In this book, mobility as socially produced motion is understood
through three relational moments. First, when talking of human mobility,
we are talking about mobility as a brute fact—something that is potentially
observable, a thing in the world, an empirical reality. This is the mobility
measured and analyzed by modelers, migration theorists, and transport
planners. It is the mobility captured by high-powered computer hardware
and soft ware in sports science labs or animation studios. It is the motion
tracked by closed circuit television and biometric systems in airports and
elsewhere. Here mobility comes closest to pure motion and is at its most
abstract. Second, there are ideas about mobility that are conveyed through
a diverse array of representational strategies ranging from fi lm to law,
medicine to photography, literature to philosophy. Th ese representations
of mobility capture and make sense of it through the production of meanings
that are frequently ideological. Mobility means this. Mobility means
that. Th us the brute fact of getting from A to B becomes synonymous with
freedom, with transgression, with creativity, with life itself. Third, mobility
is practiced, it is experienced, it is embodied. Mobility is a way of being
in the world. Th e way we walk, for instance, says much about us. We may
be in love, we may be happy, we may be burdened and sad. We inhabit mobility differently according to our mood. Human mobility is an irreducibly
embodied experience. Our feet may hurt as we walk, the wind might
blow in our face, we may not be able to sleep as we fl y from New York to
London. Oft en how we experience mobility and the ways we move are intimately
connected to meanings given to mobility through representation.
Similarly, representations of mobility are based on ways in which mobility
is practiced and embodied. As David Delaney has written, “human mobility
implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes
and categorical figures moving through representational spaces.”8
Mobile
people are never simply people—they are dancers and pedestrians, drivers
and athletes, refugees and citizens, tourists or businesspeople, men and
women. This book is about the interface between mobile physical bodies
on the one hand, and the represented mobilities on the other. To understand
mobility without recourse to representation on the one hand or the
material corporeality on the other is, I would argue, to miss the point.