Hybrid Mobilities: Transgressive Spatialities

Diverse factors like globalization, geopolitical tensions, and the transformation of lifestyles are strengthening the role of mobility as a structuring dimension of contemporary societies. Social-science research has taken note of these changes, but few studies cross the different forms of mobility, ranging from commuting to tourists and backpackers, and on to seasonal workers or international migrants. The diversity of mobility situations studied in this book highlights the contribution of the reality of mobility in the daily construction of urban, regional, and global spaces, as well as in the redefinition of socio-spatial concepts.

By using an interdisciplinary relational approach, the book revisits certain concepts such as exclusion, heritage, or distance, in order to understand spatialities beyond the oppositions of fixity/mobility, private/public, or here/elsewhere. The book sheds light on the capacities for resistance of mobile persons in Singapore, Dakar, Bangkok, Amman, Paris, New York, or Mexico by studying the power relationships that are established in situations of mobility. By deciphering the values that characterize regimes of (im)mobility, the contributors stress the normative injunctions of public policies and social practices.

The originality of the work lies in capturing the deployment of alternative spatialities and underlining how they are reshaped between sedentary and mobility regimes. It highlights the importance of fully associating mobility with its characteristics of ephemerality and fluidity, in our theorizations and understandings of spatialities. By taking a post-structuralist posture, the book makes it possible to establish a logic of ‘and’ to design a ‘between’ of things, and to reverse ontology. This allows the temporary and the connected to be rehabilitated, beyond distance, in our practical knowledge of spatialities and territorialities. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars of geography, sociology, anthropology, and urban studies with interests in mobility, migration and relational thought.

Nadine Cattan is research director in geography at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was previously director of a unit on territorial indicators and statistics at the OECD. She has also chaired an expert group on gateways at the DATAR, the French government’s regional development planning agency. Her main research interests aim to understand how mobilities are likely to modify society’s relationships to space and so lead to a reinterpretation of spatial concepts and theories. She has provided a critical overview on the issues of polycentrism and spatial integration in Europe. She has also developed spatial models to explain how metropolitan areas are being transformed. Her current research integrates gender to understand how genders contribute to reshaping territorialities and urban space. Her published works include: Cities and networks in Europe. A critical approach of polycentrism (2007) and Atlas mondial des sexualités. Libertés, plaisirs et interdits (2016).

Laurent Faret is a professor of geography at the University of Paris, a member of CESSMA, and currently on research leave at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City, with the Research Institute for Development (IRD). He is a member of the LMI MESO, an international collaborative program between France, Mexico, and Central American countries. His research interests include: the evolution of international migration dynamics and the related territorial and political transformations; the urban dynamics resulting from transit movements and settlement of mobile populations; and the production of transnational mobility spaces and their effects on the dynamics of development in the Global South, at different scales. He is the author or editor of various books on these themes, such as Migrant Protection and the City in the Americas (2021), Les circulations transnationales. Lire les turbulences migratoires contemporaines (2009), Migrants des Suds (2009), and Les territoires de la mobilité. Migration et communautés transnationales entre le Mexique et les Etats-Unis (2003).