FROM SPATIAL TURN TO MOBILITIES TURN

FROM SPATIAL TURN TO MOBILITIES TURN 

"This article reflects on the contributions of the late John Urry to sociology and to its
spatial turn especially by developing the new mobilities paradigm."

Net als in kort hiervoor geplaatste In memoriam post eigenlijk een in-memoriam op John Urry. Maar hier geconcentreerd op zijn bijdragen aan en invloed op het vakbebied van de 'mobilistiek'. 

Het hart van het artikel bestaat uit de de lijst met 7 kenmerken van 'mobilistiek' die Urry in zijn vroege samenspraken met Mimi Sheller inwikkelde.

Hier de kernzinnen uit deze zeven kenmerken:

1.It involves examining the place of movement within the very workings of social institutions and of social practices, those institutions and practices that form people’s
lives. They each presuppose multiple, interdependent mobilities.

.2.Work within the new paradigm examines five different modes of mobilities
and their complex combinations that together make possible the institutions and practices
of social life and its spatial practices.

Deze 5 mobiliteiten zijn:

-corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure, migration, and escape, organized in terms of contrasting time–space patterns (ranging from daily commuting to once-in-a-lifetime exile)

-physical movement of objects to producers, consumers, and retailers; as
well as sending and receiving presents and souvenirs;

- imaginative travel effected through the images of places and peoples appearing on and moving across multiple print, visual,
and social media;

-virtual travel often in real time transcending geographical and social distance using digital media;

-communicational connectivity; and communicative travel through person-to-person messages via texts, letters, telegraph, telephone, fax,
mobile, and smartphone.

De vervlechting tussen deze mobiliteiten geeft vorm aan levenswijzen.

3. These multiple mobilities necessitate distinct exemplars of research to capture
and represent various kinds of movement and related spatial practices and mobility
regimes. Mobile methods are qualitative, quantitative, visual, and experimental.

4. Tthere is a complex assembly of movements and moorings within these mobility
forms. Mobilities are organized in and through systems and such mobility systems
presuppose ‘immobile infrastructures’

5. This paradigm emphasizes how social practices can emerge through ‘unintended
consequences’ stemming from the ways people use, innovate, and combine different
systems (and their spatialities).

6.The new mobilities paradigm involves analyzing diverse intersecting networks,
relations, flows and circulation, and not fixed places. It suggests that it is crucial to bring
in the dynamic, ongoing production of space via everyday social practices into social
theory.

7. The world is not simply more mobile than ever, at least not in the sense of
there being an enhanced ‘freedom of mobility’. Mobilities are tracked, controlled, governed, under surveillance and unequal, especially because of the increasing power of big
‘mobile’ data.