key: cord-0792139-q7hdeb3k
authors: Merriman, P.
title: Mobility
date: 2009-07-08
journal: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
DOI: 10.1016/b978-008044910-4.00300-x
sha: 8639aa0b19ce4f76ceafb07457e62f41f1703534
doc_id: 792139
cord_uid: q7hdeb3k

Mobility and movement are of concern to academics working across the social sciences, and this article provides a critical evaluation of current geographical research on mobility. Mobilities are fundamental to our daily lives and to the functioning of societies and economies, and the article begins by examining how geographers have approached mobility and fixity during the past half century and why there appears to have been a resurgence of research on mobility in the past decade. Mobilities are entwined with complex power relationships and the article examines how governments and businesses have attempted to encourage and facilitate the movements of people and things, while controlling and regulating mobilities which are deemed to be threatening, out of place, and uncontrolled – such as the mobility of gypsies and illegal immigrants. The article examines how mobilities have frequently been pushed into the background in accounts of landscape and place, before showing how geographers have more recently begun to take account of movement, change, and dynamism in conceptualizing place and landscape. The final section examines how human geographers and social scientists have been paying increasing attention to the social and cultural dimensions of travel and transport, and focuses on recent work on the geographies of the car and driving.

Mobility and movement are of concern to academics working across the humanities and the social, physical, natural, and medical sciences. Physical geographers have concerned themselves with the movements of water, ice sheets, soil, plant species, and radiation, to name just a few examples, while mobility has been a long-standing concern of human geographers working on a broad range of issues, from migration, transport, and trade, to imperial expansion, travel writing, tourism, globalization, and cultural diffusion. The next section examines how geographers have approached the issues of mobility and fixity, before showing how the emergence of antiessentialist post-structuralist thinking, participative methods, and an interdisciplinary concern with themes such as embodiment, globalization, transnational migration, tourism, mobile communications, the Internet, performance, and the spaces of the car and airport, has led to a resurgence of writings focusing on mobility across the social sciences. The subsequent section examines the power relationships surrounding particular kinds of mobilities, and the discourses of exclusion which have gathered around the mobilities of such groups as gypsies, travelers, tramps, and immigrants. Then we explore how particular mobilities and senses of movement are accounted for in geographical writings on place and landscape. Mobilities have commonly been held to erode distinctive senses of place, generating feelings of placelessness, but in recent years geographers have come to theorize places and landscapes as dynamic, practiced and performed through the movements of all manner of things. The final section discusses recent work on cultures of transport, focusing on the geographies of the car and road.

Geography -a term whose etymology can be traced through Greek, Latin, and subsequently French -is often defined as Earth-writing. When I talk to friends who have a limited knowledge of academic geography, they frequently suggest that geography is about physical landscapes, maps, or places. It is said that geography is, or should be, concerned with locating things and events, particularly physical landscape features. Fixity and locatedness emerge at the heart of such imaginaries of what I and other the geographers do, and in these definitions, fixity is frequently constructed in tension or opposition to mobility. Things move or stay still. They are stationary or mobile. As Tim Cresswell has shown, throughout the history of geography, academics have developed a range of theoretical approaches and methodological tools for accounting for and exploring the relationships between mobility and fixity.

Mobility has been framed as unfortunate, abnormal, and problematic, and as inevitable, normal, and productive. In the 1960s, positivist constructions of human geography as a spatial science frequently constructed fixity or locatedness as the norm or ideal. Where movements occurred, they were constructed as rational, functional, and purposeful movements between fixed points. In the 1970s, time geography examined the mobilities of people engaged in everyday activities, while Marxist thinkers have long emphasized patterns of mobility, flow, and circulation in society and the economy. In focusing on place, many humanistic geographers constructed mobility as an eroding force or threat to the integrity of places. Human geographers working in the areas of transport geography, migration studies, and tourism have also done much to advance geographical research on particular kinds of mobilities. Early studies tended to focus on the causes and effects of particular mobilities, or on the quantitative dimensions of mobilities. However, since the late 1980s and 1990s there have emerged a large number of qualitative studies of mobility marked by a new wave of research on tourism, transport and migration, and the emergence of an interdisciplinary interest in themes such as globalization, transnational migration, diasporic cultures, mobile communication technologies, the Internet, performance, and postcolonialism.

With these developments, and the increasing purchase of anti-essentialist post-structuralist thinking, and participative and performative methods, it has been suggested by Mimi Sheller and John Urry that the social sciences are seeing a 'mobilities turn' and the emergence of a 'new mobilities paradigm'. Mobilities research does appear to be flourishing, but it is important to be cautious about such proclamations. Mobilities research is not that new. Much contemporary research builds upon long-established and broader-reaching developments in the social sciences. New and emerging research questions do not necessarily lead to a 'turning' of disciplines and research agendas, or the establishment of new paradigms. It is important, therefore, not to overstate the influence of these new agendas, or to overlook more firmly established lines of research. Indeed, while 2006 saw the launch of the interdisciplinary social science journal Mobilities, and the publication of a number of important books on mobilities, we should not forget that the Journal of Transport History was first published in 1953, Transportation Research in 1967, and the Journal of Transport Geography in 1993.

Mobilities research does not simply provide a new unproblematic nonessentialist way of thinking, tracing narratives built around metaphors of mobility and fluidity, and allowing academics to move away from sedentary theories rooted in ideas of fixed, solid essences. This was the mistake made by a generation of postmodern, post-structuralist, and feminist theorists who embraced a 'nomadic metaphysics' that celebrated (and frequently romanticized) the transgressive mobilities of the migrant, traveler, nomad, or theorist in an attempt to depart from a 'sedentarist metaphysics'. There is a politics and geography of power bound up with practices and discourses of both mobility and fixity, and as Tim Cresswell has asserted, it is important for human geographers and other social scientists to expose these power relations and examine the social, spatial, and material processes by which particular mobilities are produced. Modern Western societies may appear to emerge and gain life through the mobilities of all manner of things, but our worlds are punctuated by a broad range of material things and sedentary beliefs. In Western nations it is commonly assumed that their inhabitants will have nationalities, fixed dwellings, postal addresses, and either lease or own property. The geographies of mobilities are inseparable from particular materialities, whether of transport infrastructures, passports, human bodies, border fences, or walking boots. What is more, when one travels, one does not simply travel across the landscape. Mobilities rework, shape, animate, and perform places and landscapes.

Advertisers, manufacturers, and academics delight in informing us that our communications and movements are speeding up, the world is shrinking, time-space compression is occurring, and that there is an 'end to geography'/'geography is history'. We are said to be increasingly mobile, living in a 'hyper-mobile' world, and yet through such assertions we are provided with little sense of the differential experiences and impacts of mobilities. The geographies and histories of mobilities are often missing, and popular cultural commentators seem to overlook the long and tortured history and complex geography of globalization. As Doreen Massey points out, we do not all have access to e-mail, television, public transport, private vehicles, or immigration visas. New connectivities and mobilities produce geographies of exclusion, disconnection, inequality, and immobility. Pacific islands which were once key stopping points for passing ships are now by-passed by intercontinental airliners. In rural Britain, cuts in public transport provision and post office closures have had a detrimental impact on the communications and mobility of vulnerable groups without access to cars or the Internet. Indeed, while the movements of the business traveler, commuter, Western tourist, quarantined animal, and airmail letter may be facilitated by businesses and governments, the mobilities of less-empowered minorities are frequently overlooked, while the movements of groups such as refugees, gypsies, and migrant workers are closely regulated and commonly criticized. People and things, then, are not always free to move. Human and nonhuman bodies have different capacities to move, or purposes for moving. The mobilities of human bodies, water, oil, and many other things may appear to be governed by 'natural laws', but their movements are enmeshed in complex political, economic, and cultural geographic processes. Governments, large companies, academics, and a broad range of individuals have long been concerned with how mobilities are performed in different ways and at different scales, from the microspaces of the human and animal body, to the scale of the nation-state or globe.

Mobile entities are incessantly identified, classified, and monitored. The mobilities of commodities are tracked by logistics experts and distribution companies using computers, Universal Product Code (UPC) bar-codes, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and written inventories. Customs and excise agencies attempt to stem the flow of illegal drugs, untaxed cigarettes and alcohol, or unauthorized agricultural imports, tracking their movements using international policing networks, informers, and more-or-less sophisticated searching technologies. Animals may be quarantined. In the UK certain species of domestic pet (including dogs, cats, and ferrets), once microchipped and vaccinated, can be issued passports to travel within the European Union (EU). Authorities are continually trying to categorize mobile objects and individualize mobile subjects, and judgments are made about the movements of particular things.

When I fly to the USA for an academic conference, as a British citizen I am required to stand in an immigration queue designated for non-US citizens. I am required to have a machine-readable passport which can be swiped, and might soon be required to have one of the new generations of biometric passports featuring a computer chip which can store facial biometric data (including key facial measurements and characteristics), a digitally encoded photograph, and other personal information. And yet, I am afforded certain privileges not possessed by all non-US citizens. As a citizen of one of 27 'developed' (the majority Western European) countries, I do not need to apply for a visa. I simply queue up with my completed I-94W visa waiver form, answer a few questions, submit my passport and fingerprints for scanning and, hopefully, I am granted permission to enter for up to 90 days. Non-Western travelers, and those deemed to be a moral, physical, or biological threat to the USA and its citizens, receive a quite different treatment, while throughout the world thousands of migrants scale fences, cross deserts, rivers, and seas, or travel in the back of lorries in an attempt to traverse national borders. People smuggling has emerged as a high-profit activity for criminal gangs.

My experiences at US immigration checkpoints are predictable, occasional events, but my mobilities and mobile communications are governed and monitored in many other seemingly mundane but significant ways. My movements through the airport, as with the street, railway network, or shopping center, can be monitored or registered with closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, pedestrian, or vehicle flow counters, at check-in desks, ticket barriers or toll booths, and predicted and guided by architects with computer simulation models, computer-aided design packages, and a variety of architectural and design features. Software and computing are increasingly being embedded into the built environment of Western countries. Credit card purchases and supermarket loyalty cards collect data on mobility and purchasing patterns, generating information which is highly valued by marketers and consumer profilers. Our mobilities are registered by the movements of our mobile phone, in addition to the calls we make. The movements and locations of our bodies, identification documents, financial transactions, and private technologies, then, are tracked by an array of government and corporate agencies. We 'move' and are 'traced' through transportation networks, border control points, electric cables, radio waves, and computer databases. But while the scale and capabilities of tracking technologies may be changing, authorities have long been concerned with tracking the movements of individuals and groups. The pervasiveness of computer, digital, and optical technologies which are used for tracking mobilities should not lead us to overlook a much longer history of 'technologies' for governing mobile citizens and maintaining extensive political and economic networks: from the history of customs agencies and imperial trading companies, to the history of passports, visas, and radar.

The mobilities and spaces of car driving in Britain are particularly instructive. Long before government agencies, transport engineers and the police utilized automatic speed cameras, CCTV cameras, number plate recognition technologies, and computer databases to monitor and regulate vehicle drivers, their movements have been identified, individualized, and regulated through the use of vehicle number plates, driving tests and licenses, codes of conduct, police speed traps, 'sleeping policemen' (speed control ramps), traffic lights, roundabouts, and a whole host of other technologies. Governments and the police have long recognized that to govern mobile vehicle drivers across a fairly extensive network of roads, they need to combine juridical and disciplinary techniques of government with liberal principles which encourage drivers to practice techniques of self-government, controlling the movements of themselves and their vehicles. Experienced drivers appear to embody the skills and practice the etiquettes (both formal and informal) of driving in particular environments, performing the act of driving and governing their own movements and conduct in automatized, precognitive, and unreflexive ways. They may subtly resist or reinterpret the formal rules of the road, but the potentially fatal consequences of inattentiveness and rule-breaking lead the majority of motorists to drive in more-or-less socially acceptable ways.

By engaging in particular strategies or government programs, and deploying a broad range of technologies, individuals and authorities aim to exclude particular mobilities, activities, entities, and individuals from the public/private sphere, and minimize the risk of certain events occurring. The mobilities of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, travelers infected with diseases such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and suspected terrorists are approached with varying degrees of urgency and intensity by authorities, who 'profile' and 'screen' travelers and categorize those deemed to be 'high risk': whether this is due to their name, ethnicity, religion, nationality, travel itinerary, or their body temperature. This section focuses on the mobilities of two groups who are frequently excluded or criticized by political and cultural commentators: first, asylum seekers and economic migrants; and second, tramps, gypsies, and travelers.

In the UK, asylum seekers have been consistently constructed by the right-wing and tabloid press as out of place: as unwelcome immigrants whose claims to refugee status are untested or unproven, and who are 'scrounging from the state'. Asylum seekers are not yet proven to be 'legitimate refugees' (according to the 1951 UN Convention) entitled to protection from political persecution, and reactionary social commentators frequently label them as 'bogus asylum seekers'. The stability of British society and Britain's economy is presented as being under threat from such mobilities, and the dramatic and emotive language which journalists and others use draws upon metaphors of uncontrolled flows of fluids or the spread of infectious diseases. Headlines shout about 'floods', 'tides', and 'waves' of immigrants, and this language is not limited to the mobility of asylum seekers. With the accession of ten countries (including eight East European countries) to the EU in 2004, commentators focused their attention on the 600 000 or so individuals who came to the UK in the first two years (May 2004 -June 2006 . Tabloid newspapers suggested that 'the tide' or 'surge' of EU migrants needed halting, as the British economy, health service, and Briton's jobs were said to be under threat. There is, of course, a long history of hostility to immigration and immigrant mobilities, in the UK and elsewhere. Prejudices and political and juridical discourses have gathered around the movements of people for hundreds of years, and entire academic subdisciplines and theoretical debates -including studies of migration, colonialism and postcolonialism, diasporic cultures, and Orientalism -focus their sights on the social, economic, cultural, and political imagination and effects of migration and travel. National histories are crosscut with narratives and memories of immigrant and emigrant mobilities, and the diasporic and hybrid cultures which emerge are frequently defined by, or seen to be practiced through, those very mobilities and their spaces. We are urged to trace the 'routes' shaping cultural formations, rather than searching for the 'roots' of cultures and identities. Attention is focusing on the 'Atlantic geographies' and 'Black Atlantic' cultures weaving North America, Europe, Africa, and beyond, demonstrating how mobilities are practiced and experienced in strikingly different ways. The histories and geographies of mobility and migration reflect complex power relations, and geographers have done a great deal to help expose such power relations.

Mobilities are frequently constructed as central to, and essential to, capitalist development and circulation, but it is also common for mobilities which do not appear to have a (legitimate) purpose or destination to be romanticized as a way to escape, or criticized as a threat to, the routines of sedentary societies. In the USA, mobility has long been central to both mainstream and countercultural imaginaries of the nation. Mobility was central to narratives of pioneering Westward expansion, and both road transport and railway travel (as well as shipping) became embroiled in accounts of nation formation. The road, in particular, has been portrayed as a space of freedom, escape, and resistance for a broad range of individuals: families fleeing the depression and poverty of the dustbowl states in the 1930s (as depicted in Dorethea Lange's photographs, or John Steinbeck's 1939 book The Grapes of Wrath); men escaping the responsibilities and mundane realities of domestic life in Jack Kerouac's 1957 book On the Road; or the two women escaping abusive relationships in the 1993 film Thelma and Louise. Such narratives are often highly gendered, and it has been argued that academics must not simply affirm or romanticize popular narratives which equate mobility with freedom and resistance. People stay put and resist. Others may have very little freedom or choice in their movements. What's more, there are a whole series of mobilities -for example, those of refugees and asylum seekerswhich are more commonly criticized than romanticized.

As Tim Cresswell shows in The Tramp in America (2001), during the 1870s a moral panic gathered around the mobilities of the tramp. The completion of an extensive network of railway lines in the American West, coupled with a fluctuating economy and increasingly mobile workforce, acted to facilitate the movement of homeless and jobless men and women across America. In 1875, Josiah Flynt estimated that as many as 10 000 tramps rode the boxcars every night, and the mobilities of these tramps were presented as unpredictable, threatening, immoral, and pathological. A broad range of discourses gathered around the movements and actions of the tramp. Sociologists sought to define and understand the life-world of the tramp. Laws were enacted to control the mobilities of tramps and vagrants, although such categorizations were conveniently applied to a broad range of individuals deemed to be 'out of place', enabling the police to arrest the unemployed and working-class activists. Despite the presence of a significant number of female tramps and hobos, the tramp was frequently constructed as a male figure who posed a threat to women and the moral sanctity of the spaces of the home. The figure of the tramp was constituted as degenerate and pathological by eugenicists and medical experts. In film and cartoons, most famously The Tramp (1915), starring Charlie Chaplin, widespread stereotypes of tramps and hobos were used to illicit laughter, but unlike more official narratives Chaplin's character emerged as a hero representing resistance to authority. Cresswell's writings reveal how the tramp was 'made-up' in a variety of ways, but while tramping was constructed as a modern problem in the USA in the 1870s, England and other countries had seen panics over vagrancy and homelessness as early as the late fifteenth century.

In the UK the mobilities of gypsies and travelers have long been constructed as a threat to society and capitalist spatiality. In contrast to romanticized stereotypes of 'traditional' Romany gypsies traversing the countryside in horse-drawn wooden caravans, contemporary gypsies and travelers equipped with motor vehicles and modern caravans are frequently constructed as a polluting presence who threaten the planned order of a 'Middle-English' countryside. Gypsies and travelers are presented as being out-of-place in the contemporary English countryside, and in 1994 Britain's Conservative government enacted a Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill which included clauses designed to control the mobilities and actions of gypsies -along with New Age Travelers, ravers, hunt saboteurs, and environmental campaigners. During discussions of the Bill, British Members of Parliament suggested that the legislation was not aimed at 'real gypsies', but at New Age Travelers who, in their view, had chosen to drop out of society, leave urban areas and paid employment, and adopt a mobile lifestyle. New Age Travelers were labeled as dirty scroungers who did not belong in the countryside, and the Act entitled police forces to set up road blocks and control the movements of groups of travelers, ravers, road protestors, and hunt saboteurs. As geographer David Sibley pointed out, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill was 'emphatically concerned with controlling movement ' (1994, 301) .

Geography is frequently presented as a discipline concerned with places or landscapes, and it has been suggested that increasing levels of mobility might herald the 'end of geography' and the erosion of place. In his 1976 book Place and Placelessness the humanistic geographer Edward Relph suggested that increasing mobility had brought about the extension of placelessness in the twentieth century. The modern infrastructures of the airport, railway, and roads were seen to cut across the landscape, generating feelings of placelessness. In the mid-1990s, French anthropologist Marc Augé developed a similar argument in his book Non-Places (1995). Augé argued that 'nonplaces' were characteristic of an era of 'supermodernity', with an excess of information, increasingly mediated social relations, a shrinkage of space, and people becoming increasingly closed-off to the world. Nonplaces were seen to be fairly generic ubiquitous spaces of detachment and solitariness, and common examples include spaces of mobility such as motorways, airports, and hotel lobbies, as well as other spaces of modern consumption and circulation, like shopping centers, theme parks, and industrial estates. But the questions to ask here are: is it useful to approach such environments as nonplaces or as placeless? And do we need to delineate a new species of place -especially a negative term, that is, nonplace -to account for people's experiences or engagements when moving through such environments? Social scientists, including geographers, have mixed opinions on the usefulness of these terms. On the one hand, Augé and others do appear to articulate or refract the somewhat unreflexive and distracted ways in which some travelers move through such spaces, paying little attention to environments they inhabit and traverse, and forgetting their actions. Modern spaces of mobility are frequently designed to facilitate such journeys and transactions, and our familiarity with such environments and modes of travel brings about shifts in our senses of being and dwelling-in-travel, and shifts in the spatialities and phenomenologies of inhabiting and moving. On the other hand, a broad range of other academics have asserted that people inhabit such spaces in a diverse array of ways, and airports, motorways, and shopping centers are highly variegated, politicized, and policed spaces. Airports may be occupied by regular business travelers who reflect very little on their surroundings, but they are also inhabited by thousands of workers, first time travelers, and a not insignificant number of homeless people who authorities frequently attempt to exclude from such spaces.

Experiences of distraction, boredom, solitariness, and detachment are characteristics of all manner of environments and the production of many different places, despite the globalization and standardization of architectural styles and the fact that a large proportion of travelers may not actually reflect on or remember their surroundings. People may feel isolated or bored at home, at work, or in picturesque villages (which are frequently upheld as the archetypal, meaningful social place). What's more, while spaces of mobility may appear to be asocial environments where people rarely converse with one another, and where there is little sense of community, academics such as Marc Augé operate with rather narrow and conservative definitions of both 'the social' and 'place', overlooking the ways in which different mobilities may be conceptualized and enacted as practices of connection, and the importance of all manner of material technologies in social relations. Mobile telephones, letters, e-mails, light houses, or indeed car horns, wing mirrors, and indicator lights, are integral to the social relations and communications of mobile actors, and mobilities are produced and performed through an array of more-or-less transitory, individualized and embodied social relations and associations with these and other things.

As an array of geographers such as Tim Cresswell, Kevin Hetherington, Doreen Massey, and Nigel Thrift have suggested, we need to rework our definitions of place, taking account of complex spatialities and temporalities, and the ongoing mobilities of people, nonhuman things, and information into and out of places. Rather than thinking of places as fixed, rooted, frozen in time and space, and closed off to the world, we need to think of places as relational, open to the world, and 'in process'. Places are constantly performed through the 'gathering' of materials and movements. It is useful, here, not just to think of 'places' as concretized 'nouns' or 'things', but to think about the ongoing, incessant 'placing' of the world, and the processes which lead to the emergence of both highly reflexive and mundane/ backgrounded attachments, associations, and significations. An understanding of different mobilities and mobile processes can therefore highlight the importance of conceptualizing place as a noun and a verb. Places are continually undergoing processes of 'placing' and the same could be said of landscapes.

Landscape, mobility, and movement are closely, if subtly, entwined. Landscapes change, viewpoints shift, and people inhabit and move through their surroundings in different ways. Throughout the long history of esthetic engagements with -and commentaries on and in -the landscape, writers, landscape gardeners, painters, filmmakers, and academics have, to varying extents, taken seriously the ways in which people move through particular landscapes. Landscape designers have accounted for the viewpoints and esthetic experiences of those who walk or drive through landscapes. Artists, too, have engaged with the embodied movements and esthetic sensibilities of the mobile viewer, developing particular techniques for reflecting or expressing the dynamism and movement associated with particular landscape perspectives. J. M. W. Turner's atmospheric landscapes, Giacomo Balla's abstract futurist paintings of passing motor cars, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's experimental color traffic photographs, and Julian Opie's video installations of British motorways, to mention four quite different examples, use a range of artistic mediums and strategies to refract different senses of movement in the landscape. J. B. Jackson's writings on America's vernacular landscapes reflect a similar sensibility, as he attempted to articulate the viewpoint of the mobile observer who traversed the landscape by car, truck, or motorcycle. This genealogy of sensibilities to mobility, and the difference that mobilities make to understanding and encountering landscapes, is complex and varied, and in the past decade or so academics have advanced similar arguments in suggesting how geographers, anthropologists, and others should approach and theorize landscape. During the cultural turn of the 1980s, geographers writing about landscape drew increasingly upon techniques such as iconography and textual analysis, engaging with debates in the disciplines of art history, anthropology, literary studies, history, and cultural studies. Landscape was approached by geographers such as Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels as being represented or textualized in different media and materials, and bound up with particular visual cultures and ways of seeing. They rarely interpreted landscape as being fixed or static (although they were often accused of this), and their work frequently articulated the ways in which people moved through the landscape, and how landscape representations were produced, circulated, encountered, recognized, and consumed in particular settings. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s anthropologists and archaeologists such as Barbara Bender, Tim Ingold, and Christopher Tilly have drawn upon phenomenological writings in an attempt to move away from a focus on representations of landscape. It has been stressed that landscapes are not 'static representations' but are in process, in movement, and in a state of becoming. In their attempts to comprehend particular fieldwork encounters they have focused on the diverse ways people dwell in, inhabit, and move through (especially walk through) the landscape. More recently, geographers such as John Wylie have examined the performative and affective dimensions of walking through the landscape, and throughout these academic engagements it is suggested that reflective accounts of our embodied mobilities provide more satisfactory non-representational or processual ways of apprehending the ongoing constitution of both self and landscape. As with writings on place, then, academics are increasingly suggesting that we should approach landscapes as open and produced through particular mobilities and movements, paying attention to the embodied mobilities by which we inhabit, traverse, and view the landscape. As art historian W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested, we should consider landscape as a verb rather than (or as well as) a noun.

Geographers have held a long-standing fascination with travel, and the history of the discipline is closely entwined with histories of travel and exploration. The majority of British undergraduate geography students will go on a field class and undertake fieldwork during their degrees, and physical or imaginative travel to other places appears to be a central concern of many geographers. As geographers have developed an increasing interest in the representational practices and embodied mobilities of their own discipline, so they also have been paying increasing attention to the social and cultural geographies of travel, travel writing, tourism, and transportation. Geographers have examined the imaginative geographies which are refracted and produced through travel writing, the geographies associated with different cultures of exploration, and they have developed a sustained interest in the environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of tourism. This section provides a slightly different focus, examining the social and cultural geographies of transportation, and particularly the increasing attention paid by geographers and social scientists to 'automobilities', and the geographies of the car and road.

Transportation forms part of many people's daily lives, whether we travel by motor car, bus, train, airplane, bicycle, foot, or consume commodities which have been moved by such methods. The past few centuries have seen massive changes in the capacity of many people to travel and communicate across great distances. In addition to the expansion of modern communications technologies such as the postal system, telegraph, telephone, and satellite technologies, the expansion of railway networks, the rise of the private motor car, and the growth of airline travel has helped to transform perceptions of space, time, speed, and distance. In Britain, improvements in coaching technologies and roads helped to increase stage coach speeds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the railway construction boom of the 1830s and 1840s led to a massive reduction in journey times, and the emergence of distinctly new experiences and geographies. Britain's railway companies were among the nation's largest employers in the nineteenth century, and they facilitated the mobility of passengers and important commodities. The railways brought a new technology and vast engineering and architectural structures into Britain's rural and urban landscapes. Some found these spaces and technologies exciting, others found them frightening, while many firstclass passengers found the public nature of this mass mode of transport depersonalizing and at times embarrassing -as they were unaccustomed to sharing compartments with strangers. In an era characterized by locally measured clock time, the demand for accurate railway timetabling led to the adoption of a standard time across each company's network and eventually the entire nation. The railways became associated with a broader 'industrialization' of space and time, while the speed of railway travel led to the emergence of new ways of looking at the passing landscape which Wolfgang Schivelbusch has termed 'panoramic perception': where landscapes lose their depth, and passengers are forced to look or glance differently at the evanescent scenes scrolling by.

Transport technologies have had a significant impact on the geographies of work, leisure, and homelife. As urban areas have expanded so new forms of public transport such as the horse-drawn tram and bus, electric tram, electric railways, underground railways, and motor bus have helped to speed up urban travel times, making it more practical and less onerous to commute to work. As Greater London expanded in the early twentieth century so the new deep-level electric underground railway companies attempted to generate new business by promoting suburban and country living and the ease and economy of commuting. This was a time when an increasing number of people from urban areas were discovering rural areas, and this discovery was facilitated through increases in leisure time, and increasing numbers of tour guides. It also reflected the increasing popularity of walking, bicycling, train excursions, and (later) motoring. As urban areas expanded so railway and bus companies extended their networks out toward villages surrounding large cities such as London, facilitating travel across greater distances for leisure and business. Of course, it would be too simplistic to suggest that new transport technologies caused urban expansion or vice versa, but the close alignment of urban and transport expansion, and the new forms of urban and suburban development which arose in the twentieth century, fueled accounts which suggested that mobility and movement were threats to the particularities of place. The movements of cars, people, and commodities, to name three examples, have variously been seen to erode local distinctiveness, community cohesion, senses of place, and to generate feelings of placelessness. As suggested in the previous section on mobility, place, and landscape, such accounts are overly simplistic.

It is not only urban geographies which have been closely aligned with changes in transport technologies. The growth of railway travel, bicycling, and car travel have had far-reaching effects on rural areas, positive and negative. At a very different scale, the geographies of empire have long been entwined with the geographies of transportation, from shipping and railways, to the motor car and air travel. New transport technologies facilitated the weaving together of empires, and such things as railway networks and modern roads have variously been seen to be essential to the governance, policing, and development of colonies. Shipping technologies were central to the geographies of colonial conquest, expansion, and trade, and they facilitated the forging of the 'Atlantic geographies' mentioned earlier, and the transportation of both voluntary and involuntary imperial travelers. Enslaved Africans faced the possibility of death and serious illness in the horrific conditions onboard ships traversing the 'middle passage' between Africa and the Americas. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shipping companies such as British India and P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) transported mail, goods, and more fortunate imperial travelers between Britain and its empire. In the 1890s and early 1900s leisure cruises were becoming increasingly popular, while after World War I, P&O and other companies actively promoted their services to the thousands of hopeful emigrants seeking new lives in countries such as Australia.

In the 1920s and 1930s, commercial airlines like Britain's Imperial Airways and Dutch company KLM developed air routes linking their respective home nations with their empires, and with the growth in mass longdistance air travel from the 1960s we see the rise of new Atlantic, Pacific, and global geographies. The growth in air travel has given rise to new geographies and geographical imaginations, altering people's perceptions of distance, and more recently becoming enmeshed in debates about emissions/global warming and terrorism. Western academics, students, or members of the public tend to take their mobilities for granted. We inhabit a variety of spaces of travel, transport, and mobility on a more-or-less regular basis, and we may not inhabit such spaces with any great excitement. We may see particular modes of transport as merely functional, as delivering us from A to B, and we may not reflect on the geographies or spatialities of our movements. Nevertheless, an understanding of the mobilities and transportation of a range of people, ideas, and things is integral to our understanding of the geographies of many more seemingly stable processes and fixed locations. Mobility and stasis, fixity and fluidity, are relative, relational, and variegated conceptions.

New transport and communication technologies are aiding the development of new practices and forms of mobility, but it is important not only to remember that many people do not have access to new technologies and forms of mobility, but that many older forms of mobility and communication are still widely practiced (including the postal service, train travel, walking, and cycling). Walking is still a vital form of mobility for the vast majority of people, not only on a micro-scale 'in all societies' (moving around the house, workplace, the local neighborhood), but for those without access to private cars or public transport in Western and non-Western societies. In rural Africa the vast majority of trips are undertaken locally on foot, while many of those completed for domestic purposes -such as collecting water, fuel, and food -are carried out by women. Feminist scholars have undertaken extensive research on the gendering of such mobilities, exploring the embodied practices of women, the gendering of metaphors of mobility, gender differences in experiences of mobility, differentiated patterns of access, and much more.

Transport is big business, and particular modes have attracted detailed attention from economists and environmentalists. Transport economists, engineers, psychologists, architects, and transport geographers have attempted to understand, model, and facilitate the movement of people and goods through transport networks, but it is only more recently that sociologists have begun to pay attention to the more qualitative social dimensions of transport and travel. One key literature has been the critical writings which have emerged on 'automobilities', and specifically the sociologies of the car and driving.

Economic geographers, transport geographers, and environmental geographers have a fairly long-standing interest in the motor car. They have traced the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production. They have modeled the flows of motor cars along roads, and they have traced the growth in motor car ownership and use.

Geographers have long recognized that motor vehicles matter to environmental geographies, and yet social and cultural geographers, along with sociologists, have arrived somewhat late in examining the social relations and practices surrounding one of the most significant material objects in the lives of several billion people worldwide. Cars and other motor vehicles matter, not just because of their resource use, emissions, production innovations, or significance as globalized commodities. Cars also matter in our social lives and cultural relations, and for over a century they have been enmeshed in complex globalized, nationalized, localized, gendered, sexualized, and racialized discourses of identity formation, desire, exclusion, and stereotyping. Indeed, one would argue that if environmentalists, politicians, and economists want to understand why many people appear to have an unrelenting addiction to driving and attachment to their cars, it is vital that they take seriously the embodied practices, social relations, ontological formulations, spatialities, and discourses of rights which are enacted when driving or owning cars.

Social scientists have been paying increasing attention to the complex and variegated social relations associated with driving and the spaces of the road. Sociologists have stressed that although motor vehicles appear to provide an unrivaled capacity to facilitate autonomous mobility (or automobility), a driver's movements are contingent upon an extensive network of actors responsible for manufacturing, servicing, fueling, and regulating vehicles, as well as planning, constructing, and maintaining roads. Motor vehicles appear to be popular and unrivaled because they combine a sense of autonomous and independent mobility, with feelings of privacy, power, and speed. When stepping into their vehicles humans become something else, and a number of sociologists have examined how car drivers are somewhat hybrid or cyborg figures, whose movements, spatialities, and very being emerges through the joint action of people in cars. What's more, when they are fully trained, gain confidence, and have become familiar with their vehicles, drivers perform the act of driving in relatively automatic, unconscious, unreflexive ways. As with actions such as typing, drivers appear to embody their driving knowledge and skills and perform these actions in relatively unthinking and effortless ways, while the very process of driving gives rise to detached engagements with one's surroundings and a perpetual forgetting of one's actions and movements through the landscape. Driving entails rather disengaged, distracted, or unreflexive modes of attention. And yet despite this somewhat detached involvement, a broad range of academics have shown how driving entails significant affective engagements, producing distinctive emotional geographies associated with intense feelings of anger, excitement, and fear. The design of motor vehicles creates limits to how drivers can express their intentions and emotions, and drivers often get frustrated or angry at the apparent obliviousness, deafness, or blindness of other motorists to their actions and feelings.

The emergence of hybrid beings and ontological formations such as the car driver is intimately associated with the distinctive spatialities of the car, road, and driving. Drivers must develop an awareness of what is going on inside, alongside, in front of, and behind their vehicle, judging the width of their vehicle, its capacity to break and accelerate, glancing in mirrors, and expressing their intentions using indicator lights. Drivers simultaneously inhabit the public and private realm, occupying a personalized and privatized space (often infused with the personal soundscape of one's music collection), while at the same time traversing the public highways and engaging in actions which have major consequences to oneself and others. Motor vehicles have had a major impact on the geographies and sociologies of the road, for with the domination of many urban roads by petrol and diesel-driven vehicles, other road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, and indeed animals have gradually been forced on to the verge or specially constructed pavements/sidewalks. Organizations such as the British anticar group Reclaim the Streets have argued that this results in the privatization of an important public space. Indeed, urban geographers and sociologists are beginning to recognize that mobilities more generally, and cars in particular, are a fundamental part of the life (and, perhaps, death, in the case of cars) of cities, with the flow of all manner of things across their boundaries. We often encounter cities when moving through them -at, below, or above ground level. We engage with buildings kinesthetically and visually through our everyday mobilities: walking through buildings and driving past landmarks. The proximity of homes or office sites to underground stations or major roads can impact upon their value or perceived development potential. Think about the strategic location of billboards at major road junctions, or the impact of the diagrammatic plan of London's tube network upon people's imaginations of that city. Different mobilities are fundamental to how cities function, and how they are encountered as vibrant, energetic, exciting, congested, polluted, or scary places.

In the past, academics have attempted to discern globalized patterns in the consumption of cars, but there are distinctively localized and nationalized geographies to the consumption of vehicles and the spaces of the road. Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have shown how people drive, inhabit, and consume their vehicles differently in different societies and cultures. For example, the Pitjantjatjara aboriginal peoples of South Australia have incorporated cars into their material culture and cultural practices in specific ways, using, valuing, exchanging, abandoning, recycling, and navigating them in ways that may appear unfamiliar to Western observers.

Cars, as material objects and spaces, become embroiled in highly distinctive social relations, rituals, and practices of mobility and consumption.

Social scientists may have been rather slow in examining the multifarious ways in which cars have become embroiled in our lives, but commercial organizations and cultural commentators have long recognized the significance of the motor car in our cultural lives. Novelists, playwrights, photographers, artists, pop musicians, filmmakers, and toy manufacturers have engaged with humanity's fascination with driving and cars. Hundreds of films (some of which may be classified as road movies) have explored the activities of driving and the consequences of automobilities. In literature, writers have explored the automotive passions that are expressed by a wide range of fictional characters, from the reckless aristocratic Toad in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), to James Ballard and Vaughan searching for their next car crash in J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973). As these different examples highlight, motor vehicles (especially cars) are enmeshed in our worlds in multiple ways, giving rise to economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental impacts and effects.

Mobility and movement are a fundamental part of our ongoing engagements with the world, and these mobilities are being explored by academics working across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the physical, natural, and medical sciences. Human geographers have held a long-standing interest in different mobilities, focusing on geographical patterns of migration, transportation, and tourism, but in the last decade or so there has been a resurgence of writings on mobility in human geography and across the social sciences. With the increasing purchase of anti-essentialist, post-structuralist thinking, participative and performative methods, and the emergence of an interdisciplinary interest in themes such as globalization, transnational migration, diasporic cultures, communication technologies, and the geographies of the car and airport, so the topic of mobility has assumed a more prominent position in a wide range of international, interdisciplinary debates and agendas. Mobilities have been celebrated for their transgressive potential, but social scientists have argued that we must not see a language of mobility, flux, and movement as a simple solution to overcome sedentarist thinking. Instead, we should attempt to reveal the complex politics of mobility, examining how different mobilities are produced, practiced, and regulated. Mobilities and materialities are closely entwined, and mobilities rework places and landscapes on an ongoing and incessant basis. Mobilities are important to human geography and our human geographies, and the flows,

Migration; Migration, Historical Geographies of

Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Place; Tourism; Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of; Transport and Social Exclusion

Further Reading

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Against Automobility

Mobility as resistance: A geographical reading of Kerouac's ''On the Road

The production of mobilities

The Tramp in America. London: Reaktion

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects. Aldershot: Ashgate

Automobilities. London: Sage

Questions of Travel

Beyond 'women and transport': Towards new geographies of gender and daily mobility

A global sense of place. Marxism Today

Driving places: Marc Augé , non-places and the geographies of England's M1 motorway

Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England's M1 Motorway

A Mobile Century? Changes in Everyday Mobility in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Place and Placelessness

The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century

The city and the car

The new mobilities paradigm

The sin of transgression

Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century

Mobility and proximity

Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity

A single day's walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

The life and death of cars: Private vehicles on the Pitjantjatjara lands, South Australia