IntroductionAll the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forcesöthese and many others fill the world's airports, buses, ships, and trains. The scale of this travelling is immense. Internationally there are over 700 million legal passenger arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) with a predicted 1 billion by 2010; there are 4 million air passengers each day; 31 million refugees are displaced from their homes; and there is one car for every 8.6 people. These diverse yet intersecting mobilities have many consequences for different peoples and places that are located in the fast and slow lanes across the globe. There are new places and technologies that enhance the mobility of some peoples and places and heighten the immobility of others, especially as they try to cross borders (Graham and Wood, forthcoming; Verstraete 2004). Many different bodies are on the move [and it is often through their movements and proximities that bodies are marked as`different' in the first place (Ahmed, 2000)] and this movement shows relatively little sign of substantially abating in the longer term. This is so even after September 11, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), multiple suicide bombings of transport networks, and other global catastrophes, and the fact that many grand projects in transport do not at first generate the scale of anticipated traffic.Simultaneously the Internet has grown more rapidly than any previous technology, with significant impacts throughout much of the world (soon to be 1 billion users worldwide). New forms of`virtual' and`imaginative' travel are emerging, and being combined in unexpected ways with physical travel (see Germann Molz, this issue). Mobile telephony based on many societies jumping direct to such a new technology seems especially to involve new ways of interacting and communicating on the move, of being in a sense present while apparently absent (see papers in Brown et al, 2002;Callon et al, 2004). The growth of such information and communication technologies is allowing new forms of coordination of people, meetings, and events to emerge (see Bu« scher, 2006;Jain, forthcoming).And materials too are on the move, often carried by these moving bodies whether openly, clandestinely, or inadvertently. Also the multinational sourcing of different components of manufactured products involves just-in-time delivery from around the world.
