I have to put up the abstract of one of favourite papers -

In this paper I consider just how neglected the car has been in contemporary analyses of the contemporary city. Yet in many ways the car is the best example of a global technology and one whose environmental impacts are of course of awesome significance. I try to rectify this singular absence by considering some of the ways in which the people bodily inhabit the car as well as inhabiting the more general system of automobility. I show how the latter involves an exceptional combination of flexibility and coercion. I develop an analysis of different modes of dwellingness, from inhabiting the road, to inhabiting the car, to inhabiting the intelligent car. I end by considering whether some emergent technologies are developing that will finally dispense with the steel-and-petroleum car and reduce it to the dustbin of history.

Urry, J. (2000) ‘Inhabiting the car’, Between Nature conference paper: The University of Lancaster, 27 - 30 July.

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