Jennifer BROUCK, Université Paris 1 - Géographie-Cités, France
In our contemporary time, we talk about a mobile society in which places would be dissolved, identities liquified, and territories eradicated by networks. The intensive mobility is often accused to create placeless, floating, autonomous people, and the hypermobile individual –quasi-constantly on the move– represents, for some, the ultimate figure of the uprooting. But what about emotions, meanings or representations into the movement? The dichotomy between network and territory, strongly settled in our categories of thinking, impoverishes the analysis of the mobile experience by ignoring inertias, touches, or collisions.
This study emphasizes and interrogates these connecting moments between individuals and places generated by the displacement. What is the nature of these relations settled and constructed by the ephemeral time? By considering emotions and representations, could the mobility be a potential source of appropriation and anchoring? And what is the impact of these personal and sentimental relations on cities or places?
Through a survey based on a semi-directive questionnaire and mental maps, and conducted with 15 Parisians hypermobile individuals, the ambition is to understand the reliefs of the mobile spatiality. Distinction or similarity of practices according to places, the diversity of emotions, the transformation of representations…By these considerations, the mobility –particularly the intensive one– seems to assume modifications of current structures, and constructions of new ones. Involving all the categories of mobility, this study reveals convergences and echoes between places, which shape an emotional and spatial structure. This changing -but solid- entity is embodied at the individual scale and embraces a fundamental role in the contemporary spatiality. Through the symbolic figure of the knot, the wish is to concretize the existence of these ontological –but real and impacting– territories and to consider them in their articulation with places.
Mots clés : Mobile society |Anchoring |Appropriation|Hypermobility|Embodiment
A104699JB