Will be held Thursday 30 September at 6:00 PM CET Simon Gunn's lecture entitled “Making the City Mobile: Urban History and the Mobilities Turn”.
The lesson will be held on the Zoom platform, registration is required to participate. Here is the link to register for the event
ABSTRACT
Making the City Mobile: Urban History and the Mobilities Turn
What difference does mobility make to our understanding of modern cities? We are familiar with the idea of the city as a ‘space of flows’ but often think of the urban in static terms related to the built environment and social ‘structures.’
This talk challenges the idea of the city as a fixed space by drawing on insights from the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences. It brings together the study of migration, personal mobility and transport to reflect on the ‘high-speed mobile society’ emerging in Western cities in the mid-twentieth century.
I shall use Britain as my principal case-study but extend arguments out to the rest of Western Europe and North America where appropriate. Integrating an awareness of movement into contemporary urban history, I argue, has the potential to throw new light on the categories of class, race and gender and debates about ‘affluence’ and inequality which have characterised recent historiography.
