Mobility

Peter Adey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317363675
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

Mobility aims to take the pulse of this enormously expanded and energetic field. It explores the breadth of the disciplinary areas mobility studies now encompass, examining the diverse conceptual and methodological approaches wielded within the field, and explores the utility of mobility to illuminate a cornucopia of mobile lives: from the mass movements of individuals within global processes such as migration and tourism, to homelessness and war; from the entangled relations caught up in the movement of disease, people and aid across borders, to the inability of someone to cross over a road.

The new edition explores the more sustained elaboration of mobility studies within a wide variety of disciplinary approaches and subject matters. It echoes the growing internationalization of mobility research, reflected in diverse case studies from the Global South, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and so far under-represented perspectives from China, Australasia, post-socialist Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. The book also features an additional chapter on mobility studies, to survey and explore the diverse quality of the field, and methodologies, in order to reflect the growing diversity of methodological approaches to mobilities, from walk-alongs and critical cartography to the mobile arts.

The book offers an accessible reading of the way mobility has been tackled and understood, neatly exploring and summarizing a topic that has exploded into different variations and nuances. The text allows scholars and students alike to grasp the central importance of 'mobility' to social, cultural, political, economic and everyday terrains by providing accessible writings on key authors within key ideas and case study boxes, suggested further readings and summaries, while at the same time making a significant contribution to scholarly writings and debates.

1
Introduction

[T]he world is a flux of vectors.

(Alliez 2004: 2)

We simply cannot ignore that the world is moving. Maybe, the world is moving a bit more than it did before too. We might even say that mobility is ubiquitous; it is something we do and experience almost all of the time. For Nigel Thrift (2006) even space itself is characterized by this mobility and movement, ‘every space is in constant motion’, he writes. Mobility is not something ‘very new’ as Anthony Giddens (2000: 1) comments on globalization, but certainly something ‘new’ is happening in the world. Witness the vast mobilities of migrants making perilous journeys to Europe from North, East and Southern Africa, from Syria and the Middle East. Today we can see one of the most massive movements of people in history since the Second World War or the Partition of India and Pakistan. Mobility could not be more on the agenda of today's political and social concerns.

Aiwah Ong (2006) writes how mobilities have ‘become a new code word for grasping the global’ and the new and extensive ways in which we live. Living without mobility can, but not always, curtail our life chances. Without mobility we could not get to work or to the nearest source of food, neither could we stay healthy and fit. We could not make and sustain social relationships and we could not travel to far off or nearby destinations. Nor could we escape the perils of civil war, or the threat of ethnic, racial and religious persecution.

There are a host of statistics and impressive sums to convince you of this. For instance, we know that there are around 244 million international migrants living in the world today, marking what former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described as a ‘new era of mobility’ (UN News Centre 2006, www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=18765#.WIiOr4XvjOo). This figure has grown by more than 44 million since the first edition of this book. Tourism is widely pronounced as the biggest industry in the world, generating well over 750 billion dollars worth of international tourism receipts in 2005, which had reached around $900 billion at the author's time of writing (earthtrends.wri.org). The industry is worth some $7.2 trillion dollars and employs around 240 million people a year (World Travel and Tourism Council, www.wttc.org/research/economic-research/economic-impact-analysis/). Europe saw 609 million tourist arrivals in 2015 (European Travel Commission, www.etc-corporate.org/uploads/pdf/ETCAnnualReport2015.pdf). Migration and tourism are of course supported by transportation – a medium of mobility. There were 37.4 million aircraft flights scheduled for 2014. In the US an estimated 2,630.7 billion vehicle miles were travelled during 2015. While in India roughly 25 million people commute to work each day. This is an extraordinary amount of mobility.

But, even though such volume is incredibly significant, we probably do not need all of these indicators to tell us that mobility is important. Think about the ubiquity of mobility in the context of your own everyday lives. Consider getting up in the morning (but also appreciate this is drawn from the account of a male, white, middle-class academic). One wakes up. One gets out of bed, involving the movement of various limbs, a physical displacement from the bed to the bathroom. Skipping a few steps, as part of my work as a university lecturer I must go to work, which involves several other kinds of mobility. I must walk out of my building, using the stairs on the way down, which I might avoid on the way back in the evening by taking the elevator – a form of vertical mobility. I reach the train station after crossing several busy roads. I've had to walk up past the Walker Art Gallery, Central Library and Museum in Liverpool's city centre; their grand architecture reminds me how the place was built on the back of extensive global mobilities. Liverpool's earlier wealth was accumulated by the movements of slaves, goods and migrants through the city's famous port. Writers such as Walter Dixon Scott (1907) would prove most eloquent at articulating the pulse and rhythm of Liverpool's frenetic pace, the ‘democratic promenade’ of the docks. Liverpool's mobile life has been continually shaped by the metronome of the River Mersey, its outlet to the Atlantic, and other global mobilities.

But back to my journey. After crossing the busy traffic, I reach Lime Street Station and catch another form of mobility: the train. My mediated journey out of Liverpool is an immediately interesting one for as I cross the Runcorn Bridge out of Liverpool the train route runs parallel with the road along which busy commuters and others move. In the sky overhead an aircraft moves on its way to or maybe from Liverpool John Lennon Airport. In my relatively immobile state on the train, I am able to work, receive text messages, edit an earlier edition of this manuscript. At other times I just sit back and try to relax. I get out at Crewe Station and take yet another form of transportation by catching the bus down to Keele University a few miles away.

Since the original edition of this book, this journey to work has also changed, a lot. In the space of a few years I moved address several times. My journey transitioned from Liverpool to Cardiff in Wales and to other Home Counties in England where eventually these moves began to settle down with the fixities of buying a house, and what Clare Holdsworth (2013) has aptly described as the intimate mobilities and immobilities necessary to sustain spousal and family life. The precarity of the housing market in Cardiff meant I moved apartment three times in the space of a year because our landlord could not keep up with their mortgage repayments. John Urry makes the strong relationship between the 2008 Financial Crisis with oil, mobility and the American Suburbs (2014). It is odd to think of this relation in the context of the precarity of a provincial city's housing market. And I moved positions to Royal Holloway University of London.

In other words, a journey like a commute to work can be a very stable thing, but it doesn't have to be. Social and employment structures and obligations, and other facts of the economy such as the pressures on markets like rented accommodation in a gentrified part of a post-industrial capital like Cardiff, influence mobility. Indeed, other family changes and obligations may all make quite crucial differences to our mobilities, to where and why we go, and how we get there. Who we move for and who we move with.

I could go on and on about just my mobility, but this is my point. In just a few hours of a normal day, it is very easy to be highly mobile. I have travelled about 60 miles. My body has performed various mobile tasks. Various mobilities have passed in and out of my body, I missed out mentioning the intake and exhalation of air and food. I've probably even done all this mobility without having to move my body all that much either. And, as I've outlined, in the course of a few years, the patterning and intensity of these mobilities have changed quite markedly.

We must conclude that in order for me to live in the way I've become used to, in order for me to work as a UK academic, I must move. My body must be mobile and things must be mobile around me, for me. From the water that services my home, to the public transport I connect with and use, to the signals my mobile (cell)phone sends out and receives, to the students I will meet later in the day, I expect certain mobilities to synchronize with me. Indeed, student mobilities have become the subject of some fascinating research (see Holton 2015; Holdsworth 2009; Cairns 2014) and can involve highly elaborate movements and stoppages between various homes, halls of residence, the workplace and across borders that make my journeys to work seem superfluous.

We are all differently abled, and how the world enables or constrains our mobility can be crucial for the living of a good life. We may require technologies to help enable our mobilities, through bodily prostheses, augmented technologies for driving or more appropriate forms of urban planning. The social model of disability (Freund 2001) reminds us that particular physical and social structures may shape our mobilities, whether through the impediments the built environment may present, the lack of access throughout the countryside (to portions of private and military land, and where rights of way – due to gates, stiles and conditions – may only benefit the most physically able-bodied), the way particular services are offered to us, and the particular values and judgements that underlie that provision.

Just starting with this rather egocentric example – my life – my world of habits and routines appears to be fundamentally dependent upon mobilities. In order for me to conduct my career as an academic geographer, to sustain my relationships, to keep up with my friends dotted around the country and others, I must be mobile in order to achieve the sorts of socialities that compose my day to day living and more. Of course, someone else's life will be made up of very different kinds of mobility, some much more extensive and others much more bounded. Some require much more hardship and exertion and others are far smoother and easy. In this sense, although we may be always on the move, we are also always differently mobile.

And while we move ourselves we require other things and other people to be mobile for us. Many people need to be supplied and provided with services, information, capital or goods. How reliant are we on mobilities? How do we depend on the infrastructural material mobilities of gas and electricity and especially water for energy, agricultural and personal domestic needs? Twenty-three million Californians depend upon one of the biggest systems of water conveyance in the world, encompassing an enormous infrastructure of pumps, canals, tunnels and pipelines that capture, store and move water, delivered by the State Water Project (Worster 1992). California's ‘drought’ is putting even more pressure on these infrastructures. In China, hydroelectric dams form around 16 per cent of the country's total electricity generation. Indeed, dam construction often moves people on through forced displacement (see Chapter 4), and we can learn that the World Bank has just put a pause on its funding to the Democratic Republic of Congo for the construction of the Inga 3 hydroelectric dam, part of the massive Inga hydropower complex, less than 200 miles from Kinshasa. While intended to bring electricity to a region where power is scarce the project has been highly controversial for its environmental impact. It is only likely to benefit industrial users such as mining, and bypass the Congolese population in favour of long-distant power lines to urban and industrial centres in South Africa (Bosshard 2016).

From fluids and flows to the immovable matter of a concrete dam, many of the enormous forms and symbols we recognize in the world are built upon complex relationships between mobilities and immobilities. The skyscraper could only be made possible when people were enabled to move efficiently in-between floors, what Stephen Graham (2014) has recently called the upwards mobilities of ‘elevator urbanism’ within the new-found industries of ‘vertical transportation’. The first reliable braking-system invented by Elisha Otis in 1853 made skyscrapers a reality once people could move between floors without strenuous exertion or fear (Goetz 2003). Without the ability to move vertically, the skyscraper skylines of New York, Chicago, Shanghai, or Hong Kong would not be possible.

Indeed, the massive fixities in our world could not be made without mobility, embodied, say, within the mobile labour forces that build and maintain the most stubborn and enduring objects. Take the Emirate of Dubai. Witnessing some billions of dollars of investment in tourism and business infrastructures in order to shift its economy away from oil production, the vast Burj Khalifa skyscraper-city, currently the tallest building in the world, was constructed on the back of an enormous mobile workforce (by whose blood it is stained according to The Guardian (27 May 2011)). Some 1.2 million migrant workers have migrated from India, Bangladesh and South Asia, as well as Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran, to the region to take up temporary employment as construction workers. Undergoing difficult labour conditions for better wages than they would receive at home, these workers subsequently send cash back to the families they have left behind (DeParle 2007). Graham suggests, however, that the vertical mobilities lacing the inner skeletons of these buildings, support not only highly questionable and risky labour practices, but, paradoxically, the most elite and privileged people. Among the ‘super-thin malls, elite condominiums, corporate HQs, expensive hotels and restaurants’, Graham finds the world's fastest elevators negotiating these mountains built in the skies. Forbes Magazine suggests, ‘If you want to know where the world's hottest economies are […] skip the GDP reports, employment statistics and consumer spending trends. All you need to do is answer one question: Where are the fastest elevators?' (Graham and Hewitt 2013: 83).

Tragically, the apparently mobile workforce building and servicing a building like this is not as footloose and fancy-free as we might like to imagine. The same Guardian article writes of an Indian cleaner who, when denied a holiday, jumped from a window of the Burj Khalifa (The Guardian, 27 May 2011). The juxtaposition of mobilities and verticalities – ascendant and descendant – has become horribly common. It is a disgusting metaphor we have to deal with to understand the kinds of labour relations some writers have compared to indentured servitude. Research has shown that many companies have withheld passports to prevent their employees from leaving. Many workers are earning to pay back the deposits that they pay in order to gain the work in the first place, before they are able to send back remittances. And the vast majority live in squalid conditions in temporary cities like Sonapur, in the Muhaisnah locality in the north-east of the city. All this points to what Sheller calls the crucial concern for ‘friction, turbulence, immobility, dwelling, pauses and stillness, as much as speed or flow’ in mobility studies (2011a: 3). In other words, different kinds and qualities of immobilities really matter as much as moving about.

What I am trying to say is that our mobility, in short, is vital, but so is immobility. Our life-worlds are mobile and immobile for us and with us, but sometimes they are against us.

It is exactly these sorts of facts and experiences which have led scholars from many different subject areas and disciplines to argue that life occurs, and perhaps increasingly so, On the Move (Cresswell 2006). So whilst mobility might be essential to the form of somewhere like a city, or a building, what does it say to the social lives of people inhabiting these mobile worlds? For the late sociologist John Urry, it appeared as if the social is mobility. In his ground-breaking book Sociology Beyond Societies (2000) Urry explained how ‘material transformations’ were ‘remaking the “social”’. By those transformations he was thinking of the mobilities of travel, the movements of images and especially information that were reconstructing the ‘social as society’ into the ‘social as mobility’ (Urry 2000: 2; Urry 2007). Similarly, for Cresswell (2006), mobility is how geographic movement becomes entangled in the way societies and cultures assign meaning through talk, images and other representations and live out their lives. Thought in this way, mobility changes the way we understand society, culture, politics and community; it fundamentally reimagines how we make sense of the world.

Big and Little Mobilities

This might provide a little pause for thought and help us contextualize some of the interest in mobilities with wider philosophies of process and movement. Henri Bergson (1911, 1950) is probably the most well-known philosopher of process. According to Bergson, mobility and any idea of a world-in-process lay below the individual's capability to perceive that reality. Bergson suggested that perception was rather like that of the snapshot photograph, wherein a moving environment is captured and locked down onto an immobile photograph.

The point of this discussion is to demonstrate what we might call a particular train of ‘mobile ontologies’ – a set of apprehensions about the world characterized by movement, flow and vortices of matter, even if things appear fixed. In many ways all of this movement can easily escape human experience and perception unless we are trained to look for and think about it. But just because all this motion and process may lie unnoticed by our experience, I do not believe they could or should not count as mobility or it is necessarily that useful to discount them. Rather, we might instead work to question the moments when these movements of matter come to matter as mobilities. When are they perceptible? When and how do they shape social relations? While we will deal with disasters and emergencies later in the book, moments of disaster provide some of the most obvious examples of highly volatile mobile materialities that – in certain instances – force themselves upon the register of societies and vulnerable populations who are confronted with them.

The Haiti earthquake of 2010 is extremely interesting in this regard. Not just for what Nigel Clark (2010) has called the ‘inhuman natures’ that ripped apart Haiti's housing stock and public utilities and infrastructure as previously benign movements of the earth became shockingly and violently real. For along with the earthquake came a severe outbreak of cholera which since 2010 has killed over 9,000 people. But the outbreak itself was found to have been introduced by UN peacekeepers carrying the cholera bacteria from Nepal (Montalto et al. 2013). For Mimi Sheller, this reminds us that ‘diseases too make use of vectors of mobility with no respect for the borders of states or islands, bodies or cells’ (Sheller 2013: 199). At the time of writing, current legal action is contesting the UN's biosecurity screening of the Nepalese forces and the negligence of a private contractor to install proper sewage infrastructure within the UN camp at Mirebelais (The Guardian, 18 August 2016).

The little things in life are clearly very very mobile. Yet these little things may move in very big ways. In the UK, the Department for the Environment, Fisheries and Food announced in 2005 that 25 per cent of all heavy goods movement was due to food (www.defra.gov.uk). In 2002, total food miles feeding the UK created 19 million tonnes of CO₂; 10 million of those were emitted in the UK and came almost entirely from road transport. During the ash cloud crisis of 2010, when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, spreading an enormous plume of ash travelling south-west across Europe, the resulting effective closure of much of Europe's airspace during several weeks in March and April severely damaged the Kenyan fruit and flower industry. Moments of disruption and breakdown (Graham 2010) often make previously imperceptible mobilities become their most visible.

Little movements of food also link up and merge disparate spaces like ingredients in a recipe. Thus one's plate and the food on it are simply a point on a journey of vectors of food-flow from fields, farms and vineyards in a kaleidoscope of places, some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• KEY IDEAS BOXES
• CASE STUDY BOXES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mobility studies
• 3 Meanings
• 4 Politics
• 5 Practices
• 6 Mediations
• 7 Mobile methodologies
• 8 Conclusion
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX