There are many other dimensions to the unequal access to speed and movement. The postcolonial metropolis is host to a massive discrepancy in material conditions and life chances, and for most of the world’s population, their only experience of speed is on a bicycle. In fact, nowadays many more bicycles than cars are being made, largely due to the massive expansion in Chinese production. The migration of millions from the countryside in places like China is a major source of global population movement and it is a far cry from the pleasures of the urban explorer evoked by the iconic modernist figure of the flâneur.
Conclusion
I would like to end this chapter with some reflections on the upsurge of academic interest in the significance of flows, movement and mobility in social life. John Urry, for example, has called for a new sociology of mobility, that sociology should focus on movement, travel, and mobility as opposed to settled bounded institutions.47 He argues that fundamental global transformations are making the concept of society less analytically useful. We are better of analyzing the social in terms of flows and networks, as mobility is now the determining feature that frames social relations, not structures or positions. This emphasis on mobility is also a key feature of Zygmunt Bauman’s writings about liquid modernity.48 There is much talk of the ubiquity of various forms of travel, that the paradigmatic modern experience is that of rapid mobility over long distances, while migration is often represented as the central global phenomenon.
However, this model of contemporary life is, in fact, strictly applicable only to a relatively small number of highly privileged people. As David
Chapter two
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