【リンク】
The trends in the mobility approach in Anglophone human geography
and sociology are reviewed from its backgrounds and limitations.
The author compares the characteristics of theories on mobility form the
sociologists Urry and Sheller, and the geographers, Thrift, Merriman,
Cresswell and Adey.
In sociology, the mobility approach concerns the criticism of
modernization from post-modernism. From its viewpoints, Speed-up of
transport and communication in technological innovations are criticized as
a symbol of modernization.
However, in geography, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and
Spinoza and Deleuze’s concept of affects encourages to form and develop
Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory.
These theories are served as the background for forming mobility
approach regarding the “transformation of physicality in modern timespace.
Therefore, the concept of stillness is essential in the proposed notion of
mobility, as the emotional concept of affect. Hence, the pain and anxiety of
motion and stillness are clarified.
In conclusion, the mobility approach is an extension of the development
of phenomenology and humanism, and an individual is subjects to research.
It differs from conventional positivistic geography in epistemology and
methodology. So, the collective viewpoint of region or landscape is not a
subject of investigation.
In the mobility approach, individuals alternatively form a relational and
topological space due to motion and stillness of their body through
transportation and communication at an each ‘place’.
