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Hannam K, Sheller M, Urry J.Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 2006, 1(1): 1-22.has become more appropriate than the traditional Cartesian model of homogenous, self-enclosed and contiguous blocks of territory that has long been used to describe the modern interstate system' (Brenner, 2004, p.66). This shift away from the `traditional, Westphalian model of statehood' based on national-territorial containers towards more `complex, polymorphic, and multiscalar regulatory geographies' (Brenner, 2004, p.67) is, we would add, fundamentally related to the emergence of complex mobility systems and their restructuring of both space and time.Mobilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities - creating what Harvey (1989) called the `spatial fix'. Thus the forms of detachment or `deterritorialization' associated with `liquid modernity' (Bauman, 2000) are always accompanied by rhizomic attachments and reterritorializations of various kinds (Shurmer-Smith & Hannam, 1994; Sheller, 2004a). There are interdependent systems of `immobile' material worlds and especially some exceptionally immobile platforms, transmitters, roads, garages, stations, aerials, airports, docks, factories through which mobilizations of locality are performed and re-arrangements of place and scale materialized. The complex character of such systems stems from the multiple fixities or moorings often on a substantial physical scale that enable the fluidities of liquid modernity, and especially of capital. Thus `mobile machines', mobile phones, cars, aircraft, trains and computer connections, all presume overlapping and varied time-space immobilities (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Urry, 2003a). There is no linear increase in fluidity without extensive systems of immobility, yet there is a growing capacity for more flexible and dynamic scalar shifting, polymorphism of spatial forms and overlapping regulatory regimes. We can refer to these as affording different degrees of `motility' or potential for mobility (Kaufmann, 2002), with motility now being a crucial dimension of unequal power relations.Mobilities also are caught up in power geometries of everyday life (Massey, 1994). There are new places and technologies that enhance the mobility of some peoples and places even as they also heighten the immobility of others, especially as people try to cross borders (Timothy, 2001; Verstraete, 2004; Wood & Graham, 2006). `Differential mobility empowerments reflect structures and hierarchies of power and position by race, gender, age and class, ranging from the local to the global' (Tesfahuney, 1998, p.501). Rights to travel, for example, are highly uneven and skewed even between a pair of countries (Timothy, 2001; Gogia, 2006). Many feminist theorists have argued that nomadic theory rests on a `romantic reading of mobility', and that `certain ways of seeing [arise] as a result of this privileging of cosmopolitan mobility' (Kaplan, 2006; see also Pritchard, 2000; Tsing, 2002). Ahmed, for example, critiques mobile forms of subjectivity and argues that the `idealisation of movement, or transformation of movement into a fetish, depends upon the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way' (Ahmed, 2004, p.152). Skeggs further argues that the mobility paradigm can be linked to a `bourgeois masculine subjectivity' that describes itself as `cosmopolitan'; she points out that `[m]obility and control over mobility both reflect and reinforce power. Mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship' (Skeggs, 2004, p.49; see also Morley, 2002; Sheller & Urry, 2006b). It is not a question of privileging a `mobile subjectivity', therefore, but rather of tracking the
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