Places of exclusion. Exploring the everyday spatiality of car users in the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | The spatial exclusivity of places primary designed for car users such as roadhouses, gas stations, drive-thrus, malls etc. is often being discussed in urban and mobility studies in the context of social injustice and inaccessibility (or disadvantaged accessibility) via other transport modes. In our paper we suggest an alternative perspective and aim to demonstrate that similar places of exclusion are produced on a much smaller scale in everyday urban environment also for car drivers. By interviewing a wide range of drivers in South Moravian Region in the Czech Republic (Central Europe) that lately either started to use automobile technologies on the daily basis or withdrew from everyday driving, we capture the perception of urban space from the position of a driver as compared to a pedestrian and public transport user. The paper presents all sorts of places described and individually experienced by our respondents as exclusive and inaccessible when driving. Moreover, and as a partial aim of this paper, we suggest, the spatial inaccessibility, does not necessarily have to evoke the negative connotations of social injustice, rather it often occurs as a natural consequence of different living spaces and possible trajectories, skills and physical condition, fears and preferences of individual car users. |
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