Abstract
The front cover photograph of a leather glove augmented by George Shove to be used as a map for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 sets the tone of this edited book. How is mobility represented, in particular in art? The obvious distortions in space that occur in a map set onto a glove – missing from the front photograph is the Collosseum drawn onto the thumb that would presumably be difficult to gauge in terms of accurate distance – are analogous to the themes in this book, made clear as the ‘complication of representation’ of mobility on page 5 of the Introduction by Lesley Murray and Sara Upstone.
The provocation on page 11 that the mobilities paradigm to date has not been interdisciplinary enough, tending to find friends in the humanities or the social sciences, is hard medicine to swallow. Yet, this criticism makes sense when taking into account just how far this volume proposes to go with ‘trans-disciplinarity’. Drawing inspiration from literary, musical and artistic (cultural) texts, Researching and Representing Mobilities makes a strong case for using ‘subjectivities’ as an inspiration and, indeed, methodological tool.
Taking this idea as a bugle call, Anne Jensen works these ideas further, in particular musing on the recent flurry around ‘mobile atmospheres’, which is most exemplary in the work of David Bissell. ‘Atmospheres’ are difficult to measure in transport and urban planning, but real enough for those who commute through these kinds of spaces. Atmospheres are indeed one of the most fruitful methodological framings to emerge from non-representational theory.
In chapter three Sara Upstone is more interested in textual forms of non-representation and sees a natural bed-fellow for mobilities in post-colonial literature. Here music, or to be more precise rhythm, provides a useful method to subvert colonial mastery over space and ample examples are given from popular fictional works.
In chapter four Lesley Murray and Hannah Vincent return to George Shove’s glove in a critical evaluation of fiction, much in the same vein as chapter three. Here, representations of mobility are used to critique the gendered nature of space in built landscapes such as London.
A history of ‘road rage’ is ably offered by Lynne Pearce in chapter five, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s sensorial meditations on motoring amongst other texts. This chapter reminds us that much of what is taken for granted as motoring space and behaviour was in fact strange to earlier users, who were exposed to the need for speed for the first time.
Chapter six offers a critical analysis of the changing nature of street art in Belfast. The shifting mural-scape in Northern Ireland is a potent example of how art in public space is mobile and while the section on taxi drivers is a surprising departure from muralists, the overall flavour of this chapter was an impressive example of the collection’s thesis.
The king of non-representation is surely Le Corbusier and this staple theorist of the creative arts only rarely appears in mobilities literature. Sue Robertson betrays her background as an architect in this chapter, which starts with a revealing insight into the roots of London’s mid-twentieth century highway boom through Le Corbusier’s sidekick Goldfinger. Her focus on roads, in particular the Westway into London, is not out of place in this volume and shows the creative opportunities many master planners have been given in the past.
My favourite chapter by Karolina Doughty and Maja Lagerqvist applies the volume’s thesis to music, which would have been sorely missed in this book. The chapter offers an excellent example of recent innovations in human geography for using sound recording and experiment as methodology, in this case a ‘sound walk’. Here an ethnographic case study on South American pan-flute music in Sweden was drawn on to deconstruct the global flows of ‘world’ music, popular in the public spaces of most urban cores’ shopping precincts.
The authors in this volume are drawn from the UK, Chile, Denmark and Sweden and are an eclectic mix of geographers, literary theorists, playwrights and photographers. Throughout this book Nigel Thrift and his colleagues’ ‘non-representational theory’ appears as the flavour of the month and not without good reason. It is surely relevant that Thrift was one of the co-authors alongside Mike Featherstone and John Urry of the edited book Automobilities in 2000. The reboot of this theory by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison in an edited book from 2010 is another milestone in this collection’s ancestry.
Unfortunately, my review version had a printing error in the Introduction where pages 5–20 were duplicated again after page 20.