How are practices of care sometimes not fair? The case of parenting and private car use

ABSTRACT

How is it that the intention to care can produce and reproduce a practice that is quintessentially unjust? This conceptual piece uses the everyday transport practices of families to explore the paradox between individual practices of care and aspirations to just and care-full cities. In doing so, it encounters a fundamental barrier to the melding of care with notions of justice. While structurally and culturally, care and justice must fuse as aspirations, from the perspective of the individual in practice, care motivates actions that are anything but inclusive and equitable. Indeed, care in practice undermines aspirations to justice in a way that needs to be accounted for if utopian visions of more care-full and just cities can be realised. Tools and concepts from social practice theory are deployed to reveal how care melds with infrastructure and ‘ways of doing’ to entrench the mobile stratifications that both represent and perpetuate injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Automobility
• care
• justice
• social practice theory
• family transport
• mobility‌

Introduction

Proponents of the ethics of care argue that care with, and through, generational cohorts is a desired social outcome, a common preference to perform practices that ‘maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto 1993, 113). In this scenario, ideal practices of care result in the seamless fusion of individuals and environments to sustain life.

Others, however, call attention to the moral salience afforded to the prioritisation of the ‘needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility’ (Held 2018, 233), highlighting the accepted partiality of care, whereby caring for one may exclude caring for others. This taken for granted norm becomes enshrined in practice, including the practices that shape our cities (Brighouse and Swift 2014; Randall 2020; Walsh 2017).

This duality – between care as common and care as partial – present a dilemma faced by those seeking justice through care. How can we account for the undeniable existence of partiality in care, while simultaneously deploying care as an instrument of equality? This paper does not seek to rectify this philosophical and ethical conundrum. It does, however, draw attention to the ways care shapes practices that entrench urban forms and functions that are inherently unjust. In doing so, it encounters the depth of incongruity between care and justice. While structurally and culturally, care and justice must fuse as aspirations (Power 2019), from the perspective of the individual in practice, care often motivates practices that are anything but inclusive and equitable. Indeed, care in practice undermines aspirations to justice in a way that needs to be accounted for if utopian visions of more care-full and just cities can be realised.

The paper is a conceptual piece. It examines the role of the private car in the everyday transport practices of families to demonstrate unjust care in practice. The following section explores existing understandings of care and its relationship with justice. After differentiating between care as ethic(s) and care as practised, the place of the private car in perpetuating injustice in practice is outlined. This includes its reliance on finite resources, and the imposition of negative externalities on those with the least capability to escape them. Tools and concepts from social practice theory are then deployed to analyse practices of parenting, which are proposed as characterised by a certain complexity which both fulfils and complicates aspirations to care. The place of the car in augmenting and ordering these aspirations is revealed. The analysis concludes with a discussion on how care melds with infrastructure, and ‘ways of doing’, to entrench the mobile stratifications that both represent and perpetuate injustice.

Care and justice

The fusion of care with justice has been the subject of burgeoning research from an array of epistemological domains, with the overall intention to demonstrate that care is a critical component of justice and vice versa. The fusion typically centres around ordering and reconciling the two perspectives (e.g. Gary 2022), seeking out instances of care in unequal worlds (e.g. Power 2019), and elevating conceptualisations of care outside of the domestic and institutional spheres towards something that is more universal (e.g. Williams 2017).

Justice in this body of work is conceptualised in the echoes of work by Clive Barnett (2011) and Amartya Sen (2009), and embraces the messiness of context to suppose there is an individual and (at times) collective intuition of notions of injustice. As Williams writes, justice comes through ‘practices enacted in response to particular injustices in an attempt to heal and repair our world’ (Williams 2017, 824). Justice is not, therefore, an end point reached through explicit activism, nor is its provision solely within the domain of top-down structures. Instead, it is experienced and pursued through mundane practices of reacting to the basic immorality of instances of bias. And these practices, it is argued, reflect a scaling up of practices of care as a component of what might prompt the just city (Power and Williams 2020).

Reflecting interest in spatiality, practice and placed materiality, geographers have explored how a place-based ethic of care offers possibilities to create and plan for more socially just, ‘care-full’ cities (a term used by Williams 2017 and also explored by, for example, Darling 2011; Power and Bergan 2019; Power and Williams 2020; Till 2012; Williams 2016). This work positions care ethics as a potentially transformative, and also universally experienced, moral, that can channel thoughts and ambitions to the just city (Power and Williams 2020). The link between care and urban justice agendas in this work is conceptualised as an interlinked system with multiple dimensions, in that care provides ‘public momentum’ (Alam and Houston 2020) to the pursuit of justice, and justice in turn supports the positioning and distribution of care equitably (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Tronto 2013; Tronto 2015). Similarly, places are capable of creating just caring, and care is capable of creating just places (Power and Mee 2020). Recent work often calls for intense attention to be paid to ‘the situated and relational nature of care’ (Williams 2016, 514) as a way to socialise and ground the ethic of justice. This work seeks examples of care provided by and to ‘actual embodied persons located in actual contexts’ (Held 2018, 221) and proposes that attention to instances of care both reflects and promotes social solidarity with capacity to ‘repair our world’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40).

Much of the work to date on care ethics and justice presents a convincing and inspiring vision, where the ethics of care concept is deployed to advocate for infrastructures and resource allocation in a way that is more just. The possibility rests heavily on there being a collective awareness of the reciprocity of care, or the ‘caring with’ (Tronto 2013; explored by Power 2019). It has immense appeal to those of us yearning to bring equality, fairness, and collective empathy to the lived experience of cities. Yet, while wondering at the potential, and being moved by the invitation to think differently, we must also acknowledge that there are limits to the presentation of an ideal, or a possibility. These provocations towards a long-term vision are essential, but so are understandings of the practical realities of care in the present, particularly when they inhibit steps towards the ideal. We need both to realise change.

Taking from Power and Williams’ call for ‘research that attends to the ways that urban lives and care are practiced, navigated, and negotiated within the urban’ and particularly ‘to consider the im/mobilities that characterise city life and the practice of care’ (2020, 5) this paper’s contribution is firmly positioned as an exposé and theorisation of what the practice of care actually is as a messy reality, and why it is so. Furthermore, it draws conclusions as to how this reality impacts more utopian visions of justice through care. The paper now turns to the mobility practices of parenting to demonstrate how caring contributes to the ongoing persistence of one of the most unjust and obdurate socio-material systems characterising modern life in cities – the private car.

Justice and the mobility practices of parenting

A rich literature theorises and demonstrates why private car use, and the system of automobility as first conceptualised by Sheller and Urry (2006), is patently embedded in the spatial and other injustices that shape modern life in cities. The 1.446 billion cars roaming the streets globally (The World Bank 2022) are each quintessential expressions of an individualised and private way of being mobile (Urry 2007). Automobility’s various accommodations, from roads, to freeways, to parking lots and garages, dominate landscapes and lives in a way that is unfair, inequitable and unjust (Edensor 2003; Merriman et al. 2008; Miller 2001; Redshaw 2008; Sheller and Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2003; Short and Pinet-Peralta 2010). The political economy of car manufacture, its ongoing and seemingly quite sticky link to global oil production and supply, its contribution to the devastatingly inequitable distribution of the harms of climate change, and the shackle that has become petrol prices for households around the globe, are further expressions of the private car’s role in perpetuating injustice in cities (Bohm et al. 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Paterson 2007; Paterson 2010).

More specifically, private cars simultaneously exhibit and perpetuate injustice and inequity in two key ways. First, private cars rely on a series of finite resources. For example, despite the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, the majority of the world’s cars are powered by combustion engines, which need fossil fuels (Bieker 2021). Less obvious is that cars also need space. The combination of speed with the sheer mass of cars ensures the road space they need is unsafe to be shared by other modes of transport, or ways of being in public (Goodwin 2012). And when not in use they need space for storage in the form of car parking (Shoup 2005). Finally, cars rely on finite thresholds of pollution, chewing up the extent to which our lungs and ears can withstand the intrusion of emissions and noise associated with urban living (Paul et al. 2019). As supplies of these resources (oil, space, air quality and silence) dwindles relative to demand, the ability to purchase them preferences more privileged groups, ensuring they enjoy greater ease and freedom of movement (Dodson and Sipe 2008). As Sheller argues, the freedom to move with autonomy is now a key instrument of social stratification. (Sheller 2018).

Second, the unintended negative consequences of the automobility system are consistently suffered by those with the least capability to escape them. Locally, the car crashes, noise and air pollution, subjugation of road space, and disinvestment in alternative modes burden groups who can’t pay to ameliorate their impact (Mattioli 2014). The groups unable to dwell in insulated and isolated spaces, and unable to avoid travel altogether by living close to where they work, or working remotely, are those most burdened by the system of automobility. More globally, cars are inextricably linked to the injustices of climate change, and the instability of oil dependent economies (Smith et al. 2022).

Automobility is unjust and although the way families travel is not necessarily any more, or less, inherently unjust than others, families do play a special and substantial role in maintaining the global hegemony of private car use. For example, in Australia’s two largest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – motor vehicle ownership is highest for households with children (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021). In Melbourne, young families (defined as one or two parents with all children under the age of 10) are least likely to use public transport – in 2010 only 5% of trips by couples with children and 4% of trips by sole parent households were done using public transport, compared to 14% of trips by other household structures (Victorian Department of Transport 2010). And caring for children engenders a substantial amount of travel. Mothers of children under the age of 10 do more trips per day than any other demographic, and they are also the least likely to use public transport. Children 0–10 make an average of 2.5 trips per day and over 90% of these trips are by private car (Victorian Department of Transport 2018). In Sydney, around 50% of trips are made for purposes related to keeping house and caring, with trips serving passengers and trips to school and childcare dominating these tasks (Bureau of Transport Statistics 2020).

How is it that parenting – a definitive practice of care – can produce and reproduce a system that is so quintessentially unjust? The following section draws on tools and concepts from social practice theory to understand this paradox, and facilitate consideration of its implications for change. It proposes that the emotions attached to the task of parenting over-ride concerns for equity – even in those most passionate about its pursuit. Further, these emotions are echoed in structures of land-use, infrastructure and governance and welcomed in social ways of being such that the unjust system of automobility is sustained.

Social practice theory

Theories of practice, examined in depth by the likes of Theodore Schatzki, Cetina, and von Savigny (2001), Andre Reckwitz (2002) and Elizabeth Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012), have become popular in sustainability scholarship since the start of the new millennium, including sustainable transport (reviewed by Kent 2021). This is, in part, because practice theory especially critiques the view that behaviours are the result of either individualised and linear decision-making processes or overbearing and unavoidable forces of structure (Urry 2012). Instead, routine human action is understood as a collective of social practices shaped by the interplay between the wider structural and cultural environment and personal preferences or individual processes of deliberation (Hitchings 2012; Shove, Watson, and Spurling 2015).

A practice is a routine human action. Our lives are made up of practices performed to greater or lesser degrees of regularity and replication across the social realm (Ropke 2009). Although practices are individually experienced, they are social in that when we perform a practice, we are likely enacting a sequence of actions previously performed by someone somewhere, and likely to be performed by someone else, at some stage (Southerton 2013).

Two concepts in practice theory are particularly useful in conceptualisations of how parental care perpetuates the unjust system of automobility in cities. First, practice theory highlights the interconnectedness of practices – sometimes labelled bundles (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). This is particularly relevant in transport where the practice of travelling is not usually the primary motivation for actual movement. Matt Watson, for example, emphasises the need for transport research to understand ‘both trips, and the activities enabled by them’ (Watson 2012, 491, emphasis added). In previous work, I have conceptualised this as there being both direct transport practices (e.g. the practice of driving a car) and practices that are facilitated by transport (e.g. the practice of attending a child’s birthday party) (Kent 2021). The practices facilitated by the act of being mobile provide invaluable explanations as to why we travel the way we do, and disclose possibilities for change towards more sustainable and equitable mobility systems.

Second, practice theory emphasises that practices are shaped by interacting elements (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011; Kent and Dowling 2013; Schatzki 1996 Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012;). Elements are constituent parts of a practice that, through their existence and interdependencies, make the practice what it is. The trajectories of elements determine the endurance of a practice as it extends beyond individual instances of action and towards a practice sustained and popularised over time, or a practice as entity (Birtchnell 2012; Shove and Walker 2007).

Elements have been listed in various formats throughout the literature and the ability to tailor elemental structures and their labels to context is an accepted and appreciated characteristic of practice theory. For the purposes of this paper, I expand on the most popular framing for elements developed by Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) to conceptualise elements as materials and structures (e.g. roads, the internet, the legal system), meanings and emotions (e.g. aspiration, indulgence, love, belonging) and skills and learned ways of doing (e.g. time management, the acquired inclination for children to attend after school activities). This elemental frame can be used to break down and describe the brilliant but sometimes overwhelming complexity of routine social practices. When applied to the life of families, it sheds light on how the emotionally laden practice of raising and loving a child, bonds to structures and ways of doing to produce an outcome motivated by care but perpetuating injustice.

While its tools are recognised as useful, practice theory has been critiqued for its inability to explain states of socio-spatial ordering and, more helpfully, provide insights as to how this might be shifted (Keller and Vihalemm 2017; Keller, Halkier, and Wilska 2016; Watson 2017; Watson et al. 2020). This critique can be countered by the way practices in practice theory are not positioned as equal. Drawing from Hägerstrand’s original theory of space time geography (Hägerstrand 1970), which conceptualises the life of an individual along a continuing path in time and space, Pred (1981, 248) notes that the practices of the individual are limited by physical indivisibility. In other words, a person can only be in one place at a time. This suggests that, to varying degrees, practices compete in space and time for the attention of practitioners. The concept of physical indivisibility and by implication there being a hierarchical order to practices, opens up consideration that some practices are, constantly and on a spectrum of consciousness, prioritised by practitioners over others.

What is the mechanism for prioritisation in practice? While practice theorists have made tentative explorations into the role of ‘dominant projects’ in prioritising practices (e.g. Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012, 79), the emphasis has been on the ordering effects of temporal commitment. In this way of thinking, practices of parenting might dominate because they consume a lot of time. I propose, however, that the ordering of practices also occurs as a result of heightened emphasis on one element over others. Just as is conceptualised in notions of justice, this understanding requires the researcher to draw upon ‘widely shared intuitions’ (Barnett 2011 citied in Williams 2017). For some practices – such as online shopping – the structure of the internet seems more important to the perpetuation of that practice at scale than the meaning imbued in the task of placing a grocery order. For others – such as driving a child 800 m to school on a rainy day – what it means to care as a parent seems to over-ride the physical potentiality of the structure of the transport network. Of course, the practice of the rainy-day school drop off is facilitated by structures (roads, the car) and requires know-how and assumptions learned through cultural attenuation (driving, time management), but the main element motivating its perpetuation is the parent’s desire to protect, nurture and care – a meaning.

To date, transport scholars have highlighted the ordering effects of structures (e.g. car dependence conceptualised as a result of road building (Frank, Hong, and Ngo 2021; Fujii and Kitamura 2000; Hymel 2019; Litman 2017)) and ways of doing (e.g. car dependence conceptualised as a result of travel socialisation where expectations for mobility are established in childhood and learned (Van Acker, Mulley, and Ho 2019; Van Acker, van Wee, and Witlox 2010)). Mobilities research has engaged with familial emotion and meanings at the level of ‘feeling the car’ (Sheller 2004, 221), which opens with a description of a small child enjoying the sensation of movement in a car. Scholars have also examined emotion and meaning embedded in the actual act of parents driving and children inhabiting the car (Waitt and Harada 2016). Yet we have been relatively silent on the power of meanings to interlink with structures and skills to shape and prioritise practices facilitated by mobility (Kent 2014). How do the meanings associated with the parenting project, such as concern, love and even frustration, impact the practices performed by parents and children, and shape the need to use the private car?

In summary, the elemental framework of practice theory provides a mechanism by which mobilities can bring meaning and emotion to the forefront of considerations of car dependency. In this way, it can shed light on the way individuals in practice, driven by what it means to care, can undermine the pursuit of justice through the care ethic as applied more broadly. The following section progresses to propose and dissect a hypothetical example of how what it means to care shapes practices that are car-dependent and thus perpetuates the unjust system of automobility.

Parenting and the private car(e)

The previous section outlined the elemental framework used in social practice theory. Practices are made up of materials, meanings and skills, and the elevation of the importance of one element over others can signal the dominance of one practice over another. This can explain how a system of mobility that perpetuates injustice can prevail over one that promotes equality.

Meanings and emotions are particularly present in practices of parenting. Although by no means universal, for many, the parenting project is experienced as a series of intense feelings, often spawned by desires, expectations and the sheer responsibility to care (Brighouse and Swift 2014; Walsh 2017 and 2018). If private car use is instrumental to the caring practices of parents in car-dependent cities, it makes sense that the practice of driving a car is elevated over and above more sustainable, and equitable, ways of travelling with, and caring for, children. The following section uses literature on children’s independent mobility and parental commitment to children’s extra-curricula activities as instances where care motivates driving children and cements the place of the private car in parenting practices.

Children’s independent mobility, care and the car

The large body of research on children’s independent mobility has its focus on examining and explaining barriers to children being independently mobile, most often positioned as children walking and cycling unaccompanied by an adult (e.g. Schoeppe et al. 2016) for the purpose of routine trips such as the journey to school (for example as reviewed by Mitra 2013). The alternative to children’s independent mobility is sometimes conceptualised as children walking or riding a bike with an adult, but more often it is the private car that replaces both independence and active mode, hence the emergence of the term the ‘chauffeured child’ (e.g. Thomsen 2016). This body of work concludes consistently that after probative distances, the key barrier to children’s independent mobility cited by parents is safety, primarily safety from strangers, and secondarily safety from traffic (Aranda-Balboa et al. 2020; Henne et al. 2014; McDonald and Aalborg 2009; Nasrudin and Nor 2013; Stone et al. 2014). Several qualitative studies have explored in depth how protection is afforded by the private car when travelling with and for children. A parent from North Carolina, USA, who doesn’t allow their child to walk to school, justifies driving as follows:

As the children get older, you think more about kidnapping … . By the time they’re in fourth or fifth grade, they’re able to cross streets and they’re paying attention. But by the time they’re in fourth or fifth grade, they’re greater targets for kidnappers (Ahlport et al. 2008, 225)

Another parent – a Somali immigrant living in Seattle, USA, also raised concerns about abduction: Another parent from the USA talks emotively about her responsibility ‘as a parent’ to be concerned about abduction:

Even though we haven’t had a child-napping in this area, as a parent you do worry about your child getting there okay.

(Eyler et al. 2008, 144)

Referencing practice theory’s concept of elements, there are cultural constructions of spatial and social risk at play here. If traffic speeds were slowed, for example, there might be more people walking and cycling and parents might be more willing to endow their children with the licence to travel without supervision. Yet several studies demonstrate that parents do not curtail independent mobility because of objective, or even perceived risk. Francis et al. 2017, for example, conducted focus groups with mothers of children aged four to 12 years to reveal a mismatch ‘between parents’ fear of stranger danger (an emotional response to potential victimisation) and the perceived risk of stranger danger (a cognitive response to potential victimisation)’. In other words, there is an undeniable emotional dimension at the heart of navigating any risk when it comes to parents and caring for children, and this extends to ways of travelling. As Joelsson (2019) so eloquently puts it, ‘ … management of risk and uncertainty in relation to children’s mobility is entwined in emotional and affective processes’ (593). Parental deferral to the private car to manage the risks associated with children being independently mobile, therefore, can be positioned as emotive as well as in response to structural and social provisions. They are acts of care. And for so many parents, in so many contexts, this risk is easily mitigated, tidied up and dismissed by placing the child into the supervised cocoon of the private car (Oliver et al. 2019).

Children’s participation in extra-curricular activities, care and the car

The second example drawn upon in this paper to explore the influence of care in practice, and the possibility of its link to private car use, is that of children’s participation in extra-curricular activities.

The transport demands of the scheduled child are not well researched, nor are the attitudes and practices of parents around the travel their ambitions to care in this way create. We do know, however, that there has been a steep increase in children’s participation in out-of-school activities, coinciding with the economic rationalism of the 1970s and 80s and the increasingly competitive and precarious labour market (Katz 2008; Van Ewijk 1994). Children’s participation in structured extra-curricular activities such as sport, music lessons and tutoring is seen as beneficial across a wide spectrum of socio-economic and cultural contexts (Devine 2004; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014; Lareau 2011; Reay 2005; Stefansen and Aarseth 2011; Van der Eecken, Spruyt, and Bradt 2019; Vincent, Ball, and Braun 2010). One UK-based survey estimated that middle-class children attend, on average, over five scheduled out-of-school activities a week. In Australia, over 90% of 10–12-year olds participate in at least one out-of-school hour scheduled activity a week, with 75% of children participating in at least one scheduled activity that is not provided by the school (Warren and Daraganova 2018). Childhood is now expected to be an incubator for social, cultural and physical skills, all designed to give children either an edge or at least a chance (Devine 2004; Levey 2009).

Extra-curricular activities are generally trip generators, creating family schedules that, in many structural contexts, are impossible to accommodate by any other mode than the private car. A mother of two boys from an affluent village near London, England, describes this complexity:

There is swimming on Wednesdays (3 mile trip), and tennis on Thursdays (2 mile trip), Saturdays 8 o’clock swimming for Pete (3 mile trip), then at 9 he goes to see his friend for an hour (1 mile trip), and then I have to get Charlie to swimming for 9.30 (3 mile trip), and then he finishes at 10 (3 mile trip). Then I pick Pete up at 10.50 (1 mile trip) and then there might be football (4 mile trip) after that. (Barker 2011, 415).

A mother of two girls from a middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada, describes a similar experience:

I use the car … because there’s Tuesday driving, there’s Saturday driving and today. You know, the girls have [language and Arts] classes [in another area of the city]. … and I’m not going to take the bus because it’ll take way too long. … mostly my driving is for the girls (McLaren 2018, 850).

The practice of driving in these stories is shaped by a series of multiple and complex interactions that occur between a set of elements: for example, the distribution of activities across urban environments (a structure), the convention that children be supported to pursue interests such as art and swimming (a learned expectation) and the mothers’ desire to care by giving their children opportunities (an emotion with meaning). While the materials and skills shaping these practices are important, the complexity of travel they create is ultimately a product of each mothers’ desire to care for her children. These bundles of practice ‘win’ over ones that are more just because these parents strive to provide their children with the experiences, opportunities and enrichments that they consider constitutes good mothering (Dowling 2000). This is the emotional dimension of care that ensures these practices, facilitated by the unjust regime of automobility, are perpetuated across urban areas.

Of course, while these various experiences are drawn from multiple contexts, they are by no means universal. But they are also not uncommon. Each parent expresses a desire to care for their children by facilitating a life that is full of activities that are accessed in a way that is safe, comfortable and autonomous. These aspirations finds a welcoming cultural and structural home in modern conventions and cities (Kalil 2015), and has been echoed in existing research exploring the intractability of the private car in parenting practices (Aguilera and Cacciari 2020; Barker 2011; Dowling 2000; Forsberg et al. 2020). These longings and expectations as parents are reproduced in cultural texts including advertising, social media, and the background of discourse to schools, sports clubs and summer barbeques (Ergler, Freeman, and Guiney 2020; Forsberg et al. 2020 Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014). And to fulfill these expectations, many cities remain structured around the assumption of the car – with long distances between uses, paltry infrastructure for safe cycling, and public transport systems that are suited to suits, but less useful for carting shopping, gym bags, violins, birthday presents, pets … and tonight’s dinner (Kent and Mulley 2023). The result is ongoing perpetuation of private car use, expressed as ongoing reliance, ongoing structural provision for, and ongoing expectations. It is a system that is, quite literally, cemented in unjust spatial and temporalities.

Conclusion

Using tools and concepts from social practice theory, this paper has highlighted the role care plays in the practice of parenting and the perpetuation of the unjust system of automobility. It demonstrates how care in practice remains at odds with more aspirational visions of mobility systems that are just.

Although care and justice can be aligned in aspiration, in reality, carers, and the cared for undeniably compete for finite material, spatial, temporal and emotional resources. As such, practices of care are prioritised somewhere on a spectrum, by individuals and collectives, whose pursuit of the universal drive to care does not always result in a universally caring, or just, outcome. Yet, to the mother teaching her child to swim, the choice to drive is morally salient. To the father dropping his child to school on a rain sodden day, the choice to drive is not unjust. The care that a parent gives to a child engenders a passion and conviction that is morally sanctioned. And, over time, structures and cultural expectations have formed around this emotionally laden project, which propose to the parent that to care they must drive.

Where does this leave agendas to challenge the dominance of the private car and its role in inequality? The car-dependent practices of the parenting project represent the unjust system of automobility at its powerful and obdurate best. Acknowledging this as a starting point implies a shift in the scale of political and cultural aspirations for social change such that they align better to the proportions of the challenges faced.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DE190100211].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. Kent

Dr Jennifer L. Kent is a Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney School of ARchitecture Design and PLanning. Her research interests are at the intersections between transport, health and urban planning.