Technology and creative imagination are currently pushing the limits for innovative ideas to reality – in search of realizing the core objective for human existence by creating an efficient and safe transportation model for securing the environment and future of humanity.

Mobility is and remains the absolute gift of creation. And since creation, humanity has been mobile from point A to B and from point B to many points. The first form, origin and main engine of human mobility is the legs. This form and system of mobility remains one of the most significant aspects of human existence.

The essence of mobility is productivity for the enhancement of human value. However, as the world population grows to astronomical proportions, humanity must find new innovative ways to fulfill the mobile aspiration in creation. This brings us to the notion of “space and technology”. The future requires us to conquer space with imaginative innovation, technological efficiency and sustainable creativity for human safety.

The theme of today’s e-World Forum is: “Imperatives for a Truly Digital Citizen and ICTs and Improving Road Safety”, which is the primary focus of the WTISD celebrations for this year. Road traffic safety has become a global concern not only for public health and injury prevention but also to improve efficiencies in traffic management as a means of combating the effects of climate change.

ITU has been leading worldwide efforts in developing state-of-the-art ICT standards for Intelligent Transport Systems and driver safety that utilize a combination of computers, communications, positioning and automation technologies, including in-car radars for collision avoidance.

Today, transportation is an enhance model of mobility which is intricately linked to shelter/residence and other associated form of livelihood such as place of work, education, market, entertainment, etc. Indeed, mobility is central to human success, happiness, misfortune and so on. Therefore, it is pertinent to ask, what is the future of transport? What are the current challenges and how do we collectively overcome them?

Origin, concept,  forms of mobility
According to Wikipedia, Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people, ideas and things, as well as the broader social implications of those movements. A mobility “turn” (or transformation) in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and society.

This turn has been driven by generally increased levels of mobility and new forms of mobility where bodies combine with information and different patterns of mobility. The mobilities paradigm incorporates new ways of theorizing about how these mobilities lie, “at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life.” (Cresswell, 2010, 551)

The mobility turn arose as a response to the way in which the social sciences had traditionally been static, seeing movement as a black box and ignoring or trivializing, “the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 208). Mobilities emerged as a critique of contradictory orientations toward both sedentarism and deterritorialisation in social science. People had often been seen as static entities tied to specific places, or as nomadic and placeless in frenetic and globalized existence. Mobilities looks at movements and the forces that drive, constrain and are produced by those movements.

Development, growth of cities – The new paradigm
The growth of cities has historically been driven by productive endeavors such as industrial advancements – new technology techniques, increased transport capability, and business expansion. As our cities get over-populated, we responded by building more homes and expanding our transport networks to widen the geographical reach of our economic centres. Traveling to work areas become over-stretched, and it is now common for someone to live over an hour, or even two to four hours, from where they work. This comes with inevitable costs to the environment and personal wellbeing, not to mention the impact on congestion.

So we are now taking a step back. We’re looking at the shape of the world we’ve created, and we’re considering ‘what next’? What will be the next iteration of the ‘modern city’? And how can Nigeria become a match-maker for that evolution? People cannot keep travelling further and further, and they most certainly cannot do so while confined by the working hours that tradition and habit, so often dictate.

Humanity, mobility and environmental impact
Recognising the fact that ‘Mobilities’ is indeed a relatively new body of knowledge as revealed by Sociologist, I have taken liberty to extensively explore the information content and Data sourced from Wikipedia as follows:

“The contemporary paradigm under the moniker “mobilities” appears to originate with the work of sociologist John Urry. In his book, “Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century,” Urry (2000, 1) presents a, “manifesto for a sociology that examines the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities.”

This is consistent with the aims and scope of the eponymous journal, Mobilities, which, “examines both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private spaces, and the travel of material things in everyday life” (Taylor and Francis, 2011).

In 2006, Mimi Sheller and John Urry published an oft-cited paper that examined the mobilities paradigm as it was just emerging, exploring its motivations, theoretical underpinnings, and methodologies. Sheller and Urry specifically focused on automobility as a powerful socio-technical system that, “impacts not only on local public spaces and opportunities for coming together, but also on the formation of gendered subjectivities, familial and social networks, spatially segregated urban neighborhoods, national images and aspirations to modernity, and global relations ranging from transnational migration to terrorism and oil wars” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 209).

Mobilities can be viewed as an extension of the “spatial turn” in the arts and sciences in the 1980s, in which scholars began, “to interpret space and the spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and interpretive power as have traditionally been given to time and history (the historicality of human life) on one hand, and to social relations and society (the sociality of human life) on the other” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 216; Engel and Nugent, 2010, 1; Soja, 1999 / 2005, 261).

TO BE CONTINUED. Uwaje, President of ISPON, delivered this as a paper at the eWorld Forum which held in Lagos penultimate week.