John Urry

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Sociology

This data article presents the UK City LIFE1 data set for the city of Birmingham, UK. UK City LIFE1 is a new, comprehensive and holistic method for measuring the livable sustainability performance of UK cities. The Birmingham data set comprises 346 indicators structured simultaneously (1) within a four-tier, outcome-based framework in order to aid...

Recently, much of the literature on sharing in cities has focused on the sharing economy, in which people use online platforms to share underutilized assets in the marketplace. This view of sharing is too narrow for cities, as it neglects the myriad of ways, reasons, and scales in which citizens share in urban environments. Research presented here...

This Little Book examines whether it is possible for cities to function in the future without cars. The book examines what is a car, what the car-system is and how it works, and whether it is possible to ensure that the uses and benefits of cars could be realised without millions of moving and parked cars and their associated infrastructures. It al...

Cargo is moved from factories through global production networks via supply chains to consumers, but this process is hidden from them by what Raymond Williams termed the magic system of marketing and what Allan Sekula and Noël Burch call the forgotten space of containerization. This paper addresses recent concern that the mobilities paradigm has ne...

Electric Mobility Innovation in China

Abstract This paper assesses possible futures concerning so-called 3D printing in relation to socio-technical systems and consumption and production. Drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council funded project, the paper details the results of research exploring possible futures of the manufacturing industry and impacts upon the transport of...

This article assesses the use of ‘science fiction’ (SF) in visioning or prototyping the potential economic and social consequences of so-called 3D printing. What is becoming clear to many commentators as well as science fiction writers is how rapid prototyping, or 3D printing more generally, could permit many final objects to be made near to or eve...

This paper examines various aspects of moving from high carbon economies and societies to a cluster of low carbon systems. First, some historical material is considered from the Second World War and the 1970s, periods with some lessons for the contemporary 'powering down' of whole societies. Second, analysis is provided of some green shoots of a po...

This paper examines brings together two topics normally understood separately: the study of elites and the processes by which new 'technologies' develop. We discuss these in the context of the new technology known as additive or 3D printing. We examine how it was that elites came to be formed in this new and as yet still-to-be-fully-formed area of...

Highlights ► Review of many approaches to low carbon transport. ► Interesting assessment of these. ► Detailed account of the importance of oil for transportation futures.

A central argument of much contemporary literature is that the advent of digital and mobile technologies creates new kinds of mobile lives, new socialities and new ways of relating to the self and others. In this paper I specifically examine how mobile lives unfold through social networks, facilitating the forming and reforming of connections peopl...

The Tourist Gaze [Urry J, 1990 (Sage, London)] is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4000 citations on Google scholar).Whilst wide ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucault-inspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. However, so...

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wn4XFihOZscC&q=mobile%2C+experimental#v=onepage&q&f=false In the twenty-first century, more than ever, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are forming an intensely mobile background to everyday life. Social scientists...

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This article examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of d...

This article seeks to develop a manifesto for a sociology concerned with the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mobilities. A number of key concepts relevant for such a sociology are elaborated: 'gamekeeping', networks, fluid...

Cosmopolitanism is the focus of much current debate. This literature is marked by a relative paucity of detailed research examining cosmopolitanism as a social force within particular societies. Two topics that have received little attention despite their utter importance for current global challenges are the scale and impact of cosmopolitanism in...

Cosmopolitanism is the focus of much current debate. This literature, however, is marked by a relative paucity of detailed research that examines the impact of cosmopolitanism as a social force within different societies. In particular, two topics that have received little attention despite their utter importance for current global challenges are t...

Social scientists and sociologists have paid insufficient attention to spatial variations in social phenomena. This paper discusses such variations in relationship to the analysis of social class. Changes are resulting in an increased fragmentation of classes on the local level, and in the heightened importance of non-class based 'local social move...

The Mobilities ParadigmA-Mobile Social ScienceSimmel and MobilitiesSedentarismNomadismMaterials on the MoveMigrations and DiasporasProximities and PleasuresSystemsConclusion Bibliography

In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of researchable entities arise, opening up a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical, and new avenues for critique. The mobilities paradigm not only rem...

Abstract In this paper we examine the relatively new topic of travel time, the ‘valuation’ of which is of great significance in the potential funding,and construction,of infrastructural projects. In the economic appraisals of such projects, which are often of massive scale and impact, itis presumed that such time is wasted, dead or empty, needs no...

The ‘steel-and-petroleum’ car is one of the most significant contributors to anthropogenic environmental change especially with its continued rapid growth in the world's most rapidly developing countries. This paper examines the intersections of the flows of new fuel systems; new ways of producing car bodies and new systems of managing personal mob...

This exploratory article describes and develops theoretical notions of how coordination takes place within mobile network societies, that is, societies where travel, ties at-a-distance, email and mobile communications are widespread. The article brings together studies of travel, communications and social networks through a particular focus upon th...

In this paper I examine various sociologies of the future. I argue that one future, of global climate change, is now exceptionally significant. This future is based upon certain sociological presumptions and thus sociology is central to its emerging contours and to its analysis. I examine one aspect of such a future, the role of travel and especial...

IntroductionVisualitySmell and TouchConclusion References

The Heritage IndustryTourism and the Local StateDesigning for the GazePostmodern Museums

This is a report on an Academy of Social Sciences debate held on 15 March 2006. The debate concerned the nature, character and development of the social sciences. Four leading social scientists were asked to reflect upon the nature of the social sciences in the light of various transformations in both intellectual thought and in those processes tha...

This article shows that much tourism should no longer be seen as marginal and by implication “unnecessary”. Rather, traveling, visiting, and hosting are necessary to social life conducted at-a-distance. It is argued here that research has neglected issues of sociality and corporeal copresence and thereby overlooked how more and more tourism is conc...

The 1990s has seen the growth of the Internet with a take-up faster than any previous technology, with one billion users soon worldwide. The dealings of foreign exchange that occur each day are worth $1.4 trillion, sixty times greater than the amount of world trade. Communications “on the move” are being transformed with new mobile phones more comm...

Issues of movement - of people, things, information and ideas - are central to people's lives and to most organisations. From oil wars to SMS texting, from airport expansion controversies to the decline of walking, from slave - trading to global terrorism, from global warming to teleworking, issues of 'mobility' are centre-stage upon many academic...

This article explores aspects of travelling times. First, it is argued that there is something about contemporary times in which travelling assumes a greater significance within many people's lives, even at a time when more communication devices are readily ‘at-hand’. Also, it is shown that there are multiple kinds of time involved in the process o...

The past decade has seen striking increases in travel and in communications at‐a‐distance through mobile phone calls, text messaging and emailing. People in prosperous societies are both travelling and communicating more to connect with absent others. People can travel, relocate and migrate and yet still be connected with friends and family members...

In earlier publications based on the research discussed in this article (e.g. Szerszynski and Urry 2002), we argued that an emergent culture of cosmopolitanism, refracted into different forms amongst different social groups, was being nurtured by a widespread 'banal globalism'--a proliferation of global symbols and narratives made available through...

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we...

Complexity theory' seems to provide some metaphors, concepts and theories essential for examining the intractable disorderliness of the contemporary world. Relations across that world are complex, rich and non-linear, involving multiple negative and, more significantly, positive feedback loops. This article shows how globalisation should be concept...

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Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized...

This paper discusses mobilities from the viewpoint of the systems that structure, organise and permit multiple mobilities. This is considered both historically and in the current century. The paper shows that in the twenty-first century, interdependent digitised systems of mobility are at the core of contemporary societies. It also shows more gener...

This paper, focused primarily on UK data and debates, considers the potential significance of travel time use within past, present and future patterns of mobility. In transport scheme appraisal, savings in travel time typically represent a substantial proportion of the benefits of a scheme--benefits used to justify its often enormous financial cost...

This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially h...

Many places around the world are being produced, converted, interpreted and made fit for tourist consumption. This fascinating book analyzes tourist performances such as walking, shopping, sunbathing, photographing, eating and clubbing, and studies why, and indeed how, some places become global centres whilst others don't. Arranged in four distinct...

This paper is concerned with the power of social science and its methods. We first argue that social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it. Second, we suggest that, if social investigation makes worlds, then it can, in some me...

Der Beitrag dokumentiert die Diskussion auf der "Author Meets Critic"-Veranstaltung zu John Urrys "Sociology Beyond Societies" auf dem 32. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (2004). Zunächst erläutert Urry den Grundgedanken seines Ansatzes, der auf eine Aufhebung der Trennung zwischen Naturwissenschaften und Gesellschaftswissenschaf...

Abstract In this article I explore the increasing overlaps between ‘sociology’ and ‘physics’ through analysing recent contributions to the social network literature concerned with exploring and explaining the so-called ‘small world’ phenomenon. I show that this new social network literature, while very provocative, is insufficiently sociological an...

'…city life is subtly but profoundly changed, sacrificed to that abstract space where ,cars circulate like so many ,atomic ,particles…. [T]he driver is concerned only with steering himself to his [sic] destination, and in looking about sees only what he needs to see for that purpose; he thus perceives only his route, which has been materialized, me...

This paper considers the role that physical, corporeal travel plays in social life. There is a large and increasing scale of such travel. This increase has occurred simultaneously with the proliferation of communication devices that in some ways substitute for physical travel. I hypothesize that the bases of such travel are new ways in which social...

Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of t...

Abstract This paper is concerned with whether a ‘culture of cosmopolitanism’ is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging ‘global’ processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the ‘world as a whole’, an...

This paper is concerned with whether a ‘culture of cosmopolitanism’ is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging ‘global’ processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the ‘world as a whole’, and they pr...

This article assesses whether some notions from complexity or non-linear theory help to make sense of September 11th. This relates to the author's more general concern, to interrogate `globalization' through the prism of complexity. Some of the topics investigated in this article include the nature of networked relationships between the macro and m...

In this article I discuss just why travel takes place. Why does travel occur, especially with the development of new communications technologies? I unpack how corporeal proximity in diverse modes appears to make travel necessary and desirable. I examine how aspects of conversational practice and of `meetings' make travel obligatory for sustaining `...

The Tourist Gaze, Third Edition restructures, reworks and remakes the groundbreaking previous versions making this successful book even more relevant for tourism students, researchers and designers in the new century. The tourist gaze remains an agenda setting theory, incorporating new principles and research. Packed full of fascinating insights th...

Schivelbusch states that 'For the twentieth century tourist, the World has become one large department store of countrysides and cities'. In the following I elaborate some aspects of this 'department store'. I bring out especially the varied ways in which people get transported to and through such a department store, with the mobilities that it gen...

The social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome consequences for social life, especially in their analysis of the urban. Urban studies in particular has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space 'scapes' of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Focusing on forms of mobility int...

This issue of Body & Society was assembled to extend the interest in the embodied nature of people's experiences in, and of, the physical world. It thus seeks to develop further the emergent sociology of the body that has provided extensive insight into the embodied character of human experience. Such a sociology has, though, dealt less systematica...

In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing...

El autor de esta obra sostiene que para comprender la era global, la sociología debe dejar de lado el estudio de la sociedad como un conjunto de instituciones encadenadas y enfocarse, mejor, al estudio de movimientos físicos, imaginarios y virtuales. Esta sociología de la movilidad trataría, entonces, de los viajes de gente, ideas, imágenes, objeto...

This article seeks to develop a manifesto for a sociology concerned with the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mobilities. A number of key concepts relevant for such a sociology are elaborated: ‘gamekeeping’, networks, fluid...