Movement is made up of time and space. It is the spatialization of time
and temporalization of space. Any consideration of movement (and mobility)
that does not take time and space into account is missing an important
facet. Time and space, as Kant reminded us, are the fundamental axes
around which life revolves—the most basic forms of classifi cation. Certainly
any material object has to have coordinates in time and space. Movement,
as the displacement of an object from A to B, involves a passage of time
and, simultaneously, a traversal of space. Time and space, however, cannot
be simply taken for granted in the consideration of movement. Time
and space are both the context for movement (the environment of possibility
for movement to occur) and a product of movement. Moving people
and objects are agents in the production of time and space. Perhaps the
most well-known formulation of this is time–space compression—the eff ective
shrinking of the globe by ever-increasing mobility at speed enabled
by innovations in transportation and communications technology. Th us
Marx was able to write of the annihilation of space by time. Th e success
of railroad technology in the nineteenth century and the new modes of
mobility that it enabled meant that things were, for all practical purposes,
a lot closer.9
While the abstract idea of movement is composed of equally
abstract notions of absolute time and space, the notion of mobility I want
to propose here, as a thoroughly social facet of life imbued with meaning
and power, is composed of elements of social time and social space.