can contribute to a social–ecological mobility transition. The work will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners working in mobility studies and mobilities.

1 Capitalist mobilities, sharing mobilities and the need for reconfiguring the everyday

DOI: 10.4324/9781003264279-1

Car cleaning parties and fighting a virus

Rosa hands me a sponge and the spray for the removal of stains on fabrics: “Just look at the seats and if you see a stain, put some spray on it, leave it for a short while and then scrub it off with the sponge.” There are three cars with five seats each, so I quickly start my work. Everybody else attending the car-cleaning party also is eagerly working on their task. Robert and his two kids are cleaning the windows, windshields and door seals. Rosa is removing coarse soiling from the wheel rims and the outer body. Rudi and Kurt are taking turns in vacuuming the interior space and everybody has an eye on the waiting line for the car wash, which is much busier than I expected for a sunny Saturday afternoon in early November. While cleaning cars can be perceived as a dull task, doing it together in a group and perhaps also because of the curious looks from the other people at the gas station, cleaning the cars feels like more than just a duty and attains meaning and even a tinge of fun.

While cleaning, the attendees also use the time to inspect the condition of the cars. We find a few scratches that are new and discuss where they might be coming from: a door unintentionally slammed into some obstacle or carelessly loading or unloading something into or from the trunk. Nobody seems to be impressed by these marks and there is no search for somebody who can be held responsible. I personally wouldn’t be upset about scratches on a car, but I am wondering a bit about the fact that the others aren’t either. Most people who care about cleaning their car thoroughly would also tend to care about the scratches, one would assume. But as nobody seems to really care, I also decide not to and continue with cleaning the seats. After finding some more scratches Rudi provides an explanation for why they don’t care about the scratches: “It is only an object of utility. This doesn’t matter.” A car is supposed to be used to transport things and that necessarily leads to signs of usage, nothing to worry or be upset about. Robert nods in agreement and adds: “As long as the car is safe to drive, these beauty errors don’t bother anybody. I certainly don’t mind and if somebody does they should get their own car.”

That Saturday, after cleaning three of the eight cars, the small group meets up in a café for some warm drinks, cake and ice cream – “the social and more important part of the cleaning party” according to Rosa and the participants. At earlier parties the members managed to clean more than just three cars and due to the low participation Rosa is organizing an additional appointment for the following weekend for the shirkers in order to clean the other five cars before winter. When I asked Robert if there are always only four people at these parties, he said: “It depends. Sometimes there are more, sometimes nobody shows up. But it is a pity that there aren’t more people. Well, I think they just don’t get the social aspect of the carsharing association.”

From this short vignette one might wonder about several things: How did these people come together to clean cars? Who thinks car cleaning parties are fun and have meaning? Can a car, from the perspective of a declared car country such as Germany, really only be an object of utility? Who doesn’t care about beauty errors and why? Who owns these cars? How is cleaning cars together connected to the broader issues of sustainable mobility? The intention behind this book is to provide some tentative answers to these questions.

The people at the car-cleaning party are brought together by being members of a carsharing association, which communally owns and uses cars. The car cleaning parties are a semi-regular event that Rosa, the head of the board of the Carsharing Union Markt Schwaben, organizes. The objective of these parties is to maintain the cars in addition to the mandatory cleaning by individual members after longer or dirty uses and thus help to remove the dirt that occurs through regular but normal usage. During cleaning, as described above, the members also briefly inspect the cars to see if there are scratches that might go beyond normal usage or damage that should have been declared or requires repairing.

The participation in the cleaning parties forms part of the engagement of the members in the carsharing association. Rosa makes it clear that engagement isn’t necessary to be or become a member of the association. However, she emphasizes that the success and functioning of the association depends on this voluntary engagement by its members. By organizing these events, Rosa wants to lower the barriers for engagement, and by connecting them with a social gathering she tries to make the cleaning parties more about meeting people than about cleaning a car, emphasizing the social aspect of carsharing. Certainly, the cleaning party is still perceived as a duty by many, with only four out of almost 100 members participating. However, it had an element of fun not just for me, being in an unusual research situation, but judging by their faces and conversations also for the members who attended. Surely, the coffee and cake afterwards helps. Thus, the parties not only have a functional meaning – cleaning and maintaining the cars – but also provide space and time for sociality between the association members, actively fostering a sense of community between them.

Another form of carsharing central to this book is the sharing of a car between people without any formal organizational structures, e.g. between neighbors or friends, or as in the following vignette between an extended family.

Ivan hands me back my lighter and takes a short break to think: “That is why I think your project is so interesting. The low-tech or no-tech approach you have. Because I think that is one of the big problems: this ongoing zombification of everything. When I talk of zombification I mean that the technology owns us instead of the other way round. Sharing is also about our relation to technology.” Ivan talks like somebody who is profoundly convinced of what he is saying. He is talking fast and uses concepts like ‘zombification’ as if everybody knows what it means, wherefore his arguments are concise and difficult to take apart. I met Ivan in the backyard of my flat in Munich, where his energy start-up had their offices. Over several cigarettes we talked about what we are doing and it turned out that he is sharing an electric car with his father, his sister and his brother-in-law next door in his home village close to Munich and plans to extend this sharing to the cooperative housing he is going to move to.

“I didn’t expect this to happen, but it was just so much fun and the technology just enabled it. It gave us a reason to de-motorize my father and we went from three ‘burners’ to one electric vehicle.” I am fascinated by Ivan’s ideas about his carsharing practice. Albeit it wasn’t a conscious decision from the start, he manages to incorporate the simple fact that he is sharing a car with his extended family into a whole worldview of capitalist domination: “The empire strikes back subtly. When you have to commute long distances in order to get a job that pays well enough to cover your travelling expenses, then you are caught in a radical monopoly without even knowing it.” Sharing an electric car became his attempt to free himself from that radical monopoly and the virus of automobility, wherefore he is still happy every time he passes a gas station, because “nobody likes to fuel a car.”

Needless to say not everybody who is privately sharing a car is as radical as Ivan. And not everybody includes it in or even has a theory about capitalist society or knows about Herman Knoflacher’s book Virus Car (Knoflacher 2009). Some people didn’t even have an explicit motivation to share a car, they just needed one and somebody else offered to share one. There are many aspects to sharing a car between friends, neighbors or an extended family and this book gives an insight into the different ways of private carsharing.

The first carsharing associations were born from private carsharing arrangements and in times when cars were a scarce resource so the practice of sharing a car was a mundane aspect of everyday mobility (Petersen 1995; Lovejoy and Handy 2011; Siegelbaum 2011). These social forms of mobility in the Global North eroded with the continuous expansion of the capitalist consumer society and the privately owned car. Nowadays, people are attempting to revitalize them with buzzwords like ‘sharing economy’ and ‘smart mobility’. The organisations that most commonly spring to mind when carsharing is mentioned, e.g. DriveNow, Car2Go, Flinkster or ZipCar, all developed from the idea and practice of private carsharing. Since the first ‘modern’ carsharing practices emerged out of the growing environmental movement in the late 1980s, carsharing has been mainly organized by associations, a few cooperatives and small local businesses, depending on the scale of the operations and the investors behind the effort (Franke 2001; Münzel et al. 2018; Nansubuga and Kowalkowski 2021). Formalized carsharing only recently developed into a business model for large for-profit corporations, but quickly achieved its hegemonic association through its integration into the ‘sharing economy’. The remnants of private carsharing, now called P2P-carsharing, are also almost exclusively offered through commercialized platforms.

Private carsharing taken out in a non-profit habitualized form between different households – not a car shared by the members of one household – became something rare, as did carsharing as an association. The simple question of why this is so intrigued me and is one of the reasons why I decided to investigate this form of carsharing. The literature on qualitative research on carsharing in general and especially on non-commercial forms of carsharing and carsharing in more rural contexts is almost non-existent (Franke 2001; Newman 2016; Dowling et al. 2018; Nansubuga and Kowalkowski 2021). Furthermore, the kind of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Capitalist mobilities, sharing mobilities and the need for reconfiguring the everyday
• 2. Empirical introduction: Investigating community carsharing
• 3. Reconstituting automobility: Changing the meanings of the car and (auto)mobility
• 4. Re-embedding automobility: Ecological critique and counter-hegemonic practice
• Interlude: The collective and organizational character of everyday life
• 5. “We do it together for us”: Community, collective identity and social re-embedding
• 6. Commoning mobility: Community carsharing and changing ownership
• 7. Community carsharing and the social–ecological mobility transition
• Index