ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how we think about mobility. To talk about changing mobilities, we need to take a multidisciplinary perspective on what drives the urge to move, how this evolves, how it is distributed, and how that distribution confers very different rights and opportunities on people. We take a relational perspective, which understands the possibilities of normalcy and difference through a comparative lens. Using insights from Sheller’s writing on mobility justice, we look well beyond the distribution of spatial opportunities and transport system provision to the processes that make and remake the patterns which we see. We address mobility and immobility, physical and virtual mobility, and their interaction. The chapter argues that, despite the dominance of the growth of movement in statistics and the narratives of growth that surround them, there is potential for change. There are observable societal changes, to which mobility patterns are intrinsically linked, which show new futures being written. However, the tools and analytical frameworks that dominate transport marginalise such possibilities, leading to insipid and ineffective proposals for policy intervention. The chapter makes the case that if we move beyond a blank canvas of planning and recognise the inevitability of the social and political nature of the transformative change required, then new possibilities could emerge.
