---
title: "Mobilities"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilities"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:58:08.316784+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Origins ==
Sheller and Urry (2006, 215) place mobilities in the sociological tradition by defining the primordial theorist of mobilities as Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel's essays, "Bridge and Door" (Simmel, 1909 / 1994) and "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (Simmel, 1903 / 2001) identify a uniquely human will to connection, as well as the urban demands of tempo and precision that are satisfied with mobility.
The more immediate precursors of contemporary mobilities research emerged in the 1990s (Cresswell 2011, 551). Historian James Clifford (1997) advocated for a shift from deep analysis of particular places to the routes connecting them. Marc Augé (1995) considered the philosophical potential of an anthropology of "non-places" like airports and motorways that are characterized by constant transition and temporality. Sociologist Manuel Castells outlined a "network society" and suggested that the "space of places" is being surpassed by a "space of flows." Feminist scholar Caren Kaplan (1996) explored questions about the gendering of metaphors of travel in social and cultural theory.
The contemporary paradigm under the moniker "mobilities" appears to originate with the work of sociologist John Urry. In his book, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, Urry (2000, 1) presents a "manifesto for a sociology that examines the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities."
This is consistent with the aims and scope of the eponymous journal Mobilities, which "examines both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private spaces, and the travel of material things in everyday life" (Taylor and Francis, 2011).
In 2006, Mimi Sheller and John Urry published an oft-cited paper that examined the mobilities paradigm as it was just emerging, exploring its motivations, theoretical underpinnings, and methodologies. Sheller and Urry specifically focused on automobility as a powerful socio-technical system that "impacts not only on local public spaces and opportunities for coming together, but also on the formation of gendered subjectivities, familial and social networks, spatially segregated urban neighborhoods, national images and aspirations to modernity, and global relations ranging from transnational migration to terrorism and oil wars" (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 209). This was further developed by the journal Mobilities (Hannam, Sheller and Urry, 2006). 
Mobilities can be viewed as an extension of the "spatial turn" in the arts and sciences in the 1980s, in which scholars began "to interpret space and the spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and interpretive power as have traditionally been given to time and history (the historicality of human life) on one hand, and to social relations and society (the sociality of human life) on the other" (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 216; Engel and Nugent, 2010, 1; Soja, 1999 / 2005, 261).
Engel and Nugent (2010) trace the conceptual roots of the spatial turn to Ernst Cassirer and Henri Lefebvre (1974), although Fredric Jameson appears to have coined the epochal usage of the term for the 1980s paradigm shift. Jameson (1988 / 2003, 154) notes that the concept of the spatial turn "has often seemed to offer one of the more productive ways of distinguishing postmodernism from modernism proper, whose experience of temporality -- existential time, along with deep memory -- it is henceforth conventional to see as dominant of the high modern."
For Oswin & Yeoh (2010) mobility seems to be inextricably intertwined with late-modernity and the end of the nation-state. The sense of mobility makes us to think in migratory and tourist fluxes as well as the necessary infrastructure for that displacement takes place.
P. Vannini (2012) opted to see mobility as a projection of existent cultural values, expectancies and structures that denotes styles of life. Mobility after all would not only generate effects on people's behaviour but also specific styles of life. Vannini explains convincingly that on Canada's coast, the values of islanders defy the hierarchal order in populated cities from many perspectives. Islanders prioritize the social cohesion and trust of their communities before the alienation of mega-cities. There is a clear physical isolation that marks the boundaries between urbanity and rurality. From another view, nonetheless, this ideological dichotomy between authenticity and alienation leads residents to commercialize their spaces to outsiders. Although the tourism industry is adopted in these communities as a form of activity, many locals have historically migrated from urban populated cities.

== Mobilities and transportation geography ==
The intellectual roots of mobilities in sociology distinguish it from traditional transportation studies and transportation geography, which have firmer roots in mid 20th century positivist spatial science.
Cresswell (2011, 551) presents six characteristics distinguishing mobilities from prior approaches to the study of migration or transport: