Tim Cresswell

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment

This second report on mobilities considers some key themes in mobilities research by (mostly) geographers over the last two years or so. Following on from some of the themes outlined in the first report, this report explores accounts of historical geographies of mobility in order to put claims to ‘newness’ in perspective. Second, it surveys how mob...

On the Move presents a rich history of one of the key concepts of modern life: mobility. Increasing mobility has been a constant throughout the modern era, evident in mass car ownership, plane travel, and the rise of the Internet. Typically, people have equated increasing mobility with increasing freedom. However, as Cresswell shows, while mobility...

This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical mobilities and forms of immobility seriously. It is argued that is important for the development of a politics of mobility. To do this it suggests that mobility can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, representation, and practice. Following this it argues for a more fi...

The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly...

It may appear that the act of writing is fruitless in the face of the size and open-ended complexity of gathering environmental calamities including global heating, species extinction, and the appearance of plastic in everything. And yet – and yet – poets and others continue to write in ways that allow us to think about the earth’s futures and, mor...

Drawing on an innovative project exploring current mobility transition policies and practices in 14 countries around the world, including key institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations, this book provides a critique of current transitions, mobility and transport policies. The authors consider how our mobility futures have been i...

This commentary responds to Eric Magrane’s welcome focus on the possibilities of ‘climate geopoetics’ as a way of accessing and thinking environmental crisis differently. It explores the problem of approaching the general through the particular and the affordances that poetry provides in making this leap. In addition, it questions the particular ve...

How do we, might we, value mobility post COVID-19? This is the central question addressed in this paper. The mobilities turn, or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ had many starting points, but one of them was a general revaluing of mobility. Examples ranged from the opening up of the supposed ‘dead time’ of the journey to work to the general critique of a...

This essay approaches the ideas of value and valuing though an exploration of the Maxwell Street market in Chicago, USA. The market was the largest open-air market in North America for much of the twentieth century. From the 1960s onwards it has been subjected to various forms of valuing and devaluing leading to its eventual demise in its historic...

Part Two is a long hybrid essay about the 100 year history of the area surrounding the Maxwell Street market in Chicago. Using a juxtaposition of original passages, archival material, and secondary sources, the essay accounts for the origins, history, and demise of the market, the many attempts of writers to grapple with the area (novelists, journa...

Part One of the book addresses the problem of writing place, with specific reference to Maxwell Street in Chicago. It reflects on the history or writing place in geography, anthropology and beyond and updates that tradition with reference to new and experimental exercises in creative place-writing. The montage technique of Walter Benjamin, the gene...

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gaine...

Over the last decade, an increasing number of geographers and other social science researchers have deployed the insights of the new mobilities paradigm to study work, labour, and employment. These insights include attention to the meanings, practices, and politics of work-related movement as well as to multiple spatial and temporal scales and type...

This essay focuses on the theme of poetry and place – a project I have called Topopoetics. It introduces the idea of topopoetics drawing on the work of Aristotle, Heidegger and more recent philosophies of place, dwelling and poetics. The point is not to cover the familiar ground of ‘sense-of-place’ in poetry but rather to explore how the poem is a...

Despite a surge of multidisciplinary interest in transition studies on low carbon mobilities, there has been little evaluation of the current state of the field, and the contributions of different approaches such as the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), theories of practice, or the new mobilities paradigm. As a step in this direction, this paper bring...

Mobility and movement are central to military actions and military life, and yet despite an increasing concern with military geographies and the geographies of mobility, little consideration has been given by scholars to the political geographies of military mobilities and movements, past or present. In these interventions, we examine how these dif...

Although the “mobility turn” has captured the critical imaginations of researchers studying an array of topics, its possible contributions to analyses of the spectrum of employment-related geographical mobility have only begun to be defined. Studies of work have engaged with the growing body of mobility theory in limited ways; by the same token, mo...

This article explores the mutual constitution of blackness and mobility in the context of the United States. Using insights gained from the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, it argues that mobilities have played a key role in the definition of blackness (particularly black masculinity) at the same time as blackness has been mapped onto p...

While the previous report made a strong case for a focus on historical geographies of mobility, this report is focused on looming future issues for geographies of mobility (and mobilities studies more generally). The report uses the recent scare over the presence of horsemeat mixed in with beef products on European supermarket shelves to consider f...

This paper approaches the area around Maxwell Street, Chicago as a rich urban place. The chapters utilizes ‘place theory’ and the approach of assemblage theory developed by Manuel De Landa to explore how Maxwell Street has been brought together and torn apart through a focus on ‘tax increment financing’. It focuses on three key dimensions of place...

This short commentary reflects on Philo's 1987 Area paper, ‘ “Not at our seaside”: community opposition to a nineteenth-century branch asylum’ by placing it in the context of currents of thought emerging or coalescing in that year as well as my own intellectual trajectory. These contexts include the emerging interest in Foucault, developments in cu...

Spatial science and its associated quantitative methods have played and continue to play an important role in geographic thought. They are also important parts of the geography curriculum and need to be taught to geography students as part of their undergraduate career. It is important to recognize, however, that the continuous valorization of quan...

This contribution is a reflection on the process of becoming a poet as a geographer. It charts my journey into the world of poetry and reflects on the cross-overs between academic geography and poetic practice in the past. It considers the way in which geography and poetry can inform each other in the practice of writing creatively, and tentatively...

This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on “mobility studies” which was held as part of a workshop on mobility and community at Aberystwyth University on September 3, 2012. In the article the five panelists reflect upon the recent resurgence of research on mobility in the social sciences and humanities, emphasizing the interdisci...

The citizen, I argue, is a legal, cultural, and social figure who stands at the intersection of three geographical imaginations – the imaginary of a rooted and sedentary nation with clear and unambiguous boundaries, the imaginary of a dense and heterogeneous city, and the imaginary of free mobility in an interconnected world. This triple imaginary...

This paper considers the importance of the notion of turbulence for the theorisation of mobility. Turbulence, as disordered and unpredictable mobilities, can be contrasted with smooth ‘laminar’ flow – where everything is moving ‘correctly’. This paper borrows from the philosophies of Michel Serres and Manuel DeLanda to think about turbulence as a p...

This first report on mobilities outlines some aspects of research on mobilities that differentiates it from and connects it to earlier, ongoing geographies of movement such as transport geography. In the context of a world on the move it seeks to bring us up to date with the mobilities turn and make a case for mobility research as a project which f...

ReviewProspectConclusion References

Over the past fifteen years or so, there has been a widespread and increasing fascination with the theme of mobility across the social sciences and humanities. Of course, geographers have always had an interest in mobility, but as yet they have not viewed this in the same 'mobility turn' as in other disciplines where it has been used to critique th...

This paper explores the process of creating archives through an exploration of a range of archival sites in Chicago, Illinois. These sites contain objects believed to be of value that were once located in or referred to the area of the Maxwell Street Market, once the largest open air market in North America. The paper contributes to discussions of...

The relationship between changing geographies and the notion of citizenship is outlined. As well as focussing on the transformation of the nation-state, it is argued, it is necessary to concentrate on other kinds of geographical transformation. These include changing regimes of mobility, the privatisation of public space and the salience of belongi...

Potential geographers often arrive at university professing an interest in places but not about place. This article seeks to encourage an engagement with place as an idea at A-level and beyond. It asks what place is, how it has been developed over the last 40 years by geographers and others and how our ideas of place can inform our understanding of...

In their evaluation of properties for historical significance, state and federal historic preservation officers operationalize place in ways that echo geographers' conceptualization of place as meaningful, material, and practiced. An analysis of designation criteria and accreditation guidelines are used alongside interviews and correspondence with...

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on 'Landscape, Mobility and Practice' which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to expl...

This paper considers the way mobility has been given meaning by decisions in the United States Supreme Court. It argues that in four key decisions the Court constructed a de facto “right to mobility” by linking mobility to notions of citizenship. The paper suggests that these cases illustrate the importance of considering how mobilities are given m...

ABSTRACTS In this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patria...

This paper examines the regulation of ballroom dancing in England in the first four decades of the 20th century. It demonstrates how various forms of dance considered to be ‘American’, particularly the ‘shimmy’, were labelled as degenerate and threatening, and how the newly formed Imperial Society for Teachers of Dancing and the dance master and ba...

This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobility and a politics of metaphor, a politics, in other words, in the context of which the production and displacement of meaning(s) constitute the major stakes. Ranging from discussions of re-territorialization, multiculturalism, “digisporas” and transnatio...

This article, placed in the context of the ‘mobility’ turn in cultural and social theory, focuses on mobilities of the suffragists, Florence Luscomb and Margaret Foley between 1911 and 1915. Using letters, diaries and newspaper accounts the article illustrates how a transatlantic voyage and car rides in Massachusetts contributed to the transformati...

This article, placed in the context of the ‘mobility' turn in cultural and social theory, focuses on mobilities of the suffragists, Florence Luscomb and Margaret Foley between 1911 and 1915. Using letters, diaries and newspaper accounts the article illustrates how a transatlantic voyage and car rides in Massachusetts contributed to the transformati...

This essay introduces the key themes that run through the remainder of the collection – place, mobility, practice, representation. It outlines the development of a place-based "sedentarist metaphysics" in cultural geography and the humanities in general in which place and roots are given vivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile...

This book provides the first account of the invention of the tramp as a social type in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. Tim Cresswell considers the ways in which the tramp was imagined and described and how, by the Second World War, it was being reclassified and rendered invisible. He describes the "tramp scare" of the late ninete...

The essays in this volume, which range across Europe, America and Africa, and from the 18th to the 20th centuries, argue that the experience of travel, and the business of representing that experience, involved an obligatory engagement with the disturbing perception that travel's pleasures were inseparable from its dangers and ennuis. Despite the c...