Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society

John Urry, Margaret Grieco, Margaret Grieco

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317095132
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

Bringing together the leading authors currently working at the intersection of social science and transport science, this volume provides a companion to the well-established and extensive international Transport and Society series. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, offers closer and richer consideration of the issues, practices and structures of multiple mobilities which shape the current world but which have typically been overlooked or minimised. What this approach seeks to do is not only draw attention to many new areas of research and investigation relating to mobile lives, but also to point to new theories and methods by which such lives have to be researched and examined. Such new theories and methods are relevant both to rethinking 'transport' studies as such but are also recasting 'societal' studies as 'transport' so that it comes out of the ghetto and enters mainstream social science.

Chapter 1
Does Mobility Have a Future?

John Urry

Introduction

Lives in the rich North have been premised upon increasing incomes, wealth, security, movement, wellbeing and longevity. This was the modern dream which, in that rich North, had apparently been set in stone certainly since 1945. The twentieth century looked like it was here for good especially as its only rival, state socialism in Eastern Europe, had imploded in and around 1989. Indeed the ‘roaring [nineteen] nineties’ made it seem as though the rich North had struck gold. The economies of North America, Western Europe and parts of Asia seemed to be set fair for many decades of growth fuelled by the high carbon systems of production and consumption. The twenty-first century appeared to be business as usual, more of the same, as these high carbon systems increasingly spread around the world engulfing so many different countries and cultures. High carbon consumption seemed to have ‘no borders’ and no ‘limits to growth’.

There is in the modern world an accumulation of movement analogous to the accumulation of capital – repetitive movement or circulation made possible by diverse, interdependent systems of movement. The human ‘mastery’ of nature was effectively achieved through movement over, under and across it. In the twentieth century, this becomes even more marked especially beginning with a new metabolism in the US. An array of powerful, high carbon systems was unleashed:

• the development of electric power and national grids so ensuring that more or less every home in the global north is lit, heated and populated with electric-based consumer goods (resting especially on coal and gas);

• the spreading of the steel-and-petroleum car (now over 650 million cars worldwide) and associated roads and a widely distributed, or sprawling, infrastructure linking most places of residence, work and leisure;

• the development of suburban housing distant from places of work and which has to be commuted to by car/bus and can be filled with household consumption goods powered by electricity;

• the emergence of various electricity-based technologies, stand alone telephones, computers, laptops, networked computers, mobile phones, Blackberries and so on, meaning that network colleagues, friends and families can now be more geographically dispersed;

• the proliferation of many specialised leisure sites, supermarkets, fast food outlets, national parks, sports stadia, theme parks, most necessitating travel from home and neighbourhood especially by car and new systems of air travel (also normally involving the long distance movements of objects and water).

These high carbon systems were trialled and developed as mass forms within the US before and after the Second World War. They were a product of the American Dream and involved partial public funding and their growing path dependent interrelationships. The American Century, as the twentieth century should be termed, involved developing the conditions for these five interdependent systems. Thus there were established in the twentieth century hyper-high carbon societies involving gigantic building, profligate use of energy and water, the vast use of oil to transport people and objects in and out and multiple addictions generated under the name of ‘choice’.

But the early twenty-first century involved a new scale, impact and quality of ‘disruption’ in the heart of the rich North: including 11 September and other bombings, heatwaves killing thousands, ‘oil wars’, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 Great Crash and Depression. At the beginning of the new century there are overlapping system changes, and a global scale of disruption as many systems go into reverse and there is the undermining of the long-term resource base of modern societies. There are many limits suddenly, many ‘bads’.

Mobilities

Movement became significant in the contemporary world – indeed the freedom of movement, as represented in popular media, politics and the public sphere, is the ideology and utopia of the twenty-first century. The UN and the EU both enshrine rights to movement in their constitutions. More than knowledge, more than celebrity, more than economic success itself, it is the infinity of promised and assumed consumption possibilities arising from multiple movements that characterises the neo-liberal dream. Also many people have mobility thrust upon them as the number of refugees, asylum seekers and slaves hit record levels in the early twenty-first century.

More specifically we can identify five interdependent ‘mobilities’ that are producing social life organised across multiple distances and which form (and reform) its contemporary contours. These five interdependent mobilities are:

• the corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure, migration and escape, organised in terms of contrasting time-space patterns ranging from daily commuting to once-in-a-lifetime exile;

• the physical movement of objects include food and water to producers, consumers and retailers; as well as the sending and receiving of presents and souvenirs;

• the imaginative travel effected through the images of places and peoples appearing on and moving across multiple print and visual media and which then construct and reconstruct visions of place, travel and consumption;

• virtual travel often in real time transcending geographical and social distance and forming and reforming multiple communities at-a-distance;

• communicative travel through person-to-person messages via personal messages, postcards, texts, letters, telegraph, telephone, fax and mobile.

Especially significant are fast modes of travel, often at the expense of slow modes such as walking and cycling. While in 1800 Americans travelled 50 metres a day principally by foot, horse and carriage, they now travel 50 kilometres a day, principally by car and air (Buchanan 2002: 121. See also Kellerman 2006, Cresswell 2006, Urry 2007). Today it is estimated that world citizens move 23 billion kilometres each year. By 2050 it is predicted that if resource constraints do not intervene this will increase fourfold to 106 billion (Schafer and Victor 2000: 171). This growth in fast travel stems from various interdependent processes.

• the growth of automobility throughout the world increasingly in the world’s two most populous societies of China and India;

• the rapid growth of cheap air travel based on new budget business models;

• a significant resurgence of rail transport especially of high speed trains across Europe and Japan;

• new kinds of globally significant themed leisure environments that have to be visited from afar;

• increased ‘miles’ both flown and travelling on the world’s 90,000 ships by manufactured goods, components and foodstuffs;

• much greater distances travelled by work colleagues, members of leisure organisations, families and friends in order to sustain patterns of everyday life that are ‘at-a-distance’

• carbon use within transport accounts for 24 per cent of total greenhouse emissions -second fastest growing source of such emissions and expected to double by 2050.

There are many different social practices in the contemporary world, each involving specific moving assemblages of humans, objects, technologies and scripts:

• asylum, refugee and homeless travel and migration;

• business and professional travel;

• discovery travel of students, au pairs and other young people on their ‘overseas experience’, where this constitutes a ‘rite of passage’ and involving going overseas to civilisational centres;

• medical travel to spas, hospitals, dentists, opticians and so on;

• military mobility of armies, tanks, helicopters, aircraft, rockets, spyplanes, satellites and so on which have many spinoffs into civilian uses;

• post-employment travel and the forming of transnational lifestyles within retirement;

• ‘trailing travel’ of children, partners, other relatives and domestic servants;

• travel and migration across the key nodes within a given diaspora such as that of overseas Chinese;

• travel of service workers around the world and especially to global cities including the contemporary flows of slaves (estimated at 27m);

• tourist travel to visit places and events and in relationship to various senses especially through the ‘tourist gaze’

• visiting friends and relatives but where those friendship networks may also be on the move;

• work-related travel including commuting which is itself increasingly varied and complex.

One consequence of these social practices is the variety of people’s social networks and how they make the complexities of social life work within the social context of others who are often ‘at-a-distance’. These others, family, friends, work and leisure colleagues, are themselves ‘networked’. Making social life ‘work’ thus involves much scheduling and rescheduling of events, meetings, dates, trips, video-conferences and holidays. Such scheduling is desynchronised from certain neighbourhood settings. There is more of a do-it-yourself, individualised time-space patterning in and through which people in the richer third of the world can cover more ground, consume abundantly, live more varied lives but need to be on the go ‘coordinating life’.¹ At least for the rich third of the world, partners, family and friends are more a matter of choice, increasingly spread around the world. There is a ‘supermarket’ of friends and acquaintances, and people depend upon an array of interdependent systems of movement to connect with this distributed array of networks but often meet up within distinct places.

Life in such a world is hurried and what Linder termed ‘harried’, as it crisscrosses the globe it presses in upon the self, on its everyday routines, scripts of selfhood and textures of emotion.² The rise of a mobile society reshapes the self – its everyday activities, interpersonal relations with others, as well as connections with the wider world. Such individualised mobility routinely implicates personal life in a complex web of social, cultural and economic networks that can span the globe or at least certain nodes across parts of the globe. This engenders the ‘small world’ experience by which those meeting in distant places discover that they are connected through a relatively short set of intermediaries. As many people state: ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it?’

Life ‘on the move’ is the kind of life in which the capacity to be ‘elsewhere’ at a different time from others is central. Email, SMS texting, MP3 audio, personal DVD recorders, internet telephonic services enable people to seek escape from the constraints of pre-existing neighbourhoods under more fluid patterns and practices. Much equipment becomes part of that life.

Mobile practices also presuppose many other people whose lives can be relatively immobilised. These include check-in clerks, hotel room and aircraft cleaners, the repairers of mobile phone masts, those making fashionable clothes in sweatshops, baggage handlers, security guards on Iraqi pipelines and the conference organisation teams, who are all on-hand around the world in order to make a mobile ‘just-in-time’ life on the move just about feasible. Life ‘on the move’ appears to unfold faster and faster in the early days of the twenty-first century, as people become more reliant upon interdependent digital systems. Through the use of miniaturised mobilities (mobiles, laptops, iPods) people track the twists and turns of social life inherited and co-created with others. Through ‘do-it-yourself’ scheduling and re-scheduling people plan courses of action and forge plans with others that comprise complex interplays of connection and disconnection (Southerton 2001).

Places of Consumption

Thus far I have set out various elements of a high carbon mobile life. But such mobile practices have further major high carbon effects upon those very places where these networks intermittently encounter each other. Many such places have become centres for such encounters, for ‘meetingness’. In the last couple of decades one place in particular has become emblematic of the new world order, the small former British Protectorate of Dubai which only became independent in 1971.

Dubai started drilling for oil in 1966 but soon the oil began to run out so a gigantic visitor, real estate and consumption economy replaced it. Instead of being a major oil producer, over 90 per cent of Dubai’s revenue is now non-oil related (Davidson 2008: 1). Dubai is a huge consumer of oil, used to build islands, hotels and attractions in what was the world’s largest building site, to transport in and out very large numbers of visitors and workers, and to provide spectacular cooled environments for visitors where average temperatures are over 40°C. This is a place of energy excess, of hugely high temperatures because of the unrelenting sun and a vast consumption of energy especially by air conditioners blowing full blast into the open air to make gardens cooler, and the indoor ski resort where sub-zero temperatures are maintained in the middle of a desert. Not surprisingly the UAE ranks second in the global league table of per capita carbon emissions, beaten only by its neighbour, Qatar.

The Dubai skyline has shown dozens of megaprojects on the go. These include two palm island developments that extend the coastline by 120 kilometres; a string of new islands shaped like the world; vast shopping complexes; a domed ski resort and other major sports venues; the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa; the world’s largest hotel, the Asia-Asia with 6,500 rooms; and the world’s first 7-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab with 100-mile views.³ This is a place of literal monumental excess. Dubai’s ambition is to be number one in the world. If it is to become such a luxury-consumer paradise especially for Middle Eastern and South Asian visitors ‘it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess’ (Davis 2007: 52). And it has sought to achieve this through architectural gigantism and perfectibility, with many massive simulacra for play, of dinosaurs, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, and a snow mountain, simulacra more perfect than any original. This is a place of overconsumption, of shopping, eating and drinking, but also of extensive prostitution and gambling. Guilt, in what is nominally an Islamic country, is not to consume to the ‘limit’ (see Diken and Lausten 2005).

Dubai is only made possible by migrant contract labourers travelling from Pakistan and India and then bound to a single employer (Davis 2007: 64–6). This is accumulation through dispossession (Harvey 2005). And as befits a paradise of consumption, ‘its official national holiday … is the celebrated Shopping Festival, a month-long extravaganza’ (Davis 2007: 60). There is a YouTube video on Dubai entitled Do Buy. It is a ‘city built on glitz and bling’ (Bedell 2010). It thus developed into the iconic place of consumption excess, both by visitors and also by (rich) locals. As Davis and Monk say: ‘the winner-...