On the Move presents a rich history of one of the key concepts of modern life: mobility.
As Tim Cresswell shows, while mobility has greatly increased in modern times, attempts to control and restrict it are just as characteristic of modernity. On the Move utilizes an impressive variety of angles to explore the increasing social and physical mobility of people over the past 150 years as well as efforts to restrict it: international migration, stop-motion photography, automobile culture, the time-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the Los Angeles bus riders’ strike of the late 1990s, the new mobilities fostered by European Union integration, and the plight of New Orleans residents unable to move when Hurricane Katrina struck.
Reviews
“By rigorously contrasting meaningful mobility with abstract movement, Tim Cresswell has enriched the study of this activity just as the scholarship on place did in contrast to space. His book is both pioneering and synthetic, a magisterial survey of the geography and history of mobility based on activities that define the modern period such as urbanism, capitalism, and imperialism as well as those which sought to regulate mobility on bus lines, at airports, and at immigration centers”
Stephen Kern – author of The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918
It is difficult to do justice to the empirical richness and theoretical innovation which characterises this excellent book …. I would urge readers across the humanities and social sciences to read this study and benefit from its many insights and wider theoretical applications.
Shompa Lahiri – cultural geographies