ABSTRACT
Mobility has become a kind of leitmotif of the modern era. It has become a banal observation to say that we live in increasingly ‘fast paced’ societies. As infrastructures of travel have allowed for faster and more commonplace movement, it is easier and easier to conduct our lives “on the road.” Tourism is now one of the largest industries in the world, and the chief source of income for many developing countries. Labor migrants wrap the globe in their networks of travel between home and workplace, from the Philippines to Singapore, India to Kuwait, Turkey to Germany, and Mexico to the United States. In China, over 150 million migrants have left their rural homes to labor in the cities, fueling industrialization and urbanization at an unprecedented scale. The cities are full of strangers, and it is this fact perhaps more than any other which has captured the imagination of scholars of modernity. Collectives of the uprooted, cities are places of mobility. This has also given the city a liberating quality for many. When everyone’s a stranger, the conventions of traditional communities don’t apply. More than simply uprooting populations and moving them from one place to another, then, mobility is related to more fundamental social changes.
