Questions of mobility are deeply connected to existing forms of inequality. Currently, 70 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes, often finding themselves without access to decent work and unable to exercise their freedom of movement. At the same time, luxury tourism and transnational mobility of skilled employees are on the rise.
For US sociologist Mimi Sheller, who has helped establish the field of mobility studies, the struggle for “mobility justice” takes place against the backdrop of what she calls the “triple crisis” of climate change, migration, and unsustainable forms of rapid urbanisation. All three crises have created their own yet overlapping patterns of mobility/immobility.
Sheller explores how mobility regimes intersect with the more general political conditions of in/justice. As the author puts it: “Mobility Justice is an overarching concept for thinking about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources, and information.” (p. 14) Building on her own extensive work, Sheller reviews the state of the art at the crossroads of mobility studies and research on inequality and political justice studies. In doing so, “mobility justice” oscillates between an academic approach and a political manifesto, combining theoretical discussions with the formulation of principles and demands for action. This double effort is a fresh contribution to the often circular debates within mobility studies. Due to the comprehensive discussion of these diverse theoretical positions, the book is not always an easy read, yet there is much merit in following Sheller’s line of reasoning, because it opens up new ways of thinking about an interconnected world through mobility.
Chapter 2 discusses “bodily moves and racial justice”, breaking the politics of mobility down to the scale of the body and its “choreography of human movement” (p. 45). For Sheller, this includes a lack of awareness of gender and racialised inequalities in urban mobility and transportation (Chapter 3). The author reviews the violent history of forced racist mobility such as the slave trade. Yet another episode in this long history of unequal movement and racism in the US, she argues, is today’s routine racial profiling, with #BlackLivesMatter as one recent forceful response. At the scale of the body, she demands “that all people [should] have a right to freedom of movement, without undue constraint imposed from outside” (p. 64). Moreover, gender, sexual identity, and other identity markers should not be used as the basis for restricting mobility or for exclusion from public space (p. 66).
Who can move in what way often depends on unevenly distributed access to infrastructures. Building on Deborah Cowen’s work1, Sheller reminds us, in Chapter 4, that infrastructures are not apolitical, but at the heart of mobility governance (pp. 97–98). She explains how the global hype around smart cities and new networked infrastructures has often reinforced rather than mitigated uneven mobility politics, data processing, and a politics of control. This includes location control and digital processing of differentiated bodies.
Chapter 5, “Mobile Borders and Migrant Justice”, examines networked infrastructures surrounding borders. We learn that seemingly “friction-free” tourism comes at the expense of others, whose class, race, gender, age, or abilities subject them to slower travel, airport security searches, lack of access to travel documents, or low-waged work in the tourism sector” (p. 130). To ensure mobility justice regarding transnational migration and travel, Sheller makes the case for the fundamental right to exit and re-enter the territory from which one originates. Secondly, she calls for the inclusion of climate refugees in the current framework of individuals’ legal protection against persecution and violence.
Chapter 6 takes up mobility justice on the scale of planetary ecologies and climate justice: “All existence moves” (p. 137). As has been argued elsewhere, climate change and “overheating” go hand in hand with acceleration.2 In this sense, Sheller argues for slower movements and sharing economies to limit energy consumption and use of high-energy materials (p. 142): she invites us to think of slowness as a positive promotion of mobility justice and economical balance, one that is based on a different temporality (p. 143). To combat mobility injustice on a planetary scale, the author postulates that mobility consumed in one place should not create waste or pollution in another place without agreed-upon deliberation, transparency, and reparations. Moreover, global polluters should pay into a global fund to meet the costs of climate change disasters; yet another principle Sheller advocates for is that the protection of planetary commons such as oceans, rivers, and the arctic must always outweigh the rights to global free trade and private rights to resource extraction.
In her conclusion, Sheller rethinks this idea of “the commons” as “mobile commons”. “What if we conceived of mobility itself as commons, and the commons as mobile?” (p. 161) In practice, her environmentally informed call for “reclaiming the commons” draws from successful initiatives in cities that reclaimed the streets (pp. 165–166). Sheller imagines “a living process of communing and the local mobilization of many networked mobile publics for the defense of the mobile commons” (p. 171).
The book’s target audience and its potential impact are somewhat difficult to ascertain. Social scientists and historians may find themselves wanting more original research, while activists may hope for detailed practical entry points for a struggle towards mobility justice. After all, it is one thing to compose a set of principles, demands, and goals, and yet another to realise them. At the same time, one is left with a desire to build on the book’s many ideas and to continue what it tries to set in motion: a process of looking at several key struggles of this particular historical period through a unified lens of mobility justice.
One weakness of the book’s global relevance, as the author is aware, may be its explicit focus on “Western forms of uneven mobilities” and “urban settings” (p. 17). Some of my own research has looked at diverse struggles for just mobility and economic access from the global margins, including Palestinian workers’ circular movements in and out of occupied territory and refugees seeking a livelihood in the planetary digital economy. These examples show that what looks like beneficial mobility and opportunity for colonial and neo-colonial accumulators of capital is often a dispossessing form of mobility for those in the Global South. This is why I have rooted my framework of “mobility equity” firmly in a bottom-up perspective on the global sustainable development agenda.3 On the other hand, two key strengths of Sheller’s book are its development of a clear link between ecology and mobility, and its focus on justice, rather than equality.
Indeed, the idea of mobility justice has already gained significant momentum. It takes centre stage in the UN’s Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Migration, and in the ILO’s Centenary Initiative on the Future of Work. It also underlies the growing push towards stronger protection and regulation for the digital economy. Sheller’s book adds an important building block to an emerging “movement” of research and practice that addresses issues of mobility justice and mobility equity.
Notes:
1 Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis 2014. See also her piece: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance (14.08.2019).
2 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Overheating. An Anthropology of Accelerated Change, London 2016.
3 Andreas Hackl, Mobility equity in a globalized world. Reducing inequalities in the sustainable development agenda, in: World Development 112 (2018), pp. 150–162.