Hybrid Mobilities

Nadine Cattan is research director in geography at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was previously director of a unit on territorial indicators and statistics at the OECD. She has also chaired an expert group on gateways at the DATAR, the French government’s regional development planning agency. Her main research interests aim to understand how mobilities are likely to modify society’s relationships to space and so lead to a reinterpretation of spatial concepts and theories. She has provided a critical overview on the issues of polycentrism and spatial integration in Europe. She has also developed spatial models to explain how metropolitan areas are being transformed. Her current research integrates gender to understand how genders contribute to reshaping territorialities and urban space. Her published works include: Cities and networks in Europe. A critical approach of polycentrism (2007) and Atlas mondial des sexualités. Libertés, plaisirs et interdits (2016).Laurent Faret is a professor of geography at the University of Paris, a member of CESSMA, and currently on research leave at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City, with the Research Institute for Development (IRD). He is a member of the LMI MESO, an international collaborative program between France, Mexico, and Central American countries. His research interests include: the evolution of international migration dynamics and the related territorial and political transformations; the urban dynamics resulting from transit movements and settlement of mobile populations; and the production of transnational mobility spaces and their effects on the dynamics of development in the Global South, at different scales. He is the author or editor of various books on these themes, such as Migrant Protection and the City in the Americas (2021), Les circulations transnationales. Lire les turbulences migratoires contemporaines (2009), Migrants des Suds (2009), and Les territoires de la mobilité. Migration et communautés transnationales entre le Mexique et les Etats-Unis (2003).

"This book convincingly shows us why a mobility lens is crucial to understanding nation-states, cities, territories, neighbourhoods, homes and other spatial formations. Highly relevant in an age gripped by the contentious politics around borders and mobilities."Professor Brenda Yeo, National University of Singapore"An edited collection that takes seriously the dialectical relationship between mobility and place through a vivid and diverse set of examples and approaches - through Marrakesh to Mexico City, from homes and heritage, to mobile and migrant subjects arriving, being driven, some stranded in-transit, in domestic labour, others leaving and tourists leaving things behind. Cattan and Faret have curated a series of wonderful entries sensitive to context, place, vehicle, and experience; to gendered and raced differentiations of mobility that condense around the material nuclei of mobility and stasis and stasis in mobility, in intimate practices, alternative belongings, policy formations and the spaces between them. A terrific and inspiring collection."Professor Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London

• Introduction: When Mobilities Construct Spatialities Part I - A Relational Approach: Insights into the Building of Sociospatial Concepts 1. Tenements in New York and Riads in Marrakesh: Mobilities and the New Paradigm of Heritagization 2. Urban Mobilities and Power: Social Exclusion by Design in the City 3. Rethinking ‘Ethnic Neighborhoods’ after the Mobility Turn 4. Clouds and Movements 5. Transportation Vehicles in Africa: Between Autonomy and the Administration of Space Part II - Spatial Practices of the City: Power Relations and Agency 6. Migrant Women Servants in Amman and Backpackers in Bangkok: The ‘Walking Interviews’ Method for Studying Mobile Groups in Cities 7. Padlocks as Obscure Objects of Tourism. An Emotional Imprint in the City of Love 8. Transgressing the City-State: Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore 9. Everyday Mobility and the Social Divisions of Space: A Space-Time Analysis of Mexico City Part III – Mobility Schemes, Values, and Norms: A Sociopolitical Perspective 10. Immobility as A Migration-Management Resource in Seasonal Agricultural-Worker Programs 11. Stranded Migrants, Mobile Subjects: The Spatiality and Social Order of ‘Waiting’ in Mexico 12. Facing the Environmental Transition: The Critical Issue of Grasping Mobile Spatialities at the Crossroads of (Un)Changing Practices and Policies 13. Work and High Mobility: Current Knowledge and Blind Spots Afterword: Hybridities, Transgressions, and Stranded Mobilities