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Accelerating innovation is as important as climate policy Rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emission are needed to avoid dangerous climate change. This will necessitate low-carbon transitions across electricity, transport, heat, industrial, forestry, and agricultural systems. But despite recent rapid growth in renewable electricity generation, the rate of progress toward this wider goal of deep decarbonization remains slow. Moreover, many policy-oriented energy and climate researchers and models remain wedded to disciplinary approaches that focus on a single piece of the low-carbon transition puzzle, yet avoid many crucial real-world elements for accelerated transitions ( 1 ). We present a “sociotechnical” framework to address the multidimensionality of the deep decarbonization challenge and show how coevolutionary interactions between technologies and societal groups can accelerate low-carbon transitions.

The associations between objective and subjective dimensions of the built environment and walking behaviour have been examined extensively in existing studies. However, the interaction effects of those dimensions of the built environment on walking behaviour are understudied and may be more complex than hitherto suggested. Apart from the subjective dimensions of the built environment, walking attitudes also play a role in moderating these relationships. This paper investigates the independent and joint effects of objective neighbourhood characteristics, people’s perceptions of the neighbourhood environment, and walking attitudes on the frequency of walking by using Shenzhen as a case study. Since those effects may vary across different kinds of walking trips, the analysis looks separately at three major types of walking at the neighbourhood level—walking for work/school, walking for leisure/recreation, and walking for household responsibilities. Logistic regression analyses confirm that the correlates of people’s walking frequency vary considerably among different types of walking. Statistically significant interaction effects of objective neighbourhood characteristics and perceived environment are found. The results suggest that positive perceptions of the environment can compensate for the effect that low objective walkability of neighbourhoods has on people’s walking frequency. When seeking to encouraging walking at the neighbourhood level, policymakers should not only concentrate on improving objective neighbourhood characteristics but also consider people’s perception of the neighbourhood environment and their attitudes towards walking.

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subjective well-being, and particularly the satisfaction with travel scale. However, studies analyzing the link between travel mode choice (i.e., decision utility) and travel satisfaction (i.e., experienced utility) are limited. In this paper we will focus on the relation between mode choice and travel satisfaction for leisure trips (with travel-related attitudes and the built environment as explanatory variables) of study participants in urban and suburban neighborhoods in the city of Ghent, Belgium. It is shown that the built environment and travel-related attitudes—both important explanatory variables of travel mode choice—and mode choice itself affect travel satisfaction. Public transit users perceive their travel most negatively, while active travel results in the highest levels of travel satisfaction. Surprisingly, suburban dwellers perceive their travel more positively than urban dwellers, for all travel modes.

More than ever is Geography surrounded by interdisciplinary movements claiming expertise with regard to the interconnections among nature, society and technology. These movements ask questions from Geography and geographers about if and how they can contribute to those movements and what form collaboration might take. This paper analyses Human Geography's interactions with research on sustainability transitions since the early 2000s to think through future interactions between Geography and research on the water–energy–food nexus. It shows that concepts, ideas, logics and methods have travelled from Human Geography into Transition Studies but that exchange between them has so far been partial and asymmetrical. Arguing that common ideas about how interdisciplinarity can be encouraged might be insufficient to change this situation, the paper develops ideas from Stengers, Whitehead, Foucault and others to explain the relations between Human Geography and Transition Studies in terms of modes of ion in an evolving ecology of power relations. It makes a case for slowing down modes of ion and proposes some ideas for slow collaborative research on sustainability transitions in contact zones. Implications for how Geography and geographers might engage with interdisciplinary nexus research are outlined.

This paper introduces the theme of the special issue on wellbeing, independence and mobility. We begin with outlining the complexity of each of these notions and then turn towards their interdependence. It is argued that the links between wellbeing, independence and mobility are manifold and contextual in older people's everyday lives: they differ between places, between individuals and across phases in each individual's unique lifecourse. The inherent complexity of those links can be examined fruitfully and understood better if a geographical or environmental analytical perspective is adopted. We also suggest that the interdependence of wellbeing, independence and mobility in later life needs to be understood in the context of neo-liberal governmentality and the creation of particular ways of being and acting for older people. The piece concludes with a brief description of the papers brought together in the special issue.

Academic research tends to overlook what happens when night falls. This special issue aims to bring the space–time of the urban night to the fore by asking how nocturnal cities are produced, used, experienced and regulated in different geographical contexts. Despite local variations and specificities important similarities and ongoing transformations are identified regarding the long-term trends in the formation of the space–times of the urban night. We have structured this special issue on the basis of four important focal points of research for studying the night: (1) changing meanings and experiences of urban darkness and nights; (2) the evolution of the night-time economy; (3) the intensification of regulation; and (4) dynamics in practices of going out. By bringing different sets of literature and theoretical perspectives together this special issue provides a relational perspective on the urban night.

This paper argues that time-geography can make a contribution to contemporary 'rematerialized' geographies, because the interconnections among social processes, human corporeality and inanimate material artefacts within the landscape were among Hägerstrand's central concerns. Time-geography needs none the less to be extended in several ways to make it more reconcilable with current thinking about materiality in geography. The possibility of combining Hägerstrand's framework with notions from (post) actor-network approaches is therefore explored. It is suggested that concepts and notions from the latter may contribute to the advancement of the conceptualization of action at a distance and agency in general in time-geography, as well as the incorporation of the immaterial realm into space-time diagrams. The resulting materially heterogeneous time-geography is a framework for studying the spacing and timing of different material entities that is sensitive to the role of artefacts and their local connectedness with other material forms. Some of its elements are illustrated briefly through an empirical study of the roles played by a few mundane artefacts in working parents 'coping with child-care responsibilities on working days. The case study suggest that these artefacts not only enable goal fulfilment and routinization but also result in further spacing and timing practices, and can introduce uncertainty and novelty to existing orders.

The evaluation of social impacts of transport policies has been attracting growing attention in recent years. Yet studies thus far have predominately focused on developed countries and overlooked whether equity assessment of transport projects is sensitive to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). This paper investigates how investments in public transport can reshape socio-spatial inequalities in access to opportunities, and it examines how MAUP can influence the distributional effects of transport project evaluations. The study looks at Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the transformations carried out in the city in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, which involved substantial expansion in public transport infrastructure followed by cuts in service levels. The paper uses before-and-after comparison of Rio's transport network (2014-2017) and quasi-counterfactual analysis to examine how those policies affect access to schools and jobs for different income groups and whether the results are robust when the data is analyzed at different spatial scales and zoning schemes. Results show that subsequent cuts in service levels have offset the accessibility benefits of transport investments in a way that particularly penalizes the poor, and that those investments alone would still have generated larger accessibility gains for higher-income groups. These findings suggest that, contrary to Brazil's official discourse of transport legacy, recent policies in Rio have exacerbated rather than reduced socio-spatial inequalities in access to opportunities. The study also shows that MAUP can influence the equity assessment of transport projects, suggesting that this issue should be addressed in future research.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are widely regarded as a promising solution to reduce air pollution in cities and key to a low carbon mobility future. However, their environmental benefits depend on the temporal and spatial context of actual usage (journey energy efficiency) and the rolling out of EVs is complicated by issues such as limited range. This paper explores how the energy efficiency of EVs is affected and shaped by driving behavior, personal driving styles, traffic conditions, and infrastructure design in the real world. Tests have been conducted with a Nissan LEAF under a typical driving cycle on the Beijing road network in order to improve understanding of variations in energy efficiency among drivers under different urban traffic conditions. Energy consumption and operation parameters were recorded in both peak and off-peak hours for a total of 13 drivers. The analysis reported in this paper shows that there are clear patterns in energy consumption along a route that are in part related to differences in infrastructure design, traffic conditions, and personal driving styles. The proposed method for analyzing time series data about energy consumption along routes can be used for research with larger fleets of EVs in the future.

Energy and transportation researchers can contribute to the realization of just transitions to low-carbon mobility in cities across the planet by elaborating and enacting broad conceptions of justice that consider distribution, procedure, recognition and knowledge generation.