Intersections: Technology, Mobility, and Geography

The essay introduces this issue of Technology and Culture, which highlights the intersections of technology, mobility, and geography. While recent scholarship on mobilities foregrounds mobile objects, people, and ideas, this issue’s articles link mobility to geography, illustrating the spaces that s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Technology and culture 2011-10, Vol.52 (4), p.673-677
Main Author: Soppelsa, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
African Americans
Architecture
Bicycles
Domestication
Engineers
Garages
Geography
Industrial development
Infrastructure
Intersections
Jargon
Mobility
Modernity
Nation building
Pedestrians
Political activism
Politics
Race
Railway networks
Social construction
Society
Sociocultural factors
Sociology
Streetcars & trolleys
Suburban areas
Technology
Transnationalism
White people
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Summary:The essay introduces this issue of Technology and Culture, which highlights the intersections of technology, mobility, and geography. While recent scholarship on mobilities foregrounds mobile objects, people, and ideas, this issue’s articles link mobility to geography, illustrating the spaces that shape or are created by changing sociotechnical practices of movement. Here, the where of technology’s social construction matters as much as its who. The articles approach geography on different scales—from national territory to urban, suburban, and rural spaces. Geoff Zylstra, Greet De Block, Els De Vos, and Hilde Heynen show how streetcars, railways, and automobiles influenced the social production of space, while Tiina MŠnnistš-Funk shows how geography shaped the production of bicycles. Connecting technologically enhanced mobility with modernity, race, gender, and national and regional identity, these articles show how the coproduction of technology and geography affects power and inequality, helping produce peripheral, segregated, and otherwise unequal spaces.
ISSN:0040-165X
1097-3729
1097-3729
DOI:10.1353/tech.2011.0139