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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
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- Sprache: Englisch
The concept of mobility has grown enormously over the last two decades. A large part of the social sciences has been interested in the different forms of mobility, from a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales. This book presents the different spatial and temporal scales of mobility and the way in which they form a system, by associating them with essential and original research objects. It provides an in-depth review of scientific knowledge, a perspective on major societal issues, analytical tools and a discussion on the main current academic debates. The authors highlight the need to take into account both the spatial and temporal scales of mobility in order to address contemporary environmental and societal issues. The book invites us to think about the entanglement of these different scales from the analysis of rhythms by founding a rhythmology of contemporary mobilities.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
1 Collective Thinking About Mobility Scales
1.1. Introduction
1.2. The notion of mobility in social sciences
1.3. The need for an integrative approach
1.4. A new research arena
1.5. Articulating spatial and temporal mobility scales
1.6. References
2 A Society with No Respite
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Mobility as a scale of magnitudes in a reticent capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello)
2.3. Movement: the central element of liquid modernity (Bauman)
2.4. The alienating acceleration (Hartmut Rosa)
2.5. The turning point of mobility (Urry and Sheller)
2.6. Mobility as an injunction (Mincke and Montulet)
2.7. Contextualizing research on mobilities
2.8. References
3 Mobility Justice as a Political Object
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Inequality and mobility justice in contemporary Western societies
3.3. Social justice and mobility, theoretical approaches
3.4. Inequalities and equity in transport and urban planning
3.5. Mobility justice: contributions from the social sciences
3.6. Beyond inequalities, mobility justice
3.7. References
4 Appropriations and Uses of Travel Time
4.1. Introduction
4.2. The emergence of a research field in search of a position
4.3. The basis for exploring the uses of travel time
4.4. Inhabiting travel time: at what cost to the environment?
4.5. The relevance of mixed methods for building a common survey base
4.6. Major research studies
4.7. Discussions and research perspectives
4.8. References
5 Designing Space for Walking as the Primary Mode of Travel
5.1. Introduction
5.2. A diversity of approaches to the objective conditions of walking, first of all a question of scale?
5.3. The conditions of operation, what is the place for the walker’s experience?
5.4. What are the challenges of the scales of analysis for intervention in living environments?
5.5. References
6 Residential Trajectories and Ways of Living
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Residential choice as social positioning
6.3. Elements of analysis of residential mobility in France and Europe
6.4. Discussion and perspectives: toward new ways of living
6.5. Conclusion
6.6. References
7 City, State, Transnational Space
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Myths and realities of contemporary migration
7.3. “Transnationalism”, “privilege” and “bordering”: taking into account other scales of migration
7.4. Cities in migration studies
7.5. Investigating migration
7.6. Conclusion
7.7. References
8 Work and High Mobility in Europe
8.1. Introduction
8.2. High work-related mobility
8.3. The profile of the highly mobile population
8.4. Reasons for the use of large-scale work-related mobility
8.5. The experience of high work-related mobility
8.6. High mobility linked to work and digital technology, what prospects?
8.7. Conclusion
8.8. References
9 Event-Driven Mobility
9.1. Introduction: the challenges of contemporary event-driven mobility
9.2. Mobility and major events: testing the host territory
9.3. A qualitative and quantitative test
9.4. Road policing strategy
9.5. Toward a mobility turn of event-driven management practices
9.6. Conclusion: toward a sociology of event-driven mobility
9.7. References
10 Inland Navigation
10.1. Introduction
10.2. Societal and environmental issues of inland navigation
10.3. Current state of knowledge
10.4. Conclusion: meeting between water and land
10.5. References
11 Temporary Mobilities and Neo-Nomadism
11.1. Introduction
11.2. State of current knowledge and major references
11.3. Challenges for contemporary societies
11.4. Survey methodologies, analysis with missing data
11.5. Place in general sociology
11.6. Status of scientific debates and controversies in the field
11.7. References
12 Towards a Rhythmology of Mobile Societies
12.1. Limitations of the concept of mobility
12.2. Thinking about the entanglement of mobilities using forms of rhythm
12.3. Responding to the challenges of mobility research with a rhythmology of mobile societies
12.4. References
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1.
The four main forms of spatial mobility
Chapter 4
Table 4.1.
Statistics on travel time use from the UK National Rail Passenger
...
Chapter 6
Table 6.1.
Proportion of moves within each type of type of municipality
List of Illustrations
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1.
Distribution of residential migration of the French population by
...
Figure 6.2.
Residential mobility by age group
Figure 6.3.
Settlement area by five-year age groups
Figure 6.4.
Residential mobility rates by socio-professional category
Figure 6.5.
Residential mobility rates by level of education
Figure 6.6.
Settlement area by socio-professional categories and degree level
...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1.
Changes in the number of international migrants and refugees glob
...
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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SCIENCES
Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain
Infrastructure and Mobility Networks Geography, Subject Heads – Hadrien Commenges and Florent Le Néchet
Mobility and Geographical Scales
Coordinated by
Guillaume DrevonVincent Kaufmann
First published 2023 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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© ISTE Ltd 2023The rights of Guillaume Drevon and Vincent Kaufmann to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945772
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78945-064-4
ERC code:SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space SH2_8 Energy, transportation and mobilitySH3 The Social World, Diversity, Population SH3_1 Social structure, social mobility
1Collective Thinking About Mobility Scales
Vincent KAUFMANN1 and Guillaume DREVON1, 2
1 Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine (LaSUR), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
2 Urban Development and Mobility Department, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
1.1. Introduction
In our globalized world, the coexistence, meeting, and sometimes friction between the different spatial and temporal mobility scales are permanent. Thus, contrasting forms of mobility coexist in a world perpetually in motion (Drevon et al. 2017). These movements, however, unfold according to different temporalities and spatial extents. At the one end of the spectrum are local and everyday mobilities; at the other are migrations characterized by uprooting and then permanent anchoring in a new social and geographic context. Between the two extremes are the more atypical or hybrid forms of mobility, such as large-scale work-related mobility, second homes, and temporary or seasonal mobilities. These different forms of mobility are distinguished by their contrasting temporal and spatial scales. Together, all these forms of mobility set the pace for our societies and punctuate the life journeys of individuals. Intertwining these different forms of mobility requires social science researchers to construct new ways of interpreting our societies, as proposed by Urry (2000) to describe and analyze contemporary societies through the prism of mobility.
However, approaches to the different forms of mobility that constitute the broad spectrum mentioned above remain fairly disciplinary. Thus, local daily mobility is most often studied by the socioeconomics of transport and urban geography, while migration and residential mobility are largely rooted in the field of demography. Atypical mobility, due to a lack of available data, is most often the domain of anthropology and ethnography. The fact that these different forms of mobility coexist within the same society requires a common approach for the different fields of social sciences in order to think collectively about the different spatiotemporal forms of mobility. This book attempts to meet this interdisciplinary challenge by offering a set of chapters from various disciplinary backgrounds in an attempt to document and describe most forms of contemporary mobility.
Collective thinking about the different spatial and temporal mobility scales is all the more important as the butterfly effects multiply, sometimes carried by long-haul flights from China. In fact, crises directly linked to mobility and referring to different forms of collisions of scales are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace: strong demand for the right to stroll in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, a call to develop public transport rather than finance the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016, the rejection of speed limits and the carbon tax by the Gilets Jaunes in the winter of 2018 in France, a general strike in Chile following the increase in the price of a metro ticket in October 2019, reinforcement of migratory controls at the gates of Europe following the Syrian conflict, and finally, in 2020, forced immobilization of a large part of the planet to fight the spread of Covid-19 and the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. All spatial and temporal mobility scales are affected by these crises, as we can see: pedestrians and the ultralocal and the everyday, urban transport, the automobile and the national territory, air traffic, as well as residential and international migration.
In this general context, we are at an exciting moment for dealing with the spatial and temporal dimensions of mobility, especially since the major social science research traditions on mobility are still struggling to think of time and space together in a single, nondeterministic, and dynamic approach.
In this chapter, in order to delve into the topic, we propose discussing the history of the notion of mobility in social sciences, before returning to the understanding of the spatial and temporal scales of this phenomenon. After this conceptual and epistemological exploration, Chapter 1 ends by presenting the different contributions that constitute the key ideas of this book.
1.2. The notion of mobility in social sciences
The term “mobility” appeared in German, English, and French dictionaries in the 18th century to evoke mental agility and therefore the ability to change. It is therefore a question of:
Ease of change, of modification. Mobility of features, of physiognomy. Mobility of light, of reflections. Mobility of character, of mind, of imagination, ease of passing promptly from one disposition to another, from one object to another. Mobility of feelings, of mood. Mobility of opinions (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française du XVIIIe siècle)
The term mobility entered into the terminology of social sciences in the 1920s, with a double arrival: the work of Sorokin and that of the Chicago School.
In 1927, a Russian researcher who had emigrated to the United States, Pitirim Sorokin, published a book entitled Social Mobility, in which he laid the foundations for what was to become one of the most classic fields of investigation in sociology. He defines mobility as a change of occupation and identifies two types of movement:
vertical mobility, which implies a change of position in the socio-professional ladder, which can be upward or downward (e.g., the worker who becomes his own boss);
horizontal mobility, which refers to a change in status or category that does not imply any change in relative position in the social scale (for example, changing to a job with identical levels of qualification and remuneration). In Sorokin’s conception, mobility may involve space, but movement in geographical space has, in his opinion, meaning only through a change in status in the social space that it reveals or implies.
The work of the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s focused on the spatial dimension of mobility. Faithful readers of Georg Simmel, researchers placed the analysis of mobility in a dynamic analysis framework inspired by internationalism. While the interactions between the city, its morphology, and social relations are at the heart of the Chicago School’s work, their attention is focused, above all, on the social system, its functioning, its organization, and its transformations. Geographic mobility, whether residential or daily, is considered an integral part of urban life. The originality of this approach lies in the fact that mobility is thought of as a factor of disorganization or disruption of equilibrium, and therefore as a vector of change.
From the outset, this work has been concerned with international migration to the United States. In this respect, it is in line with researchers interested in migration phenomena who have proposed numerous “laws” and models, such as Ravenstein’s seven “laws” (1885), Stouffer’s (1940) models of attraction and repulsion processes, and Zipf’s (1946) model, which introduces the effects of distance into attraction/repulsion models.
At the start of the Second World War, the field of mobility was already divided between sociological research, which defined mobility primarily as a change of position, role, or status, and an ecological approach, which considered it as a flow of movements in space.
Since the 1950s, analyses of social mobility have focused on the career paths and the intergenerational transmission of occupational categories. This last theme crystallized essential questions relating to the construction of social inequalities, such as social reproduction and the possibilities of ascending or descending the occupational ladder. It mobilized sociology to the point of becoming one of the most dynamic fields of research, which was to become totally autonomous in relation to the work in the city and in the urban setting. In this movement, sociology came to adopt the definition of mobility as a change of status, role, or position, which was the only one retained until the present day.
At the same time, geographical approaches to mobility have been developing since the postwar period (Kaufmann 2014) and are based around the four main forms of spatial mobility present in the societies of the time: daily mobility, travel, residential mobility, and migration. These are the main forms that can be differentiated according to the temporality to which they address (long or short term) and the space in which they take place (internal or external to the catchment area) (see Table 1.1). Each of these four forms is the subject of an abundant piece of literature and develops its own concepts, arenas, and journals. In short, it is constructed as a field of research. This conception clearly refers to spatial and temporal scales. Yet, if we delve into the research, we quickly realize that, although the temporal dimension is integrated, it is often not really questioned in the academic reflections that insist more on the spatial dimension of mobility.
However, the conceptualization of mobility remains common to all four domains: it is a movement between an origin and a destination. Implicitly, this approach combines a definition of mobility as the crossing of space and a definition as change. In fact, it postulates a coupling of these two orders of phenomena.
Table 1.1.The four main forms of spatial mobility
Short time frame
Long time frame
Inside of a catchment area
Daily mobility
Residential mobility
Outside of a catchment area
Travel
Migration
Dividing spatial mobility analysis into four domains has produced significant scientific advances, even if it has not made it possible to deal with all their links, because of the autonomy of the research domains that it has produced. Although approaches to mobility have often emphasized geography, temporal approaches are an important dimension of the analysis of mobility, especially daily (Drevon 2019) and temporary mobility. An examination of the temporalities of mobility cannot be free of the theoretical foundations of the geography of time (Hägerstrand 1970). Indeed, the Lund School and its most illustrious representative, Torsten Hägerstrand, laid the foundations for an approach to mobility and activities that take into account both space and time. This spatiotemporal consideration of human activities allows us to understand their ordering and coordination within a constrained space–time framework (the prism). The geography of time has received renewed interest from researchers over the last 20 years. This approach to human activities and behaviors is the result of a critique of economically inspired models that postulate a supposed rationality of individuals, thus reinforcing the need to rethink the analysis of mobilities, particularly by reinterpreting the sociology of social mobility.
1.3. The need for an integrative approach
The movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas is at the heart of global change and affects all areas of economic, political, and social life. These intrinsically structural changes appear to be the consequences of globalization and, in particular, of the fluidity of the circulation of capital, goods, and people on a scale never seen before. For example, the mobility of the main factors of production has increased considerably. On the side of capital, mobility has gone hand in hand with the development of the financial industry and increased returns. Liberalization, the development of information and communication technologies, and the continuous development of new services by the financial industry have led to an extremely rapid circulation on a global scale. The spatial and temporal organization of cities and territories is now penetrated by considerable differences in speed, ranging from walking to the immediacy of telecommunications, thus articulating particularly contrasting spatial and temporal scales.
In this context, a person’s ability to move in space and time has become a central resource for social mobility and more generally for social integration. In doing so, it raises the question of the relationship between social mobility and spatial mobility. This question was extensively addressed in the 1970s and 1980s by numerous studies that showed that international or inter-regional migration was a “social elevator.” The research of Bassand et al. (1985) went even further by analyzing the links between central and peripheral locations and upward or downward social mobility.
To account for these transformations, a new integrative approach is strongly needed, one that does not postulate the “Russian doll” type inclusions between the spatial and temporal forms of mobility or of a sequential type, like the four-stage models used to generate daily movements. Indeed, understanding mobility behavior is fundamentally a question of “why do we move?”
We move around to go to work and carry out the tasks of daily life. But we also move around to relax for leisure activities, which are becoming more and more prevalent. We also move around to fit in with lifestyles where frequent long-distance travel is valued. We travel to cohabitate with a partner, and we also travel following a divorce. Shifting from one activity to another also makes us change our role, our emotional state, and even our social status. These forms of mobility unfold on different temporal and spatial scales, from movement in the vicinity to international migration, and from a brief move in the neighborhood to a move to the other side of the world. Understanding mobility thus implies establishing a holistic approach to the phenomenon, which integrates the spatial, temporal, and social dimensions of mobility, thus making it possible to fit together the pieces of the puzzle that the history of research has sometimes misplaced and often scattered around.
In this endeavor, the work of Michel Bassand is essential and pioneering. In the book entitled Mobilité spatiale, Bassand and Brulhardt (1980) laid the foundations for such an approach. They consider mobility as a total social phenomenon in the sense of Marcel Mauss and define it as all movements involving an actor’s change of state or system under consideration. With this definition, mobility has a dual spatial and social quality, which makes it richer than purely spatial or purely social approaches.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, many thoughts on mobility have been developed under the banner of mobility turn. They aim to develop an integrative definition of the phenomenon in order to provide a real concept. These reflections concern the theoretical understanding of the phenomenon (Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007), the way in which mobilities are experienced (Merriman 2012), the role that mobilities play in the constitution of the contemporary individual (Kellerman 2006), the way in which they have evolved over time, etc. These works deconstruct spatiotemporal mobility scales and see this phenomenon as fully integrating migration. They insist that crossing geophysical space is generally a means to an end, not the end itself, and that therefore it is essential to look at the nature of this end in order to understand the motivations of mobility. This is how the mobility paradigm was born, which is a way of analyzing societies by paying attention to the role played by the movement in the organization of social relations. Such an approach allows us to legitimize questions concerning the practical, discursive, technological, and organizational devices implemented by societies to manage distance, as well as the methods necessary to study these devices.
The integrative approach to the notion of mobility, which stems from the work of Michel Bassand and the mobility paradigm, makes it possible to consider mobility in a resolutely interdisciplinary multiscale approach. In particular, it has the advantage of making it possible to approach mobility as (1) a socio-spatial phenomenon, (2) an analytical indicator, and (3) a social value. These three modalities of the notion of mobility are specific and complementary:
Mobility as a socio-spatial phenomenon
. The first modality is the observation that being mobile refers to a double faculty: that of moving, of changing place, but also that of transforming ourselves, of adapting to a new situation, of changing status, position, skills, etc., these two dimensions being strongly intertwined.
Mobility as an analytical indicator.
The second modality is that mobility can be considered as an analytical indicator of social reality. In this sense, measuring mobility can, for example, help us to understand the dynamics of family relationships. It can also, for example, make it possible to measure the rhythmic pressures to which working women with young children are subjected in terms of reconciling family life, social life, and professional life (Kaufmann 2011).
Mobility as a social value.
In preceding developments, mobility was understood as a primary good (Gallez 2015), within the meaning of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights relating to freedom of movement. The mobility value is, however, marked by a fundamental ambivalence: when movements are rapid, distant, and frequent, therefore reversible, they have very positive connotations; when, on the other hand, it is a question of migrations, in other words migrations of poor populations, therefore irreversible, they have a negative connotation. In contemporary Western societies, reversible mobility has thus become a dominant social norm, which is constructed particularly on the basis of a fantasy that associates rapid and distant movements with positive experiences of self-enrichment through travel experiences.
1.4. A new research arena
Mobility conceptualized with the help of the three modalities just described opens up the social sciences to new questions and thus renews the debates on social and economic differences, differentiations, and inequalities in relation to time and space. Over the last 15 years, work on mobility has been largely based on a broad, integrative approach to the phenomenon of mobility, considering it as a total social fact in the sense of Marcel Mauss, which allows for interdisciplinary recompositions around several epistemologies likely to produce a renewal of knowledge. More specifically, concerning the spatiotemporal mobility scales, four complementary approaches based in social science are developed, through the hybridization of urban geography, urban sociology, and the analysis of public policies with a spatial impact.
The first approach considers that the generalization of reversible forms of mobility requires an adaptation of the approach of contemporary societies. In his book Sociology beyond Societies, Urry (2000) is very clearly situated in this perspective, as is Manuel Castells (1996) in The Network Society or Jeremy Rifkin (2000) in The Age of Access. In this approach, social categories become blurred, and the traditional metric distances of geography lose their meaning. By looking through the lens of a network-based apprehension of the world, we make all that is related to fixity disappear and thus to the instituted substance of societies and their stratifications (Offner and Pumain 1996; Montulet 1998).
The second approach consists of considering the transformations of mobility as the practical consequence of an ideology of speed characteristic of modernity, to which people are now subjected. In this perspective, the social injunction to mobility is becoming more and more pressing, particularly in the world of work (Vignal 2005). Moving fast, far and often becomes imperative for those who want to prove that they are dynamic, motivated, or ambitious (Amar 2010). This posture is clearly that of Bauman (2013) in Liquid Modernity or of Janelle (1969) and Harvey (2001) when they speak of the compression of space–time. The vision of mobility as an ideology is very strongly focused on the world of work: daily commutes between home and work do indeed constitute a significant part of contemporary movement, but because of their rational motivation, they play only a minor role in the construction of a relationship with space between the traveler and the places they pass through; however, mobility also comes under the heading of other fields, such as leisure and tourism, which contribute to shaping a pace of life.
The third approach involves interpreting changes in mobility as one sign among others of the advent of a society of individuals (Drevon 2019). In this view, society as a whole is then based on the idea of freeing human beings from the clutches of community and traditional attachments tomake them more rational and reflexive with regard to their own development (Ascher 1995; Bourdin 2005). The multiple rhythm lifestyles that are developing, as well as the hybrid forms of travel such as long-distance commuting, “digital nomads,” or dual residents, are to be considered as reflections of individual aspirations. The central issue of this individualization becomes a social cohesion: how can so many differences be made to cohabit harmoniously (Tasan-Kok et al. 2013)?
The fourth approach to transformations in mobility is inspired by Time Geography (Hägerstrand 1970; Pred 1977) and also finds its extension with the concept of accessibility (Lenntorp 1976; Burns 1979) and of activity programs in time and space (Hensher and Stopher 1979). In this approach, the modalities of the simultaneous consideration of space and time are linked to three types of constraints: the capacity to appropriate a potentially available geographical context, the need for co-presence between individuals (knowing where, when, how, and for how long), and the conditions of availability of the activity opportunities offered (opening hours, teleworking, etc.). From this point of view, the transformation of mobilities is interpreted by a spatiotemporal enlargement of the possibilities to carry out activity programs.
Despite their epistemological differences, these four ways of interpreting the relationship between mobility and society converge on the diagnosis of a growing fragmentation and diversification of the temporalities of mobility (David 2007; Drevon et al. 2020), as well as the enlargement of the potential for speed provided by transport systems and connected objects and their accessibility. These observations support the theory developed by Rosa (2010) concerning the acceleration of life rhythms when he states that this results from the conjunction between technical acceleration and the multiple injunctions linked to social acceleration.
1.5. Articulating spatial and temporal mobility scales
In order to take the description and detailed understanding of the transformations of mobility and societies that have just been outlined in this chapter further, the book brings together a dozen contributions from researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds: sociology, geography, demography, anthropology, and political science.
Each of these contributions attempts to describe the different spatial and temporal mobility scales from a specific angle and according to a common sequence. Thus, each chapter in this book opens with a detailed review of scientific knowledge. From the presentation of the major references in the field, it then proposes a synthesis of different research works carried out in Europe on the subject discussed to finally lead to the outline of future research perspectives based on the discussion of the current debates and controversies that animate it. This writing device has the advantage of providing a didactic and comprehensive overview of the different spatial and temporal mobility scales as well as the issues related to each of them.
The book follows a path that tends first to put the conceptual and theoretical issues into perspective. Chapter 1, written by Vincent Kaufmann, a professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Guillaume Drevon, a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-economic Research and associate researcher at the LaSUR of the EPFL, proposes a review of the concept of mobility and its current perspectives. In Chapter 2, Christophe Mincke, a visiting professor at the Université Saint-Louis and researcher at the Institut national de criminalistique et de criminologie de Bruxelles, positions mobility as an interdisciplinary notion based on the main theoretical contributions of the last decades, which have tended to link different mobility scales. Chapter 3, written by Caroline Gallez, the director of research at the Laboratoire Ville Mobilité Transport, puts into perspective the eminently political dimension of mobility, particularly the inequalities it generates. Based on an in-depth review of the state of knowledge, Caroline Gallez outlines the principles of mobility as a vector of social justice at both the individual and the city level.
The second part of the book is dedicated to the main forms of mobility, which are also the most studied in social sciences. In Chapter 4, Juliana González, a researcher at the Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine of the EPFL, addresses the issue of inhabiting mobility by proposing an original approach that focuses on the experience of travel time. In Chapter 5, Sébastien Lord and Mathilde Loiselle from the École d’urbanisme, d’architecture et de paysage and the Faculty of Planning at the University of Montreal highlight the central dimension of walking and outline the principles of planning that promote its development. Chapter 6, by Samuel Carpentier-Postel, from the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, is dedicated to residential mobility in France and Europe. In this chapter, Samuel Carpentier-Postel puts into perspective the dynamics of residential mobility and their determinants. Chapter 7, provided by Garance Clément, a researcher at the Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine of the EPFL, and Camille Gardesse, from the École d’urbanisme de Paris, discusses migration at different spatial scales from a critical perspective.
Finally, the third part of the book is dedicated to atypical forms of mobility. In Chapter 8, Emmanuel Ravalet, a researcher at the Université de Lausanne, describes the complexity of the different forms of large-scale work-related mobility. Chapter 9, by Pascal Viot, an associate researcher at the Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine of the EPFL, looks at the issue of mobility and urban rhythms related to major events. Laurie Daffe, a researcher at the Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine of the EPFL, highlights in Chapter 10 the theme of river mobility from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective. Chapter 11, by Arnaud Le Marchand of the Université du Havre, focuses on the different forms of temporary and seasonal mobility. Chapter 12, written by Guillaume Drevon and Vincent Kaufmann, suggests putting the limits of the concept of mobility into perspective. In this last chapter, the authors also suggest renewing the approach to mobility through the prism of the concept of rhythm, thus prefiguring a rhythmology of mobility and more broadly of contemporary societies.
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2A Society with No Respite: Mobility as an Interdisciplinary Concept
Christophe MINCKE
Institut national de criminalistique et de criminologie, Brussels, Belgium
2.1. Introduction
A book that examines mobility scales must, logically, seek to shed light on how local or international, daily or long-term, and temporary or long-term mobility differs.
This approach, however, should not lead one to think that mobility can only be approached through the prism of scale. This would be tantamount to considering that mobilities cannot be considered in a global manner. If mobility is a concept with any sociological depth, it must be studied in an interdisciplinary manner through the scales at which it manifests itself. Indeed, to limit the concept of mobility to a particular scale would imply that a considerable number of situations, social practices, and representations are totally foreign to it. Thus, if mobility could only be conceived at an individual level, it would be impossible to use it to analyze public policies, social representations, or institutions. In the same way, if mobility only concerned long-distance travel, it would be impossible to use it as a tool for understanding everyday relationships with space, especially local space. Similarly, if we were to talk about mobility at various scales, but at the cost of establishing definitions of this mobility specific to each scale considered, we would have to give up the idea of a global social phenomenon, called mobility, whose ramifications at various scales would be united by a set of common characteristics. In this book, this chapter will explore mobility beyond the distinctions of scale. We shall therefore set about describing some theoretical proposals that have sought to link the different mobility scales and describe a relationship to mobility that is free of them.
In order to carry out this task, we have chosen to examine five theoretical proposals that seek to shed light on the meaning of mobility in our societies, the social representations with which it is associated, the context in which it takes on meaning, and, of course, the normative investments of which it is the object. It is thus the relationship of our contemporary societies with mobility that will be examined here.
The theories selected here are those that we consider to be major and recent contributions to this question. The aim here is not to make history of the thinking on mobility, but to present proposals that may shed light on contemporary phenomena related to mobility. It should be noted that the fifth proposal is ours, conceived with Bertrand Montulet, and is not presented here because it would be on a par with the others, but because we assumed that it was one of the reasons why the editors had asked us for it. Rather than attempting an overview of the productions of each selected author, we preferred to stick to their major work – from the perspective of a multiscale reflection on mobility – and to take these productions as milestones of a global perspective on mobilities.
We will begin our overview with the proposal of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (see section 2.2), who question what, today, justifies inequalities within our societies. Proposing a normative framework – the project-based city – they offer a first approach to mobility as part of an evolution of contemporary value systems, born in companies, expressed in management literature, and now widely shared in society. We then turn to the contribution of Zygmunt Bauman and his reflection on the emergence of a liquid modernity, based on lability, lightness, and the race for mobility (see section 2.3). Closely linking modernity and capitalism, it makes mobility the instrument of a domination of the mobile over the less mobile. This question of domination will also be present in our third author’s work, that of Hartmut Rosa, who is the author of a critical theory of acceleration (see section 2.4). Articulating his thought around the notion of alienation, he characterizes our societies by the fact that they have entered into a process of endless acceleration, feeding and justifying themselves. He makes it a major factor of a headlong rush leading to a subjection of the individual to the imperative of speed. Our fourth milestone will be the work of John Urry (see section 2.5). Based on the idea of a paradigmatic shift in mobility in a society marked by the figure of the network and by weak social ties, his intervention is both a formalization of the centrality of mobility in social relationships and a call for a (re)centering of the social sciences on it, to make it a major analyzer of social matters. We will conclude by presenting the work we are proposing, with Bertrand Montulet, around the question concerning the evolution of social representations of space–time and mobility. In this work, we have endeavored to integrate the contributions of the authors who have preceded us, first and foremost the four of whom we will speak here. Our specific contribution is, undoubtedly, beyond this work of integration to propose a more explicit extension of the reflections on mobility to non-material spaces and to propose a grammar of the injunction to mobility, articulated in four imperatives.
The work discussed here must be seen in a broader context, including Ehrenberg’s (1998) contribution to the reflection on the exhaustion of the contemporary individual in pursuit of himself, Cresswell’s (2001, 2006) proposals on sedentary and nomadic metaphysics structuring contrasted relations to space and mobility, or Kaufmann’s (2004, 2008) contribution via the concept of motility. We should not forget, in this broader context, the significant contributions, albeit of lesser magnitude, that encourage reflection on the social frameworks related to mobility, a living field, such as that of Borja et al. (2014) or Debarbieux (2014).
2.2. Mobility as a scale of magnitudes in a reticent capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello)
The first theoretical approach that we feel is necessary to report is that presented by Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) in their landmark work entitled Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (English version: The New Spirit of Capitalism). This book is an extension of another one: De la justification: les économies de la grandeur (English version: On Justification: Economics of Worth), by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991). In order to understand the latter, it is necessary to briefly recall the ambitions of the first book.
2.2.1. Justifying inequalities
Boltanski and Thévenot, in On Justification: Economics of Worth, question the mechanisms of justification of social orders, in other words, of social inequalities between individuals. They ask how, in societies based on the principle of common humanity – human beings are equal because of their humanity – inequalities can exist, be maintained, and be considered perfectly admissible. To answer this question, they formalize various registers of justification by relying on a common grammar, which includes all the necessary elements for a system of legitimating inequalities. They call these universes of meaning “cities.” Each one allows for classifying objects and persons hierarchically, after the tests.
It is on the basis of this grammar of justification of orders of magnitude that Boltanski and Thévenot formalize various cities, corresponding to as many ways of classifying people and objects. They identify five of them: inspired, domestic, opinion, civic, and industrial cities. However, they conclude their work by recognizing that none of these seem to describe the current order of magnitude in a valid way, and that they are trying hard to identify the system currently at work.
Eight years later, Luc Boltanski is back on the scene with The New Spirit of Capitalism written with Ève Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). Together, they propose the project-based city that they consider to describe the most contemporary system in economy of greatness, one whose domination has been established since the 1960s.
2.2.2. Inequalities in a reticular context: the project-based city
The project-based city is characterized by a particular affiliation to the figure of the network. It is based on a fundamental value, the common higher principle: activity. This requires everyone to be active at all times, whatever the field. Activity takes the form of participation in the projects that bring together a group of participants in a network mode. Every project is temporary; activity therefore consists of moving from one project to another and managing a global integration process in a successive or concomitant set of networks. The distinction between large and small within the social hierarchy is based on respect for this common superior principle.
Since the state of greatness is linked to the ability to integrate projects, its central quality is its employability, i.e., the interest it represents in the eyes of its networks of relations, an interest that motivates its solicitation for many projects. In order to build a broad network, mobility and adaptability are essential qualities. The large subject is flexible, unlike the small subject, who is fixed, rigid, and unable to integrate and change projects. The small subject is the one who cannot commit or be committed.
However, the large one does not achieve this status without difficulty because they have to sacrifice to the formula of investment. This term refers to the price to be paid to rise in terms of social hierarchy. In this case, the large subject has had to give up everything that could hinder their mobility: geographical and material attachments, regular working hours, personal principles, long-term planning of their life path, etc. Any obstacle to total flexibility must be removed, including their own morality and institutional power, as well as all categorization and compartmentalization of their various activities (work/leisure, friendships/professional relationships, etc.).
But the project-based city is also legitimate because it is redistributive through the ratio of size. This term refers to the fact that the large contributes, by its size, to the well-being of the small. In this case, the large of the project-based city redistributes connections and projects to the small in exchange for their enthusiasm. The small ones have access to networks that would otherwise be closed to them. This networking helps them to grow. This is how the large one serves the common good. Without it, of course, none of the projects would see the light of day.
The test that leads to the attribution of great quality, which demonstrates greatness, is the articulation between projects: going from one to another to manage several at the same time, but also being able to find new ones when one of them comes to an end, is a pivotal moment. The large one then shows its agility, demonstrating its greatness.
The whole system is based on a particular conception of the human being and their behaviors, called “natural relationship between beings”. In the project-based city, it is the establishment of connections with others. It itself is derived from a specific conception of dignity, based here on the natural capacity of each person to establish connections and on the desire to do so. In this framework, the harmonious figure of the natural order is the network. The human being is a social being, a being that is part of a network, and this is why the project-based city is the right order for human societies.
2.2.3. Project-based cities and mobility
Although their aim is not directly to examine the relationship of our societies with mobility, Boltanski and Chiapello introduce in the project-based city – and thus in their presentation of the reasons for the justification of inequalities – elements that are closely linked to this question.
This is how the large one shows themself as permanently capable of movement. They are thus always active, never immobile, always ready to embark on a new project, and always looking for new links to establish with others. Free of all grounding, freed of all weight, they embody mobile lightness.
Thus, if the purpose of Boltanski, Thévenot, and Chiapello’s theoretical advances is above all to better understand the way in which our societies, which recognize the equality of human beings in principle, tolerate inequalities, the formalization of the project-based city puts the question of mobility into perspective and provides elements for thinking about the reasons why we are mobile and value this mobility.
It should be noted that the point here is not to understand mobility in the narrow sense of the term, as a movement in material space, but, more broadly, as a set of social practices concerning both material and social spaces. Let us note that Boltanski and Chiapello, from the title of their work, insert their reflection in the specific framework of capitalism.
2.3. Movement: the central element of liquid modernity (Bauman)
Boltanski and Chiapello are of course not the only ones to question the place of mobility in the current economic and social context, nor to consider that the division of anchorages is a striking phenomenon, central to recent social developments. Bauman (2000), in his seminal work Liquid Modernity, questions its emergence and proposes an explanation based on the evocations of capitalism.
Handling concepts of heaviness, lightness, liquidity and solidity to handle the comparative destinies of modernity and capitalism, he proposes both a reflection on socioeconomic structures and on the destiny of individuals.
2.3.1. Dissolution and anchoring of solid modernity
Modernity would have, at the time of its emergence, dissolved the entirety of the existing social institutions, in the name of the obstacle that they constituted to freedom, but also to the instrumental reason. Then, it would have created new solids, new forms of political and economic organizations that were stable and resistant to change. For Bauman, this time is over because modernity has changed, becoming a continuous process of dissolution, becoming an end in itself and no longer founding anything that offers resistance to change. A compulsive tendency to modernization has developed, a kind of creative destruction theorized by Schumpeter.
For Bauman, the origin of modernity lies in the dissociation of time and space. When technical means made possible a considerable acceleration of travel, space was no longer measured by the time it took to travel through it. A place, which for a long time had been a 2 days’ walk from another, became accessible in different times, depending on the technical means used to reach it: the steamboat, the train, and soon after the automobile or the bicycle thus opened up the prospect of differentiated travel times that were constantly contracting as progress was made. Time then became the dynamic element of space–time, one that we were constantly trying to shorten in order to travel through space, fighting against the resistance of distances.
The most powerful technologically or economically became the fastest, the one who had new means to catch their competitors at speed. This is how the globe was soon covered in all directions and colonized. The empires took each other by storm and conquered immense territories, stopping only when they came up against a similar one and considering as empty any space not under the domination of one of them.
Certainly, mobility and speed were important, but the conquered spaces had to be ruled, controlled, bounded, and closed off. The world of modernity, based on the decoupling of time and space, was solid because it was made of borders, controls, and territorial claims. The conquest of space meant a spatial stabilization within borders.
It is this spatiotemporal arrangement that, for Bauman, has survived. The advent of information technology has now abolished space by moving from speed to instantaneity. Since today we can increasingly free ourselves from space, communicating instantly with the whole world and acting remotely, space has lost its value. What made it expensive was the difficulty of accessing it, the time it took to travel, and the competitive advantages that technology could offer. Now that everyone can be everywhere in the blink of an eye, the devaluation of space is total.
This evolution finds a striking echo in the corresponding evolution of capitalism. In the era of space resistance, heavy capitalism reigned. This was based on important infrastructures that tied capital to the ground. Factories, machines, stocks, and concessions for the exploitation of resources were then indispensable to economic activity. In order to exploit them, an innumerable workforce was recruited and chained to the infrastructure. Neither the capital nor the workers thought of escaping, as the anchoring of the economic activity seemed obvious: the weight and the size were the signs of success and power. Workers and employers lived together and fought against each other. In order to achieve productivity gains, production had to be faster and more efficient, and manufacturing processes had to be increasingly organized. The Fordist organization was the model, a model of order, based on the maximum predictability of each gesture and on the domination of time. The time of the flash of crossing space in order to conquer it corresponded here to the monopolization of land to develop productive activities, the strict delimitation of their perimeter, the extreme control of movements, and the routinization of time. In this world, it was up to rational leaders to define the steps to be taken to achieve clear and predefined objectives.
2.3.2. The fading of ends and limits
But, as Bauman teaches, no one is concerned with the ends anymore, so that production systems are deprived of a clear direction. The economic elites themselves no longer wish to anchor their activities. They think only in terms of light, mobile capitalism. Any choice made today must be the seizure of an opportunity, but it must not obviate the future agility of structures. Companies are relocating, subcontracting, refocusing on their core activities, laying off employees, and constantly adapting their strategies. There is no longer any question of long-term objectives, nothing being conceived as predictable. The industrial heaviness may be the power of the moment, but it will inevitably be a barrier to change tomorrow. But only one thing is certain: change.
In this light capitalism, limits have disappeared. Nothing hinders action in a world of instantaneity. From then on, an incessant movement can develop: it is not that we hurry to reach a fixed goal, but that in the absence of a goal, there is no finish line, no final gratification, just a movement cultivated for itself, because it is all that remains.
As Bauman points out, we are not equal in the face of movement. Thus, the dominant ones, today, are no longer those who hold space and are masters of borders. They are those who are able to escape from everyone, to change places without difficulty, while the dominated remain attached to space. Thus, capital enjoys more and more the ability to vanish, to teleport away, while workers remain localized. To force someone to stay in a place is, in liquid modernity, the preferred way to dominate them, while escapism is the faculty that determines power.
In a world largely based on the abolition of space, time becomes an eternal present. If the instantaneity of the movements and communications seems to be within our reach, it appears possible to indefinitely stretch each instant, to accomplish, the time of its duration, an infinity of tasks. The duration is thus without value if it is possible to accomplish everything in an extremely short period of time.
The combination of immediacy and lightness allows us to escape the consequences of our actions, to reap the rewards, and to avoid having to assume our responsibilities, which are left to those left behind.
