Mobility Practices as a Knowledge and Design Tool for Urban Policy

The chapter introduces two processes that endow mobility with centrality as a cognitive key for understanding socio-spatial transformations in the contemporary city. The first process is part of broader critical reflection on the role of spatial mobility in describing and assessing socio-urban changes. The second process interprets the contemporary city as a “site of sociability” (Amin and Thrift 2002), which can be understood by tracking the routinization of site practices that follow their own rhythms of appearance and disappearance. This leads us toward the heuristic value of interpretation of the rhythms of usage of the contemporary city, well provided by mobility practices. Working along these two lines, in this chapter we try to reconstruct how we can consider mobility as both a knowledge and a policy tool for understanding and regulating the process of transformation of the contemporary city. Through study of mobility practices, we argue that it is possible to recognise temporary populations generating new claims, but also new common goods. In the conclusion we will briefly consider two paradoxes raised by the excessive rhetoric on mobility: the link between mobility and rootedness, and the link between mobility and speed