Mobility

The concept of mobility brings together human characteristics of identity and power with a dynamic understanding of space, place, and change. Different mobilities are shaped by different geographies, by the varying types of spaces people move through (e.g., public or private, urban or rural, real or virtual), and by a range of factors from cultural norms to modern security and immigration controls. Further influences include access to the means of mobility, be they cars, computers, bikes, or pavements, and the varying ability to be mobile, based on age, sex, body type, and other components of identity. Mobility is constructed in relationship to relative immobility, or what are sometimes termed moorings, locations where mobility appears temporarily abated. Yet as absolute immobility is all but impossible, the mobility concept proposes that everyone and everything is mobile and that it is matters of scale, difference in speed, and variation in direction that create appearances of relative immobilities. Mobility can also be used to assess the impact of modern telecommunication and computer technologies on sociospatial relations, such as changing labor practices through which the mobile office makes almost any location a potential workplace, and, in a more metaphorical context, to explore the virtual experiences of moving through spaces via the Internet, videogames, television, and film.

Mobility scholars challenge traditional social science theories that often assume sedentary sociospatial relations and being stationary as the usual condition of life. In contrast, the mobility lens understands motion to be both normal and meaningful, not merely a temporary condition that occurs when moving between fixed locations. The concept thus challenges static understandings of space and spatial relationships, often defined by delimited areas such as nations, regions, cities, and homes. Consequently, where past geographical studies commonly analyzed such places as isolated entities, theories of mobility understand space as interconnected networks through which flows of people, goods, technologies, information, and images move. This constant movement forms the basis for analyses of mobility yet does not deny that there are material aspects to life. Mobility is not ethereal. It is tied to places and exhibited through physical forms. For example, cars allow the function of mobility, but garages, repair shops, streets, and highways are the relatively immobile moorings necessary for mobility to be enacted. Similarly, an airport may seem immobile, but passengers, baggage, workers, inspectors, security guards, capital, goods, vehicles, and so on, continuously move through its spaces. Even the airport buildings and runways, if looked at through a greater temporal lens, are mobile as they are remodeled, extended, damaged, and repaired. Envisioning spatial relations through a lens of mobility thus reformulates ideas of space, scale, and time.

Mobility is relational and differs from person to person. It matters who is doing the moving, where, when, how, and why. Immigrants, diaspora populations, and international tourists experience mobility differently from commuters, nomadic peoples, or prisoners. Men and women experience moving through space differently, as do young and old, people of different social classes, races, ethnicities, and nationalities. For example, if an adult and a child are traveling together, the child, while involved in the same movement, does not experience the same sense of [Page 1922]mobility, and thus, the two individuals understand and practice very different mobilities. Similarly, mobility in contemporary European space is very different for an academic with a British passport going to a conference than it is for an Ethiopian economic migrant moving through the illicit spaces of the underground economy. Encountering difference is often an aspect of mobility. Travel writings and accounts of foreign journeys commonly romanticize unfettered movement through the places of otherness, whereas vacations, exile, and emigration are experiences of difference that generate disparate mobilities.

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