The appropriation and the social implications of the mobility transition. The case of Navarra (Spain) from an international comparative perspective

Abstract

I chose to do my research on the social implications and the appropriation of the mobility transition. At first, this topic seemed to be too vast and abstract, so I needed to define a set of research objectives that would help me in focusing on my specific cases in a coherent way. The attempt to evolve towards a new mobility model was sparking debate in the city of Pamplona-Iruña. Therefore, I found it logical that my home city would be one of the case studies. We knew that suburban areas and rural areas did not face the same challenges, so I also decided to include the city´s suburban areas and a nearby rural area. Later on, I was offered the opportunity to start a collaboration with the committee of a local company, so that I could include a fourth case study (on home-work mobility) from the region of Navarra. This work would allow for the comparison of my home-region-based findings with those obtained in the foreign cities that represented different ways of managing the transition. The thesis has been divided into eleven chapters that have been arranged into three main parts. The first part of the thesis has been devoted to giving shape to a theoretical framework and to a chapter on the methodology. The second part comprises the chapters on the four international case studies that are used for a comparative analysis. The third part consists of the four chapters on the region of Navarra (Spain). I aim to offer a holistic approach to my research problem, even though covering all the social impacts of the mobility transition in advanced societies is not viable. Thus, I analyse in a comparative way a set of case studies that are meant to be representative of different types of contexts where this transition is taking place.