Homo Mobilis

This time is not another utopian tale. We don’t need to build New Babylons for the homo ludens, nor a ticket for the Barnum Junior Magnificent City. The modern subject, the real modern subject is finally on the move. Mass-mobility has become the common denominator of the global world. Images, technology, capital, people…everything is moving at an ever increasing higher frequency and speed. A new ethnoscape has emerged where human motion becomes embedded in our daily lives. If the temporary home is the hotel, then the city of the homo mobilis will be the City of hotels.

Mobility has become unavoidable. If not literally, mobility is inevitably part of our imagination. Television, cinema, literature are now globalized commodities that have triggered all kinds of fantasies. The massive flow of mass-mediated images creates the constant desire to move. Whether it is real or imagined, mobility has democratized.

While nations are suppressing borders and mass-media monopolize our imagination, the old flâneur can no longer remain in the arcades. In this shifting world where present is constantly past, uncertainty is the new condition. There is a feeling of disorientation, a constant fear for the unknown that comes with the new urban experience. Confronting strangers has become a habit. The stranger of Simmel is no longer the exception but the most prominent figure of our contemporary cities. We live in a City of Strangers.

Confronting uncertainty has become our daily practice. Susan Sontag expresses how tourists deal with this feeling of the uncertain: “to take possession of space in which they are insecure…the very activity of taking a picture is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation….Unsure of other responses, they take a picture “.  Unconsciously, iphones in hand, we are all becoming tourists. The city is no more than a City of Tourists.

Ready to capture the city in motion, we gaze upon everything as a sign of itself. When seeing a musician playing in the streets of Salzburg, a woman dancing tango in Buenos Aires or a couple kissing in Paris, we believe to be gazing upon the timeless melomaniac Austria, the traditional street life of Buenos Aires or the romantic Paris. Globalization has democratized the practices that before were exclusive to tourist. The proliferation of tourist sites across the world is happening at the same pace than everyday sites of activity get re-designed in “tourist” mode. In the panic of forgetting, the whole city has been converted into a museum and while doing so, its inhabitants have been simultaneously transformed into collectors of gazes, into tourists. Quoting Park, “in making the city, man has remade himself”.

The joint effect of media and migration has narrowed the existing gap that traditionally has separed the tourist and the local. A new global hybrid emerges: the homo mobilis.