The role of governments in the regulation of potentially beneficial low carbon practices, such as car sharing, has proved difficult, as there are many different actors involved and as existing practices can be undermined. The mobility sector provides clear evidence of these dilemmas, as a wide range of users need to be engaged in the discourse over the innovations, and as existing governance structures may be unsuitable for addressing both the opportunities and limitations of innovation. This paper focuses on the sustainability implications of shared mobility and the need for new approaches to governance. A qualitative study of car sharing in London is used to examine the ideas, incentives, and institutions of the key actors involved in this sharing sector. The elements of change and continuity in the emerging sharing economy indicate the different possibilities for enhancing sustainable mobility. Any search for an alternative governance regime should take account of the ideational factors that would require an understanding of the different incentives needed to accommodate the full range of actors involved with the sharing economy.

Developed during the Second World War, ‘three-sector theory’ popularized the notion of the ‘services’ sector. It has quietly underpinned understandings of economic structure ever since. The limitations and influence of this basic breakdown have led to many critiques and extensions, but no replacements. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1968), we develop a four-sector model that replaces services with sectors focused on urbanization and control. We argue that this model is a better reflection of material economic life, and a more useful way of approaching the 21st-century economy. It also offers scholars of urbanization and regional development a creative new way of seeing urbanization.

The rapid growth of cities requires effective management of transport demand and restructuring of transport systems to address the needs of growing urban populations in an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable way. In recent years, car sharing has emerged as an alternative to owning cars in cities, which has potential to bring environmental gains and address social considerations. There is a sizeable academic inquiry about the social and environmental benefits of car sharing and the barriers to its introduction and provision in different empirical contexts. However, most research on the determinants of its uptake and the ease of provision remains limited to investigating consumer demand and how to realise the benefits of car sharing. Drawing on cases from the UK, Israel, Sweden and Finland, this paper focuses on the institutional and policy settings to understand the systemic barriers for car sharing services in diverse urban contexts to expand knowledge on the challenges to and the challenges that emerge from car sharing schemes.

With this paper, I demonstrate the importance of a gendered approach to work-related mobilities, in understanding the linkages between mobilities and urban flooding. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in the Malate district in Metro Manila, I focus on work-related mobilities of low-income communities, particularly on the impact of floods on urban mobilities. Rather than considering floods as disasters, I conceptualise floods as part of everyday urban life, and demonstrate how climatic conditions traverse the dynamics of home-work linkages, localities and employment in the Urban South. I argue that bridging mobility and climatic conditions from a gender perspective brings forth how the conflicting narratives of confinement and independence are implicated in the everyday lives of the women living in low-income settlements. This eventually challenges current policy representations on the societal impacts of adverse weather and economic conditions on vulnerable communities.

Wide economic disparities are the characterizing features of contemporary urban economies. However, very little is known about how economic inequality is perceived and experienced in urban contexts. Reflecting on the current empirical thinking about perceptions of inequality and guided by Antonio Gramsci's framing of ‘conceptions of the world’, the broad meanings of attitudes and perceptions are transferred to an urban level with a view to develop a framework of ‘urban conceptions of economic inequalities’, which will enable a broader understanding of how economic inequality and its ramifications are conceptualized for urban research and practice.