Pointless Mobilities: Rethinking Proximity Through the Loops of Neighbourhood

Abstract One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have illuminated how multiple forms of mobility have given rise to different physical and virtual proximities, involving corporal travel and new communication devices. However, in spite of this apparent diversity, many discussions of physical and virtual proximity appeal to a similar ontology of connection. In the mobilities literature proximity is often understood in the context of an orientated connection towards points of significance and therefore can be described as ‘pointillist’. In response, this article stages an alternative way of apprehending proximity that removes the point. It does this by advancing the mobility-diagram of the loop. The ‘transversal’ proximities that the loop foregrounds seek to apprehend the transformative relations of mobile bodies and their near-dwellers, whilst at the same time untether the study of everyday ‘neighbourhood’ mobilities from their productivist heritage.