Motility and fascia: how neurophysiological knowledge can contribute to mobility studies

ABSTRACT

What happens if we think together the concept of motility, defined as the capacity or potential of a person to move or be mobile, together with fascia, our bodily connective tissue? This article works from a transdisciplinary perspective to consider how new neurophysiological knowledge may come to matter in mobility studies. Intercultural policy-making in Barcelona, and the proposed Blockchain-based mobility platform IoMob (Internet of Mobility) are shown as two examples of this approach. The key emergent suggestions are, firstly, to give more weight to the complexity of body, bodying and molecular-molar interplay in mobility research, and, secondly, to extend the concept of motility to explicitly include our sensorial body awareness. This has implications for mobile methodologies including participant sensation, and conceptual relevance to current issues in mobility studies such as overcoming stasis-mobility binaries, non-subjective theories of (urban) mobilities, and scalar fluency.

KEYWORDS:

• Motility
• mobilities
• fascia
• tensional responsiveness
• subjectivity
• scalar fluency

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank all workshop participants and interview partners for their insights. Particular thanks go to Lola Lopez for answering questions on Barcelona’s Pla Interculturalidad, and the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture, and Mobility (UNU-GCM) for providing the framework for the research on Barcelona’s Pla Interculturalidad. All other research was conducted independently.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. CeMoRe Weblink for “Dance Your Vehicle: Becoming Sensicle”: .

2. https://www.ouishare.net.

3. For example, “Resonant Body-ing: Cities, Senses and Alterity”. Extemporaneous Cities, Barcelona, 3 December 2018; “Becoming Sensicle”. Mobile Utopia Conference, University of Lancaster, November 1–2, 2017; “Cities as Creative Networks: a Sensorial Experience” at OuiShare Fest Paris, July 5–7, 2017; “Critical Somatics: movement and sensorial awareness in social dynamics”. Disputed Futures, June 2–4, 2016, Coimbra; “Tension and Connectivity: Sensorial awareness in processes of migration and mobilities”. SIEF Migration and Mobility Working Group Meeting, September 11–13, 2016, Basel.

4. Search results from 30.07.2109.

5. For more detailed information on fascia, please also see Weig (forthcoming in Body&Society) – ‘Fascia:

6. This can be appreciated simply through attention to bodily systems such as breathing or digestion.

7. Access refers to the available choices in mobility, to the “different forms and degrees of mobility”; skill or competence includes physical, acquired and organisational skills and abilities, in particular “to recognize and make use of access”; and appropriation is the interpretation and acting on “a particular choice, including non-action” which is “shaped by needs, plans, aspirations and understandings of agents, as it relates to strategies, motives, values and habits” (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004, 750).

8. Rikesh Shah, Head of Commercial Innovation at Transport for London (TFL), personal communication referencing a TFL Study, presented at the UN Urban Thinkers Camp, Barcelona, October 25–27, 2017.

9. Please see www.iomob.net for details of IoMob as advocated by Boyd Cohen and his team.