ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the most important thinkers who have engaged closely with John Urry’s work, or who have influenced and/or been influenced by it, and many who are committed to continuing it. It focuses on economies and spatialities, and the contributors reflect on both ‘the spatial turn’ and ‘the cultural turn’ in social theory, and especially their impact on British sociology in the 1980s, in conversation with simultaneous developments in human geography. The book considers the contributions of his work to rethinking the relation between natures, bodies, and the senses, and the emergence of what might be called ‘the sensual turn’ in sociology and cultural geography. It addresses in wider perspective the full implications of the mobilities turn, as it has impacted on a trans-disciplinary array of questions.
