Mobility, Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility

Abstract

Mobility as a key modern phenomenon can be seen in multiple ways and this article raises the question of how mobility becomes visible and real through diverse ways of seeing mobility. Mobility’s different aspects appear and take place in particular spatial settings under the workings of diverse forms of power, and recognizing this informs us about the making of spatialised mobility. It is shown how mobility intermingles with perceptions, experiences and desires of the modern self. Such workings of power relate, among other things, to framing and imagining, practising and experiencing mobility. Capturing ways of seeing mobility thus widens our language for engaging with questions of mobility and its political and social reality and possible futures.

Key Words:

• Power
• spatiality
• representation of mobility
• non‐representation of mobility
• sensing mobility
• automotive emotions
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Tim Richardson for engaged critique and useful comments and to the PhD students at Critical Mobilities Course 2008, Aalborg University, who engaged in early discussions of the articles basic ideas. Also thank you to the insightful comments provided by two anonymous referees.

Notes

1. Kaufmann defines ‘motility’ as ‘the capacity of entities (e.g. goods, information or persons) to be mobile in social and geographic space, or as the way in which entities access and appropriate the capacity for socio‐spatial mobility according to their circumstances’ (Kaufmann et al., 2004, p. 750).

2. However, as Huxley notes, in many studies ‘space seems to be conceived as a series of surfaces and containers upon which governmental aims can be projected and within which certain practices can be enacted’ (Huxley, 2007, p. 191).

3. For a Deleuzian inspired analysis of Foucault’s inclusion of space, see e.g. Johnson (2008).

4. Many thanks to Mimi Sheller for engaged commentary on these issues.

5. Bearing in mind Bærenholdt’s observation that Allen – in spite of his acknowledged Foucauldian legacy – misses a key point in Foucault’s conceptions of power when Allen argues for specific modalities of power (Allen, 2003; Bærenholdt, 2008a, pp. 51–53).

6. In scrutinising the nineteenth century practices of walking, Urry also approaches this aspect. He points at the difference it makes for the constitution of space to walk it, with no maps or other spatial representations – it is the experience of the landscape, of roads and movement that changes the way the landscape and thus rural space was conceived and conceptualised (Urry, 2000).