Mobile Technologies of the City

Mobile communications technologies are taking off across the world, while urban transportation and surveillance systems are also being rebuilt and updated. Emergent practices of physical, informational and communicational mobility are reconfiguring patterns of movement, co-presence, social exclusion and security across many urban contexts. This book brings together a carefully selected group of innovative case studies of these mobile technologies of the city, tracing the emergence of both new socio-technical practices of the city and of a new theoretical paradigm for mobilities research.

Mimi Sheller is Visiting Associate Professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, England. She is the author of Democracy After Slavery (2000) and Consuming the Caribbean (2003), and co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings (2003) and Tourism Mobilitites (2004). She is also co-editor of the new Routledge journal Mobilities.

John Urry is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University. Recent books include Sociology beyond Societies (2000), The Tourist Gaze (1990/2002), Global Complexity (2003), Tourism Mobilities (co-edited; 2004), Automobilities (coedited; 2005). He is also co-editor of the new Routledge journal Mobilities.