New sensorial vehicles

Abstract

If there has been one paradigm that has defined urban development throughout the twentieth century, it has been the car. Yet despite evidence of the multiple downsides of car-centric mobility in cities and urban regions, fresh speculation abounds as to the role of autonomous vehicles in future urban mobility, with significant vested interest from automakers and technology companies alike. Considering what we now know about the cars relationship to the city, do we even want the car to stay or is the autonomous vehicle an example of an outdated model that will persist due to the promise of technological progress? This paper maps out the contemporary discourses and critiques around autonomous vehicle adoption specifically in the context of cities. It questions the multiple narratives and assumptions sustaining the model of the car and examines the ways by which the proliferation of autonomous vehicles might reconfigure spaces and produce new kinds of epistemologies and urban cultures. Drawing on seminal works by architects in their observations of how the car shaped not just the built environment but societal and cultural ways of life, this paper argues for reflective, embodied, ethnographic, sociological and political thinking in determining future urban modalities. In order to overcome the perceptual risks and interpretive shortcomings posed by both the autonomous vehicle technology itself and the auto and technology industries at large, it advocates for the inclusion of more diverse thinkers into the process of understanding, imagining and designing for the complexity, unpredictability and irregularity of real-world environments.