On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

摘要

Urbanity often seems to be about proximities and distances, boundaries and displacements. These concepts are common ones in urbanism and planning, as they always refer to some orders and the management of those orders. Tim Cresswell's On the Move focuses on the operational concept which holds these variables: mobility. Mobility is central, Cresswell claims, for what it means to be human. Humans move around, quite simply-even in the seemingly stationary activity of reading a book, they are not really in situ. The book could thus be considered a part of the 'mobility turn': it is an outline of the difference a mobility approach makes in the analysis of the contemporary flow of things and their genealogies (see Sheller and Urry, 2006).