Dwelling in Mobile Times

Places, Practices and Contestations

Sybille Frank, Lars Meier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138717596
• eBook ISBN: 9781351766524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In an era of increasing mobilities, places of residence are still vital. Unlike commuting, migrating or travelling, dwelling usually evokes – at least in modern Western thought – the idea of an immobile, private place to rest. This book explores the places, spaces and practices of dwelling in mobile times, and considers dwelling under the umbrella of broader transformations in society. The manifestations of these transformations are carved out on the level of everyday practices and experiences.

Bringing together eight case studies from Europe, the USA and Asia on subjects such as gentrification, homelessness and displaced persons, multi-local and diasporic lifeworlds, professional elites, and tourism, the book explores various and complex entanglements of mobilities and dwelling in detail. In doing so, the contributors critically analyse who may be, or has to be, mobile under which circumstances at present. This book thus demonstrates that mobility is more than movement between localities, and that to dwell is more than to be at a locality. Instead, mobilities and dwelling are both shaped and challenged by strong but shifting power relations and are thus deeply contested. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Dwelling in mobile times: places, practices and contestations

Lars Meier^a and Sybille Frank^b

^aInstitute for Employment Research (IAB), Research Department: Joblessness and Social Inclusion, Nuremberg, Germany; ^bDepartment of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT

Mobile people dwell in local environments. The present special issue considers the relation between mobility and dwelling. This introduction to the special issue on ‘(Im)mobilities of dwelling: Places and practices’ provides a general introduction to places and practices of dwelling of highly mobile people and discusses why it is a promising subject for both cultural and mobilities studies that still needs to be addressed in its full theoretical and empirical significance. We carve out the state-of-the-art of research regarding (im)mobilities of dwelling and argue that dwelling and mobility are also an issue of power relations and contestations. Against this backdrop we demonstrate that mobility and dwelling are embedded in broader transformations of society, social inequalities and home. Moreover, this introduction demonstrates how the subsequent papers contribute to this integrated perspective on the mobile–immobile nexus.

Mobilities such as commuting between places of work and places of residence, migrating, being a tourist or fleeing from bad circumstances to a new place are accompanied by reaching, living, creating, experiencing, leaving, maybe also by being caught in concrete places. As we move from place to place, mobilities are closely interrelated to immobilities. This interrelation, however, may take various forms if one looks at the everyday practices of dwelling in mobile times. People leave dwellings in order to go to work, visit friends or business partners, travel leisurely around the world or to take up a new residence either voluntarily or involuntarily. But people also stay in dwellings in order to receive guests, arrange objects and socialize in them. People also rest, sleep, grow lonely or die in dwellings. In recent times, practices of dwelling have been put more and more on the move, since they are being transferred to new dwellings time and again, for example in case of ultra-mobile people.

Following the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social and cultural sciences, various studies have analysed practices of mobilities as well as their relationship with broader developments of society (Cresswell and Merriman 2011). Even if these works shed light on spatial practices observed in airports (Gottdiener 2001, Adey 2010a), border spaces and roads (Featherstone et al. 2004, Merriman 2007), their focal point is not on modes of dwelling, but on the ways spatial infrastructures enable or disable the mobility of subjects/sensuous bodies as well as of objects, ideas and images (Frank and Steets 2010). The relationship between mobilities, immobilities and moorings has been widely discussed over the last years (Urry 2003, Adey 2006, Cresswell 2006, Hannam et al. 2006, Sheller 2011, Cresswell 2012, Söderström et al. 2013). Accordingly, moorings have been considered essential for mobile subjects. For Urry (2007) moorings accompany mobilities because mobilities require fixed and materialized facilities such as the infrastructures of servers, airports or highways (Graham and Marvin 2001, Cresswell and Merriman 2011). These can be exemplified also as nodes in global networks that are spanned by spaces of flows (Castells 1996) or as the new centres of a globalized world, the Global Cities (Sassen 2001). But besides those technologic and material spatially fixed recourses also the mobile individuals stand still, rest and are related to localities (Gustafson 2009). Even if this seems to be sometimes overlooked in the context of the mobility turn, localities and places of residence are still vital (Büscher et al. 2010). Correspondingly, our special issue adds to a strand of mobility research that has put its focus on the spatial contexts of (im)mobilities (Skelton 2013).

Also mobile people dwell, are immersed in a local environment and are in the perspective of Heidegger (1952) and in that of phenomenology (Tuan 1977, Relph 1985, Seamon and Mugerauer 1985, Ingold 2000, Cloke and Jones 2001, Frers 2013) inseparable from the world. This ‘Dasein’ as way of being embedded in the world is often exemplified by Heidegger through romanticized harmonious rural settings such as a farmhouse in the German Black Forest (Heidegger 1952). But dwelling is also an issue of power and contestations – as it is realized in processes such as segregation, gentrification or displacement and in socio-spatial forms such as gated communities or shanty towns – and this special issue considers it as such in different spatial settings. It explores the significance of dwelling as a social experience in mobile times and discovers how mobile people dwell in places with the aim to analyse such relations between mobility and dwelling.

Unlike commuting, migrating or travelling, dwelling usually evokes, at least in modern Western thought, the idea of an immobile place to rest. Dwelling is often considered to be solely local. This perspective is accompanied by an understanding of place as being rooted. We follow a critique on such a conception of place and understand place as being porous and ‘open to the externally relational’ (Massey 2005, p. 183). Such a conception allows considering mobility and dwelling as integrated. To dwell means also to dwell in a place that is open to an outer world and that is under influence by mobility practices of mobile persons, for example, who are not only crossing a place but are also leaving an impact. This special issue explicates this integrative perspective in the subsequent three dimensions: (1) Mobility, dwelling and broader transformations of society; (2) Social inequalities, power relations and contestations of (im)mobility and dwelling and (3) Dwelling and home.

Mobility, dwelling and broader transformations of society

This special issue considers dwelling and mobility under the umbrella of broader transformations in society and carves out the manifestations of these transformations on the level of everyday practices and experiences.

With reference to intensified movements such as that of goods, information, capital and people, a ‘mobility turn’ (Cresswell 2006, Urry 2007, Canzler et al. 2008, Adey et al. 2014) has taken place in the social sciences that led to a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) and sparked a vast interdisciplinary academic debate that has lasted for over a decade. As a consequence mobility is being perceived ‘as a key component of the world today’ (Adey 2010b). The main aim was to challenge the ways in which much social science research has been ‘a-mobile’ (Sheller and Urry 2006, p. 208) and to work on a ‘sociology beyond societies’ in a world conceptualized as borderless (Urry 2000). But obviously, mobility is not a new phenomenon in a new era, just think of the colonial period, travel or mass migrations in former times, for example, or everyday bodily practices and movements.

What is different are today’s concrete everyday mobile practices such as air travel or video conferencing (Strengers 2014) that are no longer typical mainly for businesses but are today ubiquitous also in many people’s leisure time activities. Smart phones and the use of the World Wide Web allow staying connected while being mobile. But also the spread of cell phones and the lower costs of telephoning in general allows frequent communication over distance (Goggin 2006, Horst 2006, Thompson 2009) that ‘link migrants and homelands in ways that are deeply meaningful to people on both ends of the line’ (Vertovec 2004, p. 13). This allows also the development of new social relations as is the case within transnational families (Meier 2016a) that span different countries. Personal mobilities (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2009) such as commuting between workplace and residence, but also seeing family members and friends elsewhere have increased in general with more accessible, much faster and much cheaper transport and communication technologies.

Such changes are not only associated with the development of new technologies of transport and communication, but are also related to economic and political restructuring efforts as discussed in globalization theories (Harvey 1989, Castells 1996). In the recent era of ‘flexible accumulation’ with its new sectors of production, finance services and markets David Harvey has demonstrated that labour processes and labour markets but also consumption have become more flexible. Labour markets have undergone heavy restructuring with more flexible work regimes (Benner 2002) and flexible project-based work (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Time horizons of private and public decisions have shrunk and the speed up of economic processes but also of social life can be described as a new round in ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989). Those transformations have led to a new status of ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa 2013) with a pressing need of flexibility (Sennett 1998) in the so-called ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000), the era of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey 1989) or in ‘late modernity’ (Giddens 1991, Hall 1992a).

Today it has become easier to be mobile also at long distances and across borders of districts or nation states. In some cases, this allows people to move away from bad circumstances. But it has also become a norm to be mobile with more business trips and holidays, and to visit some of the iconic places the images of which are incessantly circulated through global communications media (Frank 2016a). More generally it is common to leave a locality for better job possibilities, to earn sufficient money and to dwell somewhere else. This is not only true for professionals moving to urban centres (see Meier 2015, Hilti 2016, in this issue, Kim 2016, in this issue) with developed service sector workplaces, but also for migrants sending remittance from the country of destination back to the country of origin (Martonea et al. 2011, Singh et al. 2012). Mobility has become a dominant discourse as an ideal of qualification (Brodersen 2013). It is a demand that is creating pressure for individuals to accomplish (Lyons et al. 2011). This is not only true for external forces requiring people to become mobile, for example being relocated by the employer or having to take a job or dwell somewhere else as a consequence of a regional crisis. But mobility as a demand to fulfil can also be recognized by the voluntary will of the individual to dwell in a new locality such as that of lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston 2014) or of tourists in hotels or resorts (see Frank 2016b, in this issue). Because being mobile might allow climbing the social ladder or keeping a good social position and delivers a higher amount of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) and to improve the own curriculum vitae. This special issue concentrates on dwellings as places to negotiate such demands imposed by an increasingly mobile society.

Mobilities also appear involuntarily such as long-standing residents being pushed out of places due to economic or political reasons (see Krase 2016, in this issue), refugees from Southern Europe who decide to move to Northern countries (see Holmberg and Persson 2016, in this issue), internally displaced persons in Georgia (see Brun 2016, in this issue), or homeless persons who are chased out and walk around the city to find shelter (see Kerr 2016, in this issue).

Material, political, cultural and affective dimensions of social life and space are interrelated in both permanent and temporal engagements in dwelling. This special issue analyses how dwelling is practiced in transformed societies. The transformations that have led to more mobility are accompanied by transformations in the arrangements and forms of dwellings as well. This is not only true because dwelling has become in more cases a multi-sited issue that we will consider in greater detail below, but also with respect to the material forms of dwelling such as its architecture. So more mobile and temporary elements such as moveable walls and desk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Dwelling in mobile times: places, practices and contestations
• 2. Seeing residential (im)mobilities in New York City
• 3. ‘Almost like I am in Jail’: homelessness and the sense of immobility in Cleveland, Ohio
• 4. Dwelling in the Temporary: The involuntary mobility of displaced Georgians in rented accommodation
• 5. Ephemeral Urban Topographies of Swedish Roma: On dwelling at the mobile–immobile nexus
• 6. Multi-local lifeworlds: between movement and mooring
• 7. Dwelling in different localities: Identity performances of a white transnational professional elite in the City of London and the Central Business District of Singapore
• 8. Dwelling-in-motion: Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in the Swiss Alps
• 9. Diasporic daughters and digital media: ‘willing to go anywhere for a while’
• Index