John Urry

The New Mobilities Paradigm

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

Sociology Beyond Societies : Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century

Preface 1. Societies 2. Metaphors 3. Travellings 4. Senses 5. Times 6. Dwellings 7. Citizenships 8. Sociologies

Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty‐first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large‐scale ...

Enacting the social

This paper is concerned with the power of social science and its methods. We first argue that social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it. Second, we suggest that, if social investigation makes worlds, then it can, in some measure, think about the worlds it wants to help to make. It gets involved in ‘ontological politics’. We then go on to show that its methods - and its politics - are still stuck in, and tend to reproduce, nineteenth-century, nation-state-based politics. How might we move social science from the enactment of nineteenth-century realities? We argue that social-and-physical changes in the world are - and need to be - paralleled by changes in the methods of social inquiry. The social sciences need to re-imagine themselves, their methods, and their ‘worlds’ if they are to work productively in the twenty-first century where social relations appear increasingly complex, elusive, ephemeral, and unpredictable. There are various possibilities: perhaps, for instance, there is need for ‘messy’ methods. But in the present paper we explore some implications of complexity theory to see whether and how this might provide productive metaphors and theories for enacting twenty-first-century realities.

The ‘System’ of Automobility

This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change.

Touring cultures: transformations of travel and theory.

It is becoming ever clearer that while people tour cultures, cultures and objects themselves are in a constant state of migration. This collection brings together some of the most influential writers in the field to examine the complex connections between tourism and cultural change and the relevance of tourist experience to current theoretical debates on space, time and identity.

Social exclusion, mobility and access

Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized around the notion of ‘access’ to activities, values and goods. This paper examines this discourse in some detail. It is argued that there are many dimensions of such access, that improving access is a complex matter because of the range of human activities that might need to be ‘accessed’, that in order to know what is to be accessed the changing nature of travel and communications requires examination, and that some dimensions of access are only revealed through changes in the infrastructure that ‘uncover’ previously hidden social exclusions. Claims about access and socio-spatial exclusion routinely make assumptions about what it is to participate effectively in society. We turn this question around, also asking how mobilities of different forms constitute societal values and sets of relations, participation in which may become important for social inclusion. This paper draws upon an extensive range of library, desk and field research to deal with crucial issues relating to the nature of a fair, just and mobile society.

The Complexity Turn

A flock of birds sweeps across the sky. Like a well-choreographed dance troupe, the birds veer to the left in unison. . . . The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. Bird flocks are not the only things that work that way. Ant colonies, highway traffic, market economies, immune systems – in all of these systems, patterns are determined . . . by local interactions among decentralised components. (Resnick, 1997: 3)

Cultures of cosmopolitanism

This paper is concerned with whether a culture of cosmopolitanism is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging global processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the world as a whole, and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a banal globalism. From focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the global but they this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a cultures of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a publicly screened cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orehestrate much of social and political life in future decades.

Geographies of Social Networks: Meetings, Travel and Communications

The past decade has seen striking increases in travel and in communications at‐a‐distance through mobile phone calls, text messaging and emailing. People in prosperous societies are both travelling and communicating more to connect with absent others. People can travel, relocate and migrate and yet still be connected with friends and family members ‘back home’. So, increasingly, people who are near emotionally may be geographically very far away; yet they are only a journey, email or a phone call away. In this article we attempt to examine how such strong ties are spatially distributed and sustained through specific geographies of travel, meetings and communications. How often do strong ties meet, talk at‐at‐distance and write, and to what degree does distance determine regularity? To what extent are communications enhancing and/or substituting for physical travel? We examine in particular to what degree far‐flung ties and emotional networking at‐a‐distance are characteristic of many people other than the transnational ‘elites’ and ‘underprivileged’ migrants. We consider the notion of ‘network capital’.