‘Facework’, Flow and the City: Simmel, Goffman, and Mobility in the Contemporary City

Abstract

This paper contains a re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman with an eye to the mobility practices of the contemporary city. The paper offers a ‘new’ perspective on mobility in the contemporary city by re‐reading two sociological ‘classics’ as there is a need to conceptualise the everyday level of flow and mobility in the midst of an intellectual climate dominated by grand theories of networks and globalisation. In the re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman, the aim is to reach an understanding of how contemporary material mobility flows and symbolic orders and meanings are produced and re‐produced. You may argue that other academic disciplines such as anthropology and human geography have made important contributions to this understanding. What has not been done, however, is to show how these two sociological thinkers can move beyond mere application to this field of study. With their sociological sensitivity, they rather carry important insights that will benefit the sociology of mobility. Arguably Simmel and Goffman offer the opportunity to connect the global flows to the everyday level of social practice, as well as linking more basic/classic sociological theory to contemporary issues of mobility. The reason to ‘look back’ is therefore to capture some of the past's ‘sociological imagination’ and relate it to an important social phenomenon of the present.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• sociology
• power
• city
• Simmel
• Goffman

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank the participants of the two research seminars at the Centre for Mobility Research (CeMoRe), Lancaster University, UK, and the Department of Town and Regional Planning, Sheffield University, UK on 17 and 18 May 2005 for valuable comments on the ideas presented in this paper. Thanks to Mette Jensen for the concept of the ‘accelerating mobile city’. Also thanks to Jens Christian Overgaard Madsen, Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, for helping with the references on ‘road rage’. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Dansk Sociologkongres, Roskilde Universitetscenter, 18–20 August 2005. Finally, the author wishes to thank two anonymous referees for valuable comments.