Rural mobilities: Connecting movement and fixity in rural places

Abstract

Recent work within mobilities studies has pointed to the ways in which mobility shapes people's identities and everyday lives. Mobility is also inherently geographical in nature, not only in the sense that movements of people and objects transcend space but that the ubiquity of mobility within society raises important questions about the fixities of place. Much of the recent geographical scholarship on mobilities has focused on the city, with ‘the urban’ constructed as the archetypal space of hyper-mobility. Less attention has been given to mobilities in the context of rural spaces and places. In this paper, we suggest that mobility represents an equally important constituent of rural lifestyles and rural places. Our contention is that the stabilities of rurality, associated with senses of belonging, tradition and stasis, are both reliant on and undermined by rather complex forms of mobility. We draw on empirical materials from a recent community study in rural Wales to reveal the nature of these mobilities, including the diverse range of movements of people to, from and through rural places, the difficulties associated with practising everyday mobilities in rural settings, the increasing significance of virtual forms of mobility associated with the roll-out of digital technologies across rural spaces, and the complicated relationship between rural mobilities, immobilities and fixities.