Morley notes, “Despite all the talk of global flows, fluidity, hybridity and mobility, it is worth observing that, in the UK at least, there is evidence that points to continued geographical sedentarism on the part of the majority of the population.”49 Over half of British adults live within five miles of where they were born. Even in the more geographically mobile United States, two out of three people do not have a passport.
We should therefore not exaggerate the role of long-distance travel in people’s lives. Despite globalization, local life occupies the majority of our time and space, and vast realms of people remain static, whether through choice or force of circumstance. Some groups are more mobile than others and have more control over both their own mobility and that of others. The mobility available to the afluent middle classes is quite diferent from the mobility of the international refugee or migrant, domestic worker.
Speed for the few is contingent on others remaining stationary. As Tim Cresswell remarks, “Being able to get somewhere quickly is increasingly associated with exclusivity.”50 Even in air travel—where all classes of passenger travel at the same speed—those in first class pass smoothly through the airport to the car that has been parked in a special slot close to the terminal. London’s City Airport ofers business travelers to New York the option of flying via Dublin for immigration clearance in order to be in the fast lane on landing. Meanwhile, the majority of foreign arrivals are left waiting in the slow lanes. “Speed and slowness are often logically and operationally related in this way.”
Theorists of mobility flatten out such diferences because they mistake their own partial experience for a universal condition. The same can be said of much of the literature on social acceleration. The efect is to legitimate, Bev Skeggs argues, “the habitus of the middle-class that does not want to name itself.”51 Voluntary mobility, like speed, is seen as a social good, while fixity becomes associated with failure, with being left behind. Moreover, the notion of mobility is itself gendered in various ways such that women occupy a fixed place in the male narratives of travel, adventure, and discovery. Just as the literature on modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of the life in the metropolis mainly accounts for the experience of men, so these arguments ignore the lingering separation of public and private spheres.52 By equating the modern with the public, they fail to describe women’s experience of immobility. As with time, mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship.
Time and Motion
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