Traces of a Mobile Field: Ten Years of Mobilities Research by James R. Faulconbridge & Allison Hui

Author:James R. Faulconbridge & Allison Hui [Faulconbridge, James R. & Hui, Allison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138708587
Goodreads: 33157649
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Mobility Infrastructures or Mobile Infrastructuring?

Mobility scholars have written extensively on mobility infrastructures, as can be seen in successive issues of Mobilities over the past decade. In the editorial to volume 1, issue 1, Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006) drew a distinction between mobilities and the Lefebvrian concept of ‘moorings’ (Lefebvre 1991), conceived as ‘the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities’ (Urry 2003; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 3). Mobilities, it was argued, rely upon all manner of fixities, and an array of scholarly work has focused on such seemingly static mobility infrastructures as roads, railways, airports, ports and urban infrastructures, as well as more mobile infrastructural assemblages such as shipping containers and various types of vehicle (e.g. Graham and Marvin 2001; Merriman 2007; Lipset and Handler 2014). Mobility infrastructures are frequently discussed in terms of the spaces, sociabilities, practices, qualities and politics associated with them, but in this paper I want to discuss the implications of a rather different approach to infrastructural matter, materiality and practices, arguing that realist approaches that naturalise the concrete reality of infrastructures may lead us to overlook the affective and atmospheric qualities of such spaces and oversimplify the ways in which qualities and practices resonate with and cut across people and things, spaces and subjects, matter and thought, and what some have termed mobilities and moorings.

A broad range of scholars – including transport historians, cultural geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, architectural theorists, communications scholars, urban theorists and ANT/STS scholars – have held a fairly long-standing interest in the physical infrastructures and materialities of mobility and transport networks. While some scholars have approached infrastructures as material technologies which structurally determine socio-spatial relations and practices, contemporary thinkers more frequently emphasise the non-linear, networked, relational and distributed qualities of infrastructures and mobility spaces and practices. In the case of geographers and a few anthropologists, there has been a particular focus not only on how transport routes striate the landscape, but also on how mobility, communications and transport infrastructures necessitate a rethinking of Euclidean and topographic senses of space, as they generate uneven topologies of connection and disconnection, mobility and immobility (Harvey 1989; Massey 1991; Harvey 2012; Merriman 2012). For example, cultural geographers, anthropologists and other mobility scholars have examined how limited-access routes such as motorways, railway lines and air routes generate ‘corridoring’ or ‘tunnelling’ effects in landscapes (Andreu 1998; Graham and Marvin 2001; Bishop 2002; Merriman 2011; Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012). In discussing her relational and dynamic approach to space as ‘a configuration … of a multiplicity of trajectories’, Doreen Massey (2000, 225) has similarly emphasised how a myriad of trajectories of people and things comprises and refigures our ever-changing dynamic worlds, while an increasing number of other scholars are drawing upon relational and post-humanist approaches to materiality, nature, landscape and technologies in an attempt to expose the emergence of socio-material assemblages, mixtures, configurations or hybrids which problematise any idea of stable, fixed and neatly bounded infrastructures (cf. Latour 1993; De Landa 2006).

In many ways,

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