Intersections: Technology, Mobility, and Geography

Abstract

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.

Introduction

“…Today's DIY maker communities and their spaces may take inspiration and even strategic guidance from the global commodified "maker movement", but they are geographically situated and actual practices and tactics are informed, explicitly or implicitly, by groups and norms that precede the makerspace and its community (Dunbar-Hester 2014;Costanza-Chock 2020). If articulated, currently invisible histories can tell us much about how such practices could be made more relevant, better answer local needs and gain staying power in their own localities (Soppelsa 2011). Historical knowledge can feed back into actual practice, strengthen the potential for positive socio-environmental impact, inform policy and more generally foster plurality of voice and agency.…”