ABSTRACT
Cities are mobile places and places of mobility. Many cities were built at the convergence of major waterways and overland routes, and later became hubs for railways, highway systems, air transport and multi-modal metropolitan transportation systems. Mobility has been built into the infrastructure of cities, including the momentary immobilities of ports and freight depots, parking spaces and garages, airports and subway stops. ‘Enlightened planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy body, freely flowing . . . the Enlightenment planner made motion an end in itself’ (Sennett 1994: 263-4). By the early twentieth-century the Chicago School urban theorists described mobility as ‘perhaps the best index of the metabolism of a city’ (Burgess 1925: 59). And today a ‘new urbanism’ emphasizes ‘understanding cities as spatially open and cross-cut by many different kinds of mobilities, from flows of people to commodities to information’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 3); ‘cities and urban regions become, in a sense, staging posts in the perpetual flux of infrastructurally mediated flow, movement and exchange’ (Graham 2004: 154).
