ABSTRACT
Of the many forms of technology conditioning mobilities in one way or another, buildings have not, for the longest time, been assumed to form individually determining factors. Where research focused on the built environment as a contributing factor in the initial construction and subsequent maintenance of mobilities, unitary and singular buildings were accorded a side interest at best, and were subsumed within larger infrastructures, networks, or relational effects created by an assemblage of buildings. And while recent work in cultural and social geography has begun to address the formative capacity of buildings, relevant areas of research such as transport planning and history continue to have little time for the individual building as such, while no less relevant fields of study such as art history or the engineering sciences do not normally concern themselves with the way socially relevant actions are linked to or indeed facilitated by buildings. The majority of geographical writings on mobility have followed this trajectory: unless researching the micro-geographies of households or the macro-geographies of spatial divisions of labour, architecture forms at best an assumed and largely stable set of geographical nodes into which – resembling the work of time-geographers a generation ago – mobilities are thrust. What had been absent until fairly recently is a sustained analysis of the conditioning work emanating from architectural practices – an analysis that is capable of reconciling recent insights into the centrality and fluidity of mobilities (Cresswell 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006) with theoretically based discussions about the nature and role of the built environment.
