On the Move

Mobility in the Modern Western World

Timothy Cresswell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136083228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Geografía histórica

On the Move presents a rich history of one of the key concepts of modern life: mobility. Increasing mobility has been a constant throughout the modern era, evident in mass car ownership, plane travel, and the rise of the Internet. Typically, people have equated increasing mobility with increasing freedom. However, as Cresswell shows, while mobility has certainly increased in modern times, attempts to control and restrict mobility are just as characteristic of modernity. Through a series of fascinating historical episodes Cresswell shows how mobility and its regulation have been central to the experience of modernity.

Chapter 1
The Production of Mobilities: An Interpretive Framework

Moving your hand, walking, dancing, exercising, driving to work, moving home, going on holiday, marching, running away, immigrating, traveling, exploring, attending conferences. All of these are forms of mobility but they rarely enter each other’s orbit in social and cultural enquiry. The slippery and intangible nature of mobility makes it an elusive object of study. Yet study it we must for mobility is central to what it is to be human. It is a fundamental geographical facet of existence and, as such, provides a rich terrain from which narratives—and, indeed, ideologies—can be, and have been, constructed. From the first kicks of a newborn baby to the travels of international business people, mobility is everywhere. Mobility, it seems, is also ubiquitous in the pages of academia. It plays a central role in discussions of the body and society.¹ It courses through contemporary theorizations of the city.² Culture, we are told, no longer sits in places, but is hybrid, dynamic—more about routes than roots.³ The social is no longer seen as bound by “societies,” but as caught up in a complex array of twenty-first century mobilities.⁴ Philosophy and social theory look to the end of sedentarism and the rise of foundationless nomadism.⁵ Finally, but perhaps most importantly, mobility bears a number of meanings that circulate widely in the modern Western world. Mobility as progress, as freedom, as opportunity, and as modernity, sit side by side with mobility as shiftlessness, as deviance, and as resistance. Mobility, then, is more central to both the world and our understanding of it than ever before. And yet mobility itself, and what it means, remains unspecified. It is a kind of blank space that stands as an alternative to place, boundedness, foundations, and stability. This space needs examining, and that is the purpose of this book. With this in mind, it explores the geographical imaginations that lie behind mobilization in a diverse array of contexts. It investigates the ways in which mobilities have been given meaning within contexts of social and cultural power. How, in other words, mobility has emerged as an object of knowledge in a range of practices from physiology to international law, dance notation to architecture, and simultaneously, how imaginations of mobility have informed judgments about people and their practices over the last several centuries in the Western world. In order to provide an interpretive framework for these explorations it is first necessary to start, as it were, at the beginning.

Movement and Mobility

Let us begin with a basic signifier of mobility—getting from point A to point B.

A--------------------------->B

Mobility involves a displacement—the act of moving between locations. These locations may be towns or cities, or they may be points a few centimeters apart. This is the simplest understanding of mobility as it appears on maps of movements. In classic migration theory, for instance, the choice of whether or not to move would be the result of so-called push and pull factors in A and B, respectively. The content of the line between them would remain unexplored. The cumulative effects of these movements are also what remain taken for granted in more recent social theory where movement is coded as travel, nomadism, routes, or lines of flight. This line is a good starting point for such an exploration. I want to explore the content of the line that links A to B, to unpack it, to make sure it is not taken for granted.

The movements of people (and things) all over the world and at all scales are, after all, full of meaning. They are also products and producers of power. I want to make an analytical distinction here between movement and mobility. For the purposes of my argument, let us say that movement can be thought of as abstracted mobility (mobility abstracted from contexts of power). Movement, therefore, describes the idea of an act of displacement that allows people to move between locations (usually given as point A and point B in abstract and positivist discussions of migration). Movement is the general fact of displacement before the type, strategies, and social implications of that movement are considered.

We can think of movement, then, as the dynamic equivalent of location in abstract space—contentless, apparently natural, and devoid of meaning, history, and ideology. The critiques of abstract space and location are well known.⁶ Movement, as the dynamic equivalent of location, has not been given the same attention. If movement is the dynamic equivalent of location, then mobility is the dynamic equivalent of place. Place is a word we use in all manner of contexts in theoretical expositions and in everyday life. Within geographical theory and philosophy it has come to signify meaningful segments of space—locations imbued with meaning and power.⁷ A place is a center of meaning—we become attached to it, we fight over it and exclude people from it—we experience it. The same cannot be said of location. Why geographers have not subjected mobility to the same scrutiny as the more allegedly fixed and bounded categories of space, time, territory, and landscape is curious. I have frequently heard commentators at conferences talk of the rise of mobility in the modern world as the “end of geography.” I presume they do not mean the discipline, but even so, such a statement is thought provoking. What is not “geographical” (both in real world and disciplinary terms) about things and people on the move? Why is geography equated with fixity and stasis? Mobility is just as spatial—as geographical—and just as central to the human experience of the world, as place.

In this book, mobility as socially produced motion is understood through three relational moments. First, when talking of human mobility, we are talking about mobility as a brute fact—something that is potentially observable, a thing in the world, an empirical reality. This is the mobility measured and analyzed by modelers, migration theorists, and transport planners. It is the mobility captured by high-powered computer hardware and soft ware in sports science labs or animation studios. It is the motion tracked by closed circuit television and biometric systems in airports and elsewhere. Here mobility comes closest to pure motion and is at its most abstract. Second, there are ideas about mobility that are conveyed through a diverse array of representational strategies ranging from film to law, medicine to photography, literature to philosophy. These representations of mobility capture and make sense of it through the production of meanings that are frequently ideological. Mobility means this. Mobility means that. Thus the brute fact of getting from A to B becomes synonymous with freedom, with transgression, with creativity, with life itself. Third, mobility is practiced, it is experienced, it is embodied. Mobility is a way of being in the world. The way we walk, for instance, says much about us. We may be in love, we may be happy, we may be burdened and sad. We inhabit mobility differently according to our mood. Human mobility is an irreducibly embodied experience. Our feet may hurt as we walk, the wind might blow in our face, we may not be able to sleep as we fly from New York to London. Often how we experience mobility and the ways we move are intimately connected to meanings given to mobility through representation. Similarly, representations of mobility are based on ways in which mobility is practiced and embodied. As David Delaney has written, “human mobility implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes and categorical figures moving through representational spaces.”⁸ Mobile people are never simply people—they are dancers and pedestrians, drivers and athletes, refugees and citizens, tourists or businesspeople, men and women. This book is about the interface between mobile physical bodies on the one hand, and the represented mobilities on the other. To understand mobility without recourse to representation on the one hand or the material corporeality on the other is, I would argue, to miss the point.

Movement, Time, and Space

Movement is made up of time and space. It is the spatialization of time and temporalization of space. Any consideration of movement (and mobility) that does not take time and space into account is missing an important facet. Time and space, as Kant reminded us, are the fundamental axes around which life revolves—the most basic forms of classification. Certainly any material object has to have coordinates in time and space. Movement, as the displacement of an object from A to B, involves a passage of time and, simultaneously, a traversal of space. Time and space, however, cannot be simply taken for granted in the consideration of movement. Time and space are both the context for movement (the environment of possibility for movement to occur) and a product of movement. Moving people and objects are agents in the production of time and space. Perhaps the most well-known formulation of this is time–space compression—the effective shrinking of the globe by ever-increasing mobility at speed enabled by innovations in transportation and communications technology. Thus Marx was able to write of the annihilation of space by time. The success of railroad technology in the nineteenth century and the new modes of mobility that it enabled meant that things were, for all practical purposes, a lot closer.⁹ While the abstract idea of movement is composed of equally abstract notions of absolute time and space, the notion of mobility I want to propose here, as a thoroughly social facet of life imbued with meaning and power, is composed of elements of social time and social space.

The question of the social production of space and time has received sustained attention in the social sciences and humanities in recent years.¹⁰ While space has been produced through the division of the world into functional spaces (the processes of mapping and geometry, the classification of space as property, and the delineations of planners), time has become regulated and standardized as clock time, as the time of the timetable and the daily schedule. Both time and space, it has been argued, have been taken out of the world of nature and immediate experience and placed, instead, in the world of abstraction—abstraction ruled, for the most part, by the demands of trade and capital, but also by various forms of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism.¹¹

Clearly this process of the social production of abstract time and space has implications for the understanding of movement and mobility. Mobility, as a social product, does not exist in an abstract world of absolute time and space, but is a meaningful world of social space and social time. Mobility is also part of the process of the social production of time and space. Consider the story of the railroad as an example. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has described how the invention of the railroad and its rapid spread across the surface of the globe forced a fundamental rethinking of space. Distances were practically shrunk as it became possible to travel farther in a shorter time. The metropolis was conversely allowed to expand into the new suburbs as it became possible to travel farther between work and home. Indeed work and home became functionally separate spaces because of the new modes of mobility. As more and more people traveled at new speeds in trains, a new panoramic perception of space (as seen from the train window) emerged. For the first time it was possible to see the world as a continuous blur. Even the earliest English trains at a mere 20 to 30 miles per hour were three times faster than a coach. The effect was noted at the time in the Quarterly Review:

For instance, supposing that railroads … were to be suddenly established all over England, the whole population would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two thirds of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienated them. If the rate were to be repeated; our harbours, our dockyards, our towns, the whole of our rural population, would again not only draw nearer to each other by two-thirds, but all would proportionally approach the national hearth. As distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city.¹²

Finally the new modes of mobility enabled by the railroad reduced the distinctiveness of places—their auras. Without effective mobility over long distances at high speed, places served as local and unique markets selling their own products, which were tied to seasonal production. Transportation changed these products into commodities, as goods began to lose their spatial presence and became instead products of an increasingly expansive market.¹³ At the same time it became possible to visit these places as tourists—another factor, some have argued, in the erosion of local distinctiveness.

The railroad also deprived localities of their own time. In 1870 a traveler from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco would have passed through over two hundred time zones. Every town had their own time, tied more or less to the position of the sun in the sky. This system worked until the building of the transcontinental railroad (1869); the increased speed of the railroad made this dangerous as it became possible for two trains to be in the same time and space with potentially fatal consequences. On November 18, 1883, the railroad enforced four uniform time zones in the United States. In 1884 this was expanded to the globe with the designation of Greenwich as the prime meridian and the division of the world into twenty-four time zones. Time, thanks to the railroad, was increasingly rationalized, mechanized, and timetabled as people accustomed themselves to tickets, labels, luggage, clocks, timetables, and uniforms. As Ralph Harrington has put it, “The passengers were as much a component of the great railway machine as the tracks and trains, and just as all the movements of the mechanical components had to be controlled if the machine was to operate effectively, so the behaviour of the human traveller had to be regulated with mechanical efficiency.”¹⁴ Clearly, then, mobility is not just a function of time and space, but an agent in their production. While the movement of the train (from Paris to Lyon, say) occurs in abstract, absolute space and time, it plays a central role in the production of social time and space. Here, movement becomes mobility.

Ideology, Scale, and Mobility

Mobility seems a chaotic thing—chaotic in the sense that moving things are often chaotic in the way we experience them. Stationary, sedentary life, on the other hand, is hard to see as chaos. Some might say that little of interest can be said about what links the movement of blood in the body and movement of jet planes around the globe. The fact of movement, skeptics might suggest, is both obvious and uninteresting. What connects mobility at the scale of the body to mobility at other scales is meaning. Stories about mobility, stories that are frequently ideological, connect blood cells to street patterns, reproduction to space travel. Movement is rarely just movement; it carries with it the burden of meaning and it is this meaning that jumps scales. It is this issue of meaning that remains absent from accounts of mobility in general, and because it remains absent, important connections are not made. Writing on mobility remains either very specific (about commuter patterns, migrations, or dance for instance) or maddeningly abstract—the kind of work that talks of points A and B. Connections need to be made between the determinedly different approaches applied to the different facets of human mobility listed above. I am inspired here by Daniel Miller, who in an entirely different context, wrote that it was his belief that...