PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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While it would be unfair to make Ulrich Beck responsible for the shortcomings in
Gleeson’s conclusions (which, in my view, ultimately fail to successfully re-enlighten
planning), Gleeson’s article is nevertheless highly indicative of a common problem of
theoretical adaptations of reflexive modernization, namely that the theory, like ecological
modernization, has a rather limited potential to induce (radical) political change. Even in
the face of dramatic social and environmental threats and injustices, we are always to
have faith in modernity’s (and modernity’s institutions’) capacity to re-invent itself. 21
4.3.2 Reflexive (Auto)mobility as a Framework for EU Transport Policy
The term reflexive auto(mobility) connotes the fact that scholars writing within
the discursive framework of reflexive modernity increasingly consider automobility and
modernity to be interwoven, mutually dependent concepts (Urry 1999; Kesselring 2001;
Rammler 2001; Beckmann 2001a). In this new, emerging field of transport sociology,
the private car is viewed as the central element shaping late modernity. These scholars
show how the automobile symbolizes speed, acceleration, flexibility of movement,
individualized mobility and protection from outside environmental influences. At the
same time, they argue, highways, and in particular the North American parkways, were
explicitly built to afford middle class car owners a pleasant drive though nature. And it is
of course North America which has been most prominent in the development of
21 It is thus not completely by chance that Beck’s British brother-in-arms in the popularization of reflexive
modernization, Anthony Giddens, has been such a key influence on Tony Blair in the UK. Regardless of
whether one considers the approach successful or not, it seems undisputable that Giddens’ and Blair’s
“Third Way” reinterpretation of social-democratic politics as an approach “beyond left and right”
thoroughly erased whatever radical potential the British Labor party had left.