With globalization and heightening geopolitical tensions, mobilities have
emerged as a factor that increasingly structures our societies, and that receive
particular coverage in the media. In the academic field, a substantial number
of studies have emerged to describe the effect of multifaceted mobilities on
societies’ relationships with their territories. These studies underline the subjectivity of the concepts used. They also show how, when defined as the disjunction of mobilities, these concepts remain locked into notions concerning
delimitations, borders, and appropriation, all of which systematically lead to
defensive meanings of identities and places (McDowell 1993; Bondi & Rose
2003; Cresswell 2006; Silvey 2006; Lussault 2009). Consequently, considerations of mobility have yet to be fully incorporated into theories about spaces
and their transformations.
Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities develops a relational approach
to spatialities, such as space-times, connected to social networks. In these
spatialities, identities are multiple, not fixed, and are constructed in their
interactions with otherness and elsewhere (Massey 1993). By focusing on the
production of spatialities in mobile situations, the book proposes rethinking
territories, and more generally, societies in terms of their spatio-temporal
dynamics. Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities aims to go beyond
the usual dualities and segmentations of concepts such as mobility/immobility, distance/proximity, individual/collective, permanence/impermanence,
presence/absence—dualities that fail to account for the complexity of the situations being analyzed. It also contributes to an interpretation of the coexisting
temporalities inherent in contemporary urban processes, by looking at temporalities of mobility and those of immobility and anchorage, as well as by
studying rhythms of individual trajectories and those of public policies that
may be significantly different. In this sense, the book aims to highlight the
cross-cutting dynamics of the construction of relationships to places, and
the production of spatio-temporal arrangements made of assemblages that
have so far only been studied marginally (Adey 2006; Müller 2015; Recchi &
Flipo 2019)