REBALANCE D3.1 – The REBALANCE Mobility Culture and Value Framework
Creators: name: Schade, Jens
name: Schaefer, Lisa-Marie
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: Nowadays mobility planning slowly shifts away from the overemphasis of the traffic flow and speed optimization and starts taking the individual and societal needs more in the focus. It is well recognised, that mobility as we know it today, cannot continue without seriously endangering the environment for further generations. Whereas politics on high levels such as EU parliament shifted in the last years their political programs to a more sustainable direction, a change of political goals solely does not initiate cultural shifts.Furthermore, it is essential to consider individual values and cultural idiosyncrasies. To form future ideas we first want to understand the current narrative and its underlying value system. As a first step on the long way, the first task in the REBALANCE project is dedicated to proposing a theoretical framework to structure further analysis of both, the current narrative and further forecasting activities. The main topic in REBALANCE, namely the influence of values on mobility culture, is probably one of the most discussed in current mobility research.The aim of REBALANCE is to describe the essences that shape the mobility culture of today. The frame work will be a backbone for further analysis of mobility culture aspects and will help to stay aware and structure the `complex whole’ during the project. This ‘complex whole’ is from many disciplines addressed as culture. REBALANCE starts from the assumption that the mobility culture that currently prevails in the European Union (EU) has led to unsustainable patterns, in social and environmental terms and asks the questions, how can we describe the current narrative of mobility culture(s) and which factors are most important to be considered.(Mobility) Culture can be conceptualized as sets of mobility related practices, beliefs, ideas, values, inventions, artefacts, and attitudes that characterize groups of peopleand therefore can be seen as a set of schemes that are jointly shared (Gangestad et al., 2006). To conceptualize mobility culture and to identify relevant factors within the REBALANCE analysis we apply and extend a culture model of mobility developed by Deffner et al. (2006), which combines subjective and objective factors in order tomeasure the characteristics of mobility cultures. At the heart of the model four interactive dimensions of mobility culture are identified as a spatial, an individualsubjective, a communicative and a political dimension that have been successively extended to be applicable to a cross-national scope. These dimensions include a broadset of very different elements that make the analysis complex. The spatial dimension, i.e. the historically produced space and resources shape mobility culture through not only infrastructure and provided modes of transport but also spatial planning, activity spaces and solutions like technical innovation. The dimension of communication refers to discourses in the society. This includes societal trends like currently sustainable development, equality and equity as well as their communication directly between individuals or via media, literature, arts, marketing and other means of discourses. The third dimension is politics and planning and provides the legal and political frame of mobility culture and influence the practical implementation of culture not only in form of steering the built environment but also through e.g. regulation, taxation and domain-specific policies (health, social etc.). The individual dimension brings to light the subjective elements of mobility culture. To some part, the current situation is the result of the decisions of millions of transport users e.g. where to live and work, their preferences for certain activities and travelling as described in the hierarchical structure of mobility behaviour. People usually do not base their decisions on ‘objective’ reasons (as stated in the model of the rational decision maker) but rather on heuristics and subjective evaluations, which may lead to e.g. very different mobility styles andtransport related consequences.

Whereas the four dimensions in the mobility culture framework are useful for the description of cultural expressions, all elements of (mobility) culture discussed have one thing in common: They are all guided by basic values (and related constructs like e.g. attitudes, beliefs, motifs and goals). At the group level, values are scripts or cultural ideals held in common by members of a group; the group’s ‘social mind’ (Oyserman, 2015). Differences in these values or cultural ideals distinguish different social groups r systems. Understanding culture as the shared set of values of a group finds support in most culture definitions and sees values as (one of the) the core concept of culture.Values form meaning and help to make sense of the (world) conditions. They lead to identification with other people or groups as well as with ideas and practices. Valuescan be conceptualized on the individual and group level (e.g. societies, cultures, and other social groups) and influence each other.The most profound influence of values may be through the ways that they influence rules, norms, procedures within a society, and in this way structure the everyday lifechoices for individuals within a society. Values at the individual level or personal values are defined as “broad, trans-situational, desirable goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives” (Schwartz, 1992). Thus, values refer to the motivational basis of human action. What do we want to achieve? What are our goals? What is right and wrong? That is, values may affect beliefs, attitudes, norms, intentions, and behaviour of different kinds. They can be broken down to ten basic human valuesthat are cross-culturally replicated. Structured by the different motivational goals the express, they can be sorted in a two-dimensional space, both with two conflicting poles: egoism versus altruism and individualism versus conformism. When values conflict in a particular situation, people most likely act upon the values they prioritize. Values are relatively stable over time, whereas specific beliefs, attitudes, and norms can change more easily. In turn, changes in (the priority of) values are likely to result in changes in a wide range of behaviour-related beliefs and norms, intentions, and behaviours simultaneously. This feature makes it particularly relevant to understand the value basis of transport-related beliefs, attitudes, norms, intentions, and actions. All subjective and objectives elements of mobility culture mentioned above, are based on value structures.

Politics, that have for instance a tendency towards egoist and conformist values, shape mobility culture in another way than others with a rather altruistic and individualistic orientation. Subjective motivations for mode choice for instance are addressed in literature (e.g. Schlag & Schade, 2007). When locating these motivations in the Basic Value Circle a huge gap around the altruistic value orientation becomes apparent.Ironically, values that are assigned to the altruistic orientation correspond mostly to sustainable mobility goals. It is exemplary that traditional approaches of analysis inmode choice motives miss at least partly the altruistic dimension. The Framework that is developed in this work structures the main practices of mobility culture considering contextual challenges of the present society and relates them through the analysis of the predominant motives to the concept of basic values.