Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town

Abstract In our study of everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield in north-west England), numerous sources of data suggest that annoyance about cars—their volume, speed, (bad) parking, presence at the school gate, and overall effect on the quality and character of everyday life in the town—loom large in the preoccupations of local people. It has been common in work on public insecurities—including, we should add, our own study of the same town twenty-five years earlier (Girling et al. Crime and Social Change in Middle England, Routledge, Abingdon, 2000)—to marginalize such car-related concerns from consideration of the social meanings of place, disorder and public safety and hence from sociological attention. But what happens if, instead, we attend closely to the ways in which people in this English town have come to notice cars and treat automobility as a consequential component of their sense of the town as being or not being a safe and liveable place. In this paper, we document and make sense of certain framings of the car’s prominent place in the local harmscape and consider what is at stake in the competing ways in which automobility is spoken about as an agent of everyday disorder.