Mobilities and Territories: towards a relational approach to space

The World from Spitsbergen, 2018 © Nadine Cattan

Contacts : Nadine Cattan, Camille Schmoll, Christophe Quéva

Mobility, including displacement and all the potential associated with intentionality, decisionmaking and the underlying norms, is one of the major challenges facing contemporary society. Recent health, climate, environmental, social, and political crises have highlighted the central role played by mobility in people’s everyday lives, whether ordinary or exceptional. The challenge of this transversal is to examine the way in which mobility structures and shapes territories, and conversely how territories construct mobility.

Three approaches address a common issue running through the research carried out in this transversal  theme.

1. Articulating individual and collective levels enables a focus on the interplay of individuals and actors in the collective construction of territories, cities, and metropolises in particular.
2. Associating representations of places with people’s territorial practices drives an integration of emotional and sensitive relationships to places, for a better understanding of spatialities.
3. Exploring mobility dynamics on multiple scales facilitates the examination of resulting reciprocal effects within and between territories, especially cities and metropolises.

The articulation of mobilitieswith a reflection on the scales, temporalities, and historicity of practices and representations to bring out the elements of rupture and continuity that characterize themhas three main objectives.

The concept of mobile territoriality remains incomplete. The need for a revised perspective in the apprehension of territories is obvious, but how to change it remains unclear. This project reconsiders the role of movement in the existential construction of the individual and posits a hypothesis of mobile places and times in which appropriation is possible. In a critical approach to classic categorizations, the aim is to give meaning to in-between situations. Existing surveys and statistics, in both the scientific and public policy fields, are shaping a reading of mobility that calls for discussion.

The normative dimension of mobility is examined through the prism of trade-offs between intentionality and constraint to show the extent to which mobility is at the root of the recomposition of socio-spatial inequalities in “a right to mobility.” The aim is to explore the tension between mobility and immobility, both at the level of individual trajectories and practices and of their modes of regulation, in terms of public policies and individual strategies. This tension is inherent in all forms of mobility, from international migration to everyday urban mobility.

In addition to human mobility, other forms of mobility will be examined. In the wake of work on mobility trends, the mobility of objects, animals, information, knowledge, ideas, and emotions will be examined in the context of their interactions with human mobility. It is the role of non-human “actors” in human mobility circuits that is explored here. The recent health crisis has highlighted the social, economic, and ecological implications of the mobility of goods. The parcel, for example, has become a social object, long ignored before finally being considered from a dual perspective: that of our “de-mobilities” (a parcel is delivered) and that of the circuits of this delivery and its new working-class sociology.

The all-encompassing approaches suggested by this transversal make it possible to conceive of the territorial systems that are created at the crossroads of different types of mobility, a wide variety of actors, and different modes of action, assessed by both quantitative and qualitative methods. Identifying the geographical figures of mobility systems is of particular interest, as it is part of a multi-scale, multi-dimensional perspective on travel. A historical perspective highlights the long duration of exchange and mobility practices.

1. Ongoing: MobiDic— Critical Dictionary of Mobility

Launched in 2020, MobiDic—Critical Dictionary of Mobility is a collective online publication that brings together a large number of Géographie-cités researchers, including PhD students and young researchers. Their objective is to give an account of the use of words and notions relating to the theme of mobility, as well as the controversies and debates that animate these usages. Definitions are thematic and cross-referenced with the notion of mobility to offer reflexive notes on the major concepts, categories, and methodological approaches in the study of mobility. The idea is not to give a general definition of the notions of for example, “spatialities” or “space,” but to explain what mobilities do to space and spatialities, and vice versa.

2. In Perspective

A handbook on methods and data related to mobility to decipher and explain methodological practices at every stage of research—from data collection to exploitation, analysis, visualization, and feedback to the public—is currently under consideration. The issue of measuring mobility will be addressed from the perspective of discussing the role of this measure in the very definition of mobility in the social and political field. Discussions will also focus on ethical issues.