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Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society
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.
386 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 19, 2007
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November 18, 2024Like so many of those texts that came to be known as theory, Mobilities contains utter subtle brilliance, utter banality, and utter nonsense – often within the same sentence.
Firstly, Urry is clearly a sensitive thinker on a phenomenological and speculative level, someone attuned to the nuances by which we as humans navigate the world. The only problem is that these are, at their core, speculations and observations, and when you string them together without grounding, you get little more than a Gish-gallop. These could have been a basis for magnificent belles-lettres, something on the order of a Woolf or a Sebald, but they don't count for much in terms of rigorous spatial ideas. In Urry's world, who cares about the territory when the map is just this beautiful?
And when he did look for evidence, he quoted Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. Jesus fucking Christ.
Firstly, Urry is clearly a sensitive thinker on a phenomenological and speculative level, someone attuned to the nuances by which we as humans navigate the world. The only problem is that these are, at their core, speculations and observations, and when you string them together without grounding, you get little more than a Gish-gallop. These could have been a basis for magnificent belles-lettres, something on the order of a Woolf or a Sebald, but they don't count for much in terms of rigorous spatial ideas. In Urry's world, who cares about the territory when the map is just this beautiful?
And when he did look for evidence, he quoted Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. Jesus fucking Christ.
November 29, 2016
This book is directly relevant to my PhD project, I have a lot of thoughts about it, and thus there is a real danger that this review could turn into a mini-dissertation. To prevent this, I'm imposing bullet points on myself.
Four elements of this book that I found especially interesting and helpful:
- Automobility as a dominant system, taking over from railways, which in turn took over from walking in the nineteenth century. This understanding draws on complexity theory, which suggests that the dominance of a particular system will only break at a nearly-impossible-to-foresee tipping point.
- The implications that each system change has had for time. Railways imposed a single national clock time and their timetables instituted a social norm of punctuality. Conversely, cars have imposed a fragmented, flexible sense of time, made of many tiny moments all of which must be used productively lest they be wasted. Latterly, mobile phones have wholly undermined the concept of punctuality by creating the conditions for flexible, fluid social arrangements, which have become (to my personal annoyance) the norm.
- Network capital as a more complex, nuanced basis for inequality comparisons to be made. Although naturally more difficult to calculate (that said, a more detailed methodology could be worked up and probably already has been), it offers a huge improvement on the crudity of GDP per capita.
- The nature of airports as peculiar spaces of surveillance, control, homogeneity of place but enormous heterogeneity of people. Urry's analysis reads well with Rem Koolhaas on 'The Generic City'; both comment that urban space is becoming more and more like an airport.
A criticism I would make:
- I have no objections to the content of the book, but deplore the tendency in sociology to turn nouns into verbs. It sounds so awkward! Also, the proof reader of this book seems to have stopped paying attention about halfway through, letting through some careless errors (GDP per capital, huh?). This did not undermine my interest in nor enjoyment of the book, however I am a pedant and notice such things.
Also, a caution:
- This book was published in 2007 and thus the chapter on communications already reads as somewhat quaint. Smartphones, cheap laptops, tablets, facebook, twitter, apps, etc have all eventuated since. Nonetheless, it does predict that communications technology will continue to become more mobile, further embedded in lifestyles, and will continue to entrench commoditisation and surveillance (cf PRISM et al).
My favourite aspect:
- That it ended with two scenarios of the future seen through the mobility lens, both of which are dystopian. Urry, like me, takes the view that either climate change will result in systemic collapse or the worst vagaries will be averted by policy interventionism. (The latter scenario is very well illustrated by MacLeod's novel 'Intrusion'.) Thus, Urry is certain that the inevitability of automobility will be broken, either by a generalised environmental and social disaster, or by government interventionism. My PhD is about the latter scenario.
To quote from the final page:
In conclusion:
- I can't judge how accessible this book is to the general reader, but I found it fairly easy to read and well-argued. Sociology perspectives on mobility make for a lovely breath of fresh air amongst the tedious, narrow, endlessly quantitative economic methodologies that abound in transport literature.
Four elements of this book that I found especially interesting and helpful:
- Automobility as a dominant system, taking over from railways, which in turn took over from walking in the nineteenth century. This understanding draws on complexity theory, which suggests that the dominance of a particular system will only break at a nearly-impossible-to-foresee tipping point.
- The implications that each system change has had for time. Railways imposed a single national clock time and their timetables instituted a social norm of punctuality. Conversely, cars have imposed a fragmented, flexible sense of time, made of many tiny moments all of which must be used productively lest they be wasted. Latterly, mobile phones have wholly undermined the concept of punctuality by creating the conditions for flexible, fluid social arrangements, which have become (to my personal annoyance) the norm.
- Network capital as a more complex, nuanced basis for inequality comparisons to be made. Although naturally more difficult to calculate (that said, a more detailed methodology could be worked up and probably already has been), it offers a huge improvement on the crudity of GDP per capita.
- The nature of airports as peculiar spaces of surveillance, control, homogeneity of place but enormous heterogeneity of people. Urry's analysis reads well with Rem Koolhaas on 'The Generic City'; both comment that urban space is becoming more and more like an airport.
A criticism I would make:
- I have no objections to the content of the book, but deplore the tendency in sociology to turn nouns into verbs. It sounds so awkward! Also, the proof reader of this book seems to have stopped paying attention about halfway through, letting through some careless errors (GDP per capital, huh?). This did not undermine my interest in nor enjoyment of the book, however I am a pedant and notice such things.
Also, a caution:
- This book was published in 2007 and thus the chapter on communications already reads as somewhat quaint. Smartphones, cheap laptops, tablets, facebook, twitter, apps, etc have all eventuated since. Nonetheless, it does predict that communications technology will continue to become more mobile, further embedded in lifestyles, and will continue to entrench commoditisation and surveillance (cf PRISM et al).
My favourite aspect:
- That it ended with two scenarios of the future seen through the mobility lens, both of which are dystopian. Urry, like me, takes the view that either climate change will result in systemic collapse or the worst vagaries will be averted by policy interventionism. (The latter scenario is very well illustrated by MacLeod's novel 'Intrusion'.) Thus, Urry is certain that the inevitability of automobility will be broken, either by a generalised environmental and social disaster, or by government interventionism. My PhD is about the latter scenario.
To quote from the final page:
'...mobility futures seem poised between a breakdown of many systems and networks through the multiple feedback loops of global heating and a world in where the systems and networks work only too well in 'securing' many mobilities and especially the car system, and 'securing' peoples within multiple panoptic environments.
...the analysis [...] suggests that global futures are poised between an Orwellian or a Hobbesian future, between the devil and the deep blue sea.'
In conclusion:
- I can't judge how accessible this book is to the general reader, but I found it fairly easy to read and well-argued. Sociology perspectives on mobility make for a lovely breath of fresh air amongst the tedious, narrow, endlessly quantitative economic methodologies that abound in transport literature.
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March 28, 2016This book is a legacy. John Urry was my adviser's PhD adviser. I think of it as a passing torch.
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