From wheels to systems: Characterizing automobility as technosphere
Journal article, 2026
Automobility’s global role in providing mobility services but with adverse impacts on climate change and land use makes it a critical topic at a planetary scale. So far the role of cars has been mostly addressed from a techno-economic perspective, with complementary but fragmented insights from other social sciences. We provide evidence that understanding automobility as a sub-system of the technosphere compromising human-made artifacts and structures with impacts at planetary scale enables investigations from a systems perspective. Our empirically grounded characterization of causal loops provides insights on intervention points guiding co-evolutionary trajectories between automobility, societies, and local and planetary dynamics along different temporal and spatial scales. We systematically draw on existing modeling approaches for outlining how to model automobility as technosphere in a reduced form. We conclude that policies, measures and cultural shifts should be systematically evaluated according to their impact on car-dependent systems. Our approach offers novel insights for reorienting automobility toward pathways consistent with low planetary impact and high well-being.
automobility
technosphere
coupled land use transport systems
Author
F. Creutzig
University of Sussex
Peter Wells
Cardiff University
Felix Wagner
Technische Universität Berlin
Aimée Aguilar Jaber
Hot or Cool Institute
Mark Andor
RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Marlin Arnz
Technische Universität Berlin
Sebastian Bamberg
Hochschule Bielefeld
Galit Cohen-Blankshtain
University of Copenhagen
Andrea Broaddus
San Jose State University
Elisabeth Dütschke
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Stefan Gössling
Linnaeus University
Debbie Hopkins
University of Oxford
Aneeque Javaid
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
A. Katharina Keil
University of Lausanne
Giulio Mattioli
Technische Universität Dortmund
Adam Millard-Ball
University of California
Eric J. Miller
University of Toronto
Kostas Mouratidis
University of Copenhagen
Florian Nachtigall
Technische Universität Berlin
Georgia Pozoukidou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Anjali Ramakrishnan
University of Gothenburg
Henrike Rau
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU)
Jürgen Renn
Max-Planck-Institut für Geoanthropologie
Gesine Steudle
Max-Planck-Institut für Geoanthropologie
Vincent Viguié
Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Developpement
Malte Vogl
Max-Planck-Institut für Geoanthropologie
Dominik Wiedenhofer
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Charlie Wilson
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
University of Oxford
Sarah Wolf
Technische Universität Berlin
Sonia Yeh
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Physical Resource Theory
Caroline Zimm
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Anthropocene Review
2053-0196 (ISSN) 2053-020X (eISSN)
Vol. In PressSubject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
DOI
10.1177/20530196261472905