Mobility and anti-mobility

Paul Hartzog got a interesting blog and one of his articles I will copy and paste right now, so interesting the arguments are:



“What do we mean by mobility? Although there are technological forces in the world that promote mobility, are we missing the ones that obstruct mobility? What are the forces of anti-mobility?



For example:

• There are many difficulties posed by anti-terrorist safety measures on airplanes. These measures have already had wide-reaching consequences such as musicians not being able to do their jobs (which involve substantial travel) because they can no longer transport their expensive instruments.
• Border-crossing and passport issues are getting worse. Many people are just staying within their “safe zones.”
  
  

So I got to thinking that if the forces of anti-mobility overcome the forces of mobility, we will actually be less mobile than we used to be. To clarify, what do we mean by mobility? Technological mobility involves smart objects, GPS, telecommunications, wifi, and all of the factors that enable individuals to be tapped into the no-osphere at all times, and, I would argue, is increasing. But political mobility involves the willingness of governments to allow mobility to flourish, and, this, I would argue, is decreasing.

Interestingly, I think this is a fuzzy dichotomy with overlap between the two concepts. For instance:

• Technological mobility, i.e. access to information about another place than where I am right now, means that I don’t actually have to go there. So technology can also be anti-mobility.
  
  
• Political mobility in places like the EU is definitely easier now than it ever has been since the nation-state boundaries came into being.
  
  

One can envision scenarios where society becomes more mobile locally, i.e. within some small predefined boundary, but less mobile within the global context. It is too early to tell how bad or good this might be. A lot of environmentalists are already pushing for more local activity and less global activity.

My colleague Kingsley Dennis, of the New Mobilities research centre at Lancaster University in the U.K., has said to me that he wants to investigate “the underside of mobility,” so I’m just free-floating some ideas here. It definitely seems like this area of inquiry has some room for some good analytical investigation though.”

I think it will be a interesting discussion, and will keep waiting to read more. I would include a sense o scale in this view atwart small scales are getting more and more mobility whereas big scales not. In fact, in an architectural and spatial point of view, small scale mobility is a redundance, fortifying the identity notion of the places. This, summing up to the actual delicate state of international relations could drawn a very sad frame of intolerance within regions of the globe, typical in moments as such blind nacionalisms had raised in the political panorama.