The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities

The twenty-first century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030, more people and more goods are moving ever faster, farther and more frequently. Moreover, the media are bringing experiences and images from all over the globe into people's homes and computing technologies enable people to communicate as if distance did not matter. Things are mobile for us too. People are supplied and provided with services, information, capital or goods. Societies depend on the material mobilities of gas, electricity, fuel and especially water for energy, agricultural and personal domestic needs. In essence, life as we know it could not go on without mobility. In order to grasp at these trends, 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences, delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of mobilities and immobilities. The Routledge Handbook of Mobilitiesexplores and critically evaluates the debates and controversies inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. This authoritative review is timely given the increasing interdisciplinary proliferation of 'mobility studies', and remarkable transformations, developments, decisions and behaviours occurring in the ways we move. It brings together leading specialists from range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities, illustrating disciplinary trends and pathways, conceptual histories, and the mobilities of the past. The text is also forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilties as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints. This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.