From spatial turn to mobilities turn

Abstract

This article reflects on the contributions of the late John Urry to sociology and to its spatial turn especially by developing the new mobilities paradigm. The proposition of this monograph issue of Current Sociology is that space has not yet been appropriately incorporated into sociology. But although partially true, Urry argued that this misses the significance of ‘the mobilities turn’ that swept through and incorporated the spatial turn within sociology but also within other disciplines. Tracing the spatial turn back to the 1980s, the article describes how the new mobilities paradigm grew out of and extended emerging theorizations of space. It argues that Urry’s work advanced a sociology of space though his focus on mobile spatializations and relational space. This included the distribution of agency between people, places, and material assemblages of connectivity; a broader shift in the spatial imagination of mobilities towards ‘non-representational’ social theory; the emergence of new methodologies that were more eclectic, experimental, creative, and linked to arts, design, and public policy; and lastly a renewed interest in geo-ecologies, the political economy of resource flows, and the global mobilities of energy, capital, and material objects as constitutive of spatial complexity. The new mobilities paradigm furthered the spatial turn in social sciences in many crucial ways, and John Urry’s body of work on mobilities and its influence on countless adjacent research areas have spread that spatial thinking far and wide.