Alternative mobilities

Phillip Vannini, The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes Less Travelled. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, 279 pp. ISBN 9780754676669

With few exceptions, The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes Less Travelled, edited by Phillip Vannini, comprises a strong cast of writers from a variety of disciplines, both of which help to make it a relatively smooth ride. The appeal of the collected papers resides in their richly evocative illustrations of the diverse experiences of different modes of commuting (by plane and boat for example) for different users (the young, elderly and disadvantaged) and the ways in which these, often disorderly, performances produce particular relational spaces and times. Whilst it may not entirely fulfil its stated ambition of providing a corrective to supposedly dominating accounts of connectivity and unfettered movement, it nevertheless makes a solid contribution to a burgeoning literature which will be of special interest to those interested in routes less travelled.

The structure of the book groups the 15 papers into three parts each containing five papers. The chapters in Part 1 are concerned with the construction and experience of space and time, those in Part 2 with elements that structure the personal experiences of movement, and those in Part 3 explore the material and technical aspects of mobility and transportation. The creative practices through which they do so are numerous, including buses, boats, planes, trains, bikes and canoes, to name a few, with cars notable by their absence.

The main contention that prefaces the volume is the notion that the burgeoning mobilities literature is all too ready to provide homogenised accounts of modern mobility; the suggestion is that the current landscape is dominated by ‘grand theories of networks and globalisation’ (p. 8) where hypermobility and its concomitant non-places, panoptic regimes and depthlessness appear ubiquitous in late modernity (pp. 7–8). For Vannini this is a mistake, causing us to miss, ‘the complex, negotiated and contingent nature of social worlds of movement’ (p. 8). Accordingly, he argues that there is a need to focus more on the everyday interactions that make up flows and mobilities in order to recover a sense of local culture. Hence the twin goals of the volume are to correct the prevalence of accounts which narrate hypermobility, and to do so using ethnographic accounts which attempt to ‘slow down’ and explore those places previously passed over (p. 8).

I think my biggest criticism of the collection is that I am not so sure that the moorings from which it pushes off are altogether firm. That is to say I’m not convinced that the mobilities paradigm is, as Vannini says, dominated by rooted and immobile accounts of hypermobility (p. 12). This seems to me to be a wilfully partial reading of the current cannon; whilst there are of course many accounts which position car and air travel in these ways (Adey, 2004; Sheller, 2004; Sheller and Urry, 2000; Urry, 2003, 2006), there are also those who have sought to provide less totalising and grounded accounts of mobility (Edensor, 2003, 2005; Kullman, 2010; O’Regan, 2011). Quoting Symes (2007) Vannini argues that the mobilities literature fails to engage with the actual experience of travel (p. 9), yet I thought that was exactly what much of it has done (see for example Ferguson, 2011; Ford and Brown, 2006; Middleton, 2008; Spinney, 2006). So in that sense it is hard to see how the book can realise its stated contribution when that contribution has already been made to some extent. Having said that, this shortcoming is far from fatal as the book delivers in other, more interesting ways.

What the volume does counter with its focus on ‘alternative’ mobilities is the urban bias of mobilities literature, and indeed human geographical scholarship more broadly. Accounts such as those given by Collis, Boshier, Van den Scott, and Jones and Neumann, often very richly highlight the lack of connectivity that many places experience, and in doing so provide insights into the contingent nature of the mobilities, which structure that lack of connectivity and the resulting relationships between places. Boshier’s account in Part 3 on the vagaries of commuting by boat to a small Canadian island is exemplary in describing the ways in which technology produces particular subjectivities and affects (such as anxiety), and relationships to others and other places, producing the island as remote just as much as the weather and topography.

Time is also a recurring theme, if not an outright focus, of many of the papers in the book. The point of departure as a whole is that time spent travelling is not necessarily time wasted, rather time is conceptualised as the product of specific ways of being and moving within the landscape. So the notion of stasis is one that comes up time and again; how places remain or become ‘slow’, anachronistic and out of sync with mainland temporalities and rhythms. Levin for example notes how ticketing policies in the Swedish public transport system favour particular temporal and bodily dispositions, which serve to exclude older people from public transport, and Boshier narrates the production of ‘island time’ which rubs up against dominant mainland time.

A third area where the book promises and delivers relates to rich ethnographic descriptions of the experience of different journeys and the ways in which these are structured. Jiron gives a powerful and emotive account of the commuting experience of working-class families in Santiago (Chile), whilst Bissell narrates how the multiple socialities of rail travel are constituted through the performance of particular subjectivities and ways of being and relating, which are in turn framed by the layout of the train carriage. Budd’s chapter is also worth highlighting for providing an account of the ways in which innovations in air travel have oriented the traveller to landscapes in new ways, which have rendered them mundane. These accounts are particularly useful because of their emphasis on the structures that underpin different embodied, temporal and spatial experiences and dispositions.

In treading the line of alternative mobilities, some of the examples are for me overly esoteric, and I can’t help but think that perhaps another way to highlight the differences in supposedly homogeneous practices such as driving would be – as for example Edensor (2003) has done with driving – to focus on regular car commutes and airline routes, but in a way and at a level that provides accounts which are less about uniformity and more about local variations. This observation notwithstanding, I would have to say that the book does deliver, but perhaps not precisely on the agenda it sets out. Rather its contributions are more emergent: as you read the chapters they make you aware of the paucity of ethnographic mobilities research relating to aspects of life-stages and lower socio-economic groups, disconnection and temporal stasis in rural landscapes, or to relatively common modes such as boats, buses and motorcycles, and it is here that the road less travelled is a path that should perhaps be taken more often.