Ole B. Jensen, Staging Mobilities, Routledge, Abingdon, 2013, 228 pages, £80 hardback. ISBN 9780415693738.

In 2006 Mimi Sheller and John Urry argued that the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, a theory and method of research which presents a shift away from a sedentary metaphysics (see Cresswell, 2006), was taking hold and transforming the social sciences (2006, page 208). Although the ‘newness’ of the mobilities paradigm has been latterly challenged on account of the persistence of mobile life (see Cresswell, 2010), there can be no doubt of the endurance and transformative capacity of mobilities focused research, which has shaped almost a decade of work in sociology, geography and cognate disciplines (see Adey, 2010; Bissell and Fuller, 2010; Merriman, 2012; Urry, 2007).

The significance of the mobilities ‘turn’ is exemplified in the raft of work which continues to be published in this area, of which Jensen’s book Staging Mobilities, forms another key contribution. Jensen, an author already well known for his influence on debates in mobilities studies, assembles here some of his most important arguments under the rubric of a ‘staged’ approach to understanding the way in which people, ideas and technologies move. This volume is the first in a series of books to be published and it provides an introductory theoretical approach alongside case studies that illustrate its application. In the book Jensen, a urban theorist, arguably provides an innovative and original slant on understanding mobilities in the twenty-first century.

Central to the volume is the fundamental tenet of mobilities research – that all movement is more than simply a process of manoeuvring  between points A and B, but that movement is always made, shaped, perpetuated and challenged by structures of power (see also Cresswell, 2006). For Jensen, however, understanding this politics of mobilities is approached drawing heavily on the work of Erving Goffman, particularly his ideas in relation to front and back staging and the ‘dramaturgical metaphor’ “whereby social agents play roles in accordance with more of less self-conscious scripts for social action” (page 74). This novel framing provides a rich basis for rethinking the ways in which mobilities are planned and lived. This framing emerges from Jensen’s background in urban theory and design, whereby he argues for “a shift to include material and technological dimensions much more directly in relation to social dimensions of mobilities research” (page 5).

This focus on the “material and design orientated realm” is a key contribution of this approach, which argues that it is these features that scholars have underestimated in shaping mobilities. Indeed, for Jensen, all mobilities are “carefully and meticulously designed and planned ‘from above’” and “acted out, performed and lived, ‘from below’” (page 5). Mobilities then, do not just happen; they happen within material, digital and architectural confines as well as the dimensions of socio-cultural and political life. Whilst this approach appears to borrow from de Certeau (1988), Jensen argues that this is not a mirror of a dominating or emancipatory politics described in the Practice of Everyday Life, where the categories of ‘above’ and ‘below’ have essential in-built power dynamics, but rather that the social dimensions of staged mobilities are always emergent and happen ‘in situ’, in the moment of mobility. As such, the ‘staging’ approach is not a rigid model of top down and bottom up power but of ‘mobile situationism’ (drawing on Goffman) whereby the conditions of mobility and style of mobility are contingent and ever ‘becoming’ in practices of performance. In short, the book asks “who stages mobilities, and how, why, where and by which technologies, artefacts and design principles … (and) who are staged, how they perceive staging, how they enact or react in accommodating or subversive ways, how they feel about being staged and moved in particular ways and using particular modes of mobilities” (page 7).

To do so, Jensen breaks the book into four sections. Part One offers a detailed context to the ‘staging mobilities’ approach, including a thorough literature review on mobilities research to date. Here Jensen also introduces other new concepts which layer over the central contribution of the book and move us beyond an understanding of “armatures and enclaves”, points of fixity and flows, to a more relational and emergent world of motion (page 35). For example, within a staged approach, Jensen argues we need to consider the “mobile with” (how we flow in and out of groupings), the “team” (a grouped mobility), “temporary congregations” (when mobility creates momentary collectives) and “negotiation in motion” (the dynamic interactions that occur whilst moving) (page 4). As such, throughout Jensen’s book “the lexicon of mobilities” is expanded, providing new concepts that others might apply to their mobilities research (page 4).

In Part Two Jensen frames his approach by paying special attention to the ways in which mobilities are staged through the physicality of the city (drawing heavily on the work of Lynch), the social interaction in the city (drawing on Simmel and Goffman), and the embodied, emotional and affective encounters with the city (drawing on Thrift and other non-representational approaches). In this section Jensen demonstrates the ways in which mobilities are staged through a variety of strong empirical examples ranging from the material semiotics of road signs as a design feature that creates particular mobile situations, to interaction in the street and the staging of “mobile with” encounters, to embodied mobile practices, such as running.

In Part Three, Jensen stretches this richly theoretical approach to a range of novel twenty-first-century case studies of virtual and networked mobilities, including transit spaces in Nytorv, the Copenhagen Metro, and Bangkok Sky Train. With the new mobilities paradigm still focusing on more ‘concrete’ examples of motion (from the plane, train to automobile, and the mobile subject), Chapter Six, in particular, provides an important contribution in considering how networked cyber technologies are impacting mobilities and how virtual sites can be thought of as architectural and design spaces that relate to movement in distinctive ways. As Jensen notes, “technologies stage lives and carry the potential for people to voice decisions related to their cities” creating new “everyday mobile situations” (page 135). Jensen concludes in Part Four by drawing renewed attention to the importance of design, architecture and the material realm and by setting an agenda for mobilities research (page 203).

This is an accomplished book, theoretically informed, rich in detail and convincing in the use of illustrative case studies to exemplify the staging approach. However, there are one or two areas that might be cause for criticism. Jensen’s book is self-admittedly urban-centric. In Chapter Two, Jensen conceptualizes the city as an emergent assemblage (assemblage theory being more useful for encapsulating the “design-orientated perspectives” and ever becoming nature of a city, page 31). Whilst Jensen pays lip service to criticisms that contemporary mobilities research is urban-biased, he is quick to dismiss this, noting how a city-centred study “might be expected”, “from the hands of a professor of urban theory” (page 6). There is no avoiding this partiality in the book, but, as Jensen notes, “many of the insights of provided by this book may apply to non-urban settings” (page 6). It would be beneficial to see some of these examples mobilised.

Moreover, where the ‘newness’ of a ‘new’ mobilities paradigm may be critiqued, it is the newness of Jensen’s approach that can be critiqued here. Whilst there is certainly a fresh theoretical perspective on mobilities made possible by covering the ‘staging’ of, and ‘in situ’ moments of mobilities, particularly through a predominantly urban, design focused perspective, Jensen overplays this contribution as a “departure from” (page 4) the mobilities paradigm, rather than a valuable addition to it. Whilst the use of Goffman’s thesis on staging is indeed a departure point for mobilities scholars, the notion of staging bears some resemblance, for example, to the idea of engineering mobilities; channelling the precognitive psyche to orientate particular spaces in particular ways. Whilst the engineering of mobilities draws on a different philosophical engagement, there remains in this work an attention to the ‘architecture’ of mobilities and planned ‘routing’. Certainly Jensen provides an alternative perspective, but there are shared interests in this book that make its departure from the mobilities turn appear rather too forced.  The book does not need to stress so heavily its difference from the work it follows, because its contribution is incredibly clear: mobilities happen in situ within the materially designed architecture of our cities; and this matters. 

References

Adey P (2009) Mobility. London: Routledge.

Bissell D and G Fuller (eds) (2010) Stillness in a Mobile World. London: Routledge.

Cresswell T (2006) On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge.

Cresswell T (2010) Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 17-31.

de Certeau M (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Merriman P (2012) Mobility, Space, and Culture. London, Routledge.

Sheller M and J Urry (2006) The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38: 207-226.

Urry J (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.