A mobility "turn" (or transformation) in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and society.
Later, Leopoldina Fortunati and Sakari Taipale[3] proposed an alternative typology taking the individual and the human body as a point of reference.
Marc Augé (1995) considered the philosophical potential of an anthropology of "non-places" like airports and motorways that are characterized by constant transition and temporality.
In 2006, Mimi Sheller and John Urry published an oft-cited paper that examined the mobilities paradigm as it was just emerging, exploring its motivations, theoretical underpinnings, and methodologies.
Sheller and Urry specifically focused on automobility as a powerful socio-technical system that "impacts not only on local public spaces and opportunities for coming together, but also on the formation of gendered subjectivities, familial and social networks, spatially segregated urban neighborhoods, national images and aspirations to modernity, and global relations ranging from transnational migration to terrorism and oil wars" (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 209).
Engel and Nugent (2010) trace the conceptual roots of the spatial turn to Ernst Cassirer and Henri Lefebvre (1974), although Fredric Jameson appears to have coined the epochal usage of the term for the 1980s paradigm shift.
Vannini explains convincingly that on Canada's coast, the values of islanders defy the hierarchal order in populated cities from many perspectives.
Cresswell (2011, 551) presents six characteristics distinguishing mobilities from prior approaches to the study of migration or transport: Mobilities can be seen as a postmodern descendant of modernist transportation studies, with the influence of the spatial turn corresponding to a "post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanations and about single-voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge" (Cosgrove, 1999, 7; Warf and Arias, 2009).
Despite these ontological and epistemological differences, Shaw and Hesse (2010, 207) have argued that mobilities and transport geography represent points on a continuum rather than incompatible extremes.
Sociological explorations of mobility can incorporate empirical techniques, while model-based inquiries can be tempered with richer understandings of the meanings, representations and assumptions inherently embedded in models.
A second body of theory comes from the science and technology studies which look at mobile sociotechnical systems that incorporate hybrid geographies of human and nonhuman components.
For example, the rigid spatial coupling, operational timings, and historical bindings of rail contrast with unpredictable environmental conditions and ever-shifting political winds.