Introduction

Abstract

It has long been recognised that the world appears different on the move — we understand it and relate to it in distinct ways from when we are still (Thrift, 1996; Cresswell, 2003; Urry, 2007). Our relationship to each other, space, time and place are mediated by our movement through the material and the social world. The observation that such relationships are influenced largely by movement, flow or mobility is by no means new. Baudelaire’s 19^th century flâneur understood that it was not just to be in the city that brought one close to it, it was the movement through it that allowed them to truly experience it. The act of observing whilst moving — surfacing and disappearing in the crowd — marked the flâneur as a scholar of the street, as Benjamin puts it ‘botanising the asphalt’ (Urry, 2007: 69). Some contemporary scholars are realising that the connection that Baudelaire offers with the mobile and the immobile — the traveller and what is being travelled through — are as important as ever, but our means to access meaningfully with our experience of a world constituted in a dizzying array of mobilities — actual, virtual, super fast, overt, covert, deadly or dislocating — have been largely ignored. In the 21^st century it does not appear reasonable or indeed possible to suggest one could stroll through the world, merely observing. Particularly in ‘developed’ economies this luxury is compromised by an age characterised as hypermobile (Adams, 1999) for some, and hypomobile (Murray, 2009a) for others.