Mobility, Identity And Place

The concept of movement incorporates mobility, identities and places. Movement appears unequal depending on your identity and place. Identity refers to “understanding self or other people and places” (Panelli 2004). Movement can improve your identity such as businessmen moving frequently to make money are perceived as high up in society. Therefore being unable to travel or forced to travel can be seen as weak, an example of Nomadic ideologies. Place is a “meaningful site that combines location, locale and a sense of place” (Agnew 1987). Massey (1994) highlights that transport such as flight causes segregation, in Singapore flight allows business men to travel globally but people in islands nearby don’t have this luxury. However mobility is

This is the pride and love of a county and how people identify with it. The feeling of belonging to a place (collective identity), some know this as “the myth of the modern world” (Smith 1991). It only exists due to images and imagination such as flags. This bond can affect how we see other nationalities. For example Italy resents Istria as they believe that the land should belong to them. The emotion and meaning are imagined, surviving as it is collectively bought into. People want to preserve their own, ‘pure’ identity. Causing many seeing increased movement being a threat as nationalism can not exist with multiple cultures changing identity. People are then willing to do anything to protect their identity. This shows overall that identity can not exist without place as it is not plausible to have one identity and people clearly base their identity off their place causing the link between the two to be

Migration, which is defined as “the residential relocation of an individual, family or group from one place to another”(Dictionary of Human Geography 2009: 462) causes an increase in diversity, meaning lots of identities coexist in one place. Facts clearly show that migration is increasing, Kofi Annan describes this as a “new era of mobility”, in the year 2010 there were two million international migrants around the world but by 2015 this had increased to 244 million (UN.org). This increase of mobility has caused society to become progressive, different skills and cultures are being combined with the pre-existing therefore developing the country, causing identities to readjust to accomodate diversity. However this increase can again cause national identity to be strengthened as the meaningful sense of place with be lost. Klein and smith (shock doctrine) argue that people entering and leaving a city can cause "culture genocide", the mixing of cultures so there is not one pure culture. This threat can cause people to become defensive of their territory, some link this to a psychological matter linked to the “animal kingdom” (People and place: 96). However Massey (2005) explained that place should be “extroverted, progressive and global” all places should link together. Mobility should therefore not be threatening. However, this is not the case, it is much more