ABSTRACT
An academic appreciation of the autonomous and monadic ontologies associated with mobility practices is a key to understanding the addictive and joyful sensations of moving and communicating in certain ways, as well as the forgetting, displacement or bracketing off of the environmental consequences of mobility practices. Research on elite mobilities has revealed the labour which underlies the smooth and seamless movements of the super-rich; but feelings of autonomy, freedom, smoothness and simplicity are much more widespread and ubiquitous than some of the accounts perhaps suggest. Across his career, John Urry’s diverse outputs on mobility, space, tourism, time, complexity, automobility, futures, organised capitalism, nature and much more addressed big and sometimes difficult themes in an accessible manner, bringing an ordered simplicity to his work which enabled his ideas to reach a diverse multi-disciplinary readership.
