Landscapes of Mobility

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people goods technologies media money and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world including those from Benin the United States India Mali Senegal Japan Haiti and Romania this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion this book analyzes human beings' embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically socially and politically constructed condition the book is divided into three sections-objects contacts and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes including mobile bodies buildings and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social economic ecological and political conditions the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally the last section explores how the flows of objects bodies interactions and ecologies are represented presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations processes and exchanges are captured depicted reproduced and re-embodied.