Mapping the Consumption of Distance Across the Life-Course: Connecting Individuals' Mobility Milestones to the Histories of Mobility Practices

Life events and life-course transitions can dramatically impact on people’s consumption practices. There is ample evidence that key life events (e.g. arrival of first child, relocation, transition from education to work, retirement) coincide with more or less radical changes in consumption patterns (cf. Schaefer, Jaeger-Erben and Bamberg 2012). Understanding the role and significance of such ‘tipping points’ in people’s consumption biography has the potential to significantly advance our knowledge of current patterns of (un)sustainable consumption and how to either encourage or transform them.

At the same time, individual consumption biographies reflect wider structural conditions in society, including prevailing ‘systems of provision’ (Evans 2011) that organise the delivery of goods and services and their subsequent consumption. Linking individual consumption biographies to the histories of particular practices can thus cast new light on the causes and consequences of (un)sustainable consumption and pave the way for more promising policies that work with rather than against people’s established socio-environmental practices.

This paper argues for the development of longitudinal theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of everyday physical mobility and the associated ‘consumption of distance’. The ability to adequately capture important mobility milestones across the life-course, that is, moments of radical change in how (much) people travel, must be central to these efforts.  These milestones must in turn be linked to the history of key mobility practices such as walking, cycling and car use. Drawing on documentary evidence, policy papers and qualitative interview data from the Republic of Ireland, the paper identifies key mobility milestones in individuals’ lives and connects them to the development of the modern Irish transport system and its implications for different mobility practices.