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Tim Cresswell, "The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
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- [01:29]
Tim Cresswell
I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stephen Pimpair
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Pimpair, and we are joined today by Tim Cresswell, who is the author of the Citizen and the Vagabond, A Politics of Mobility from the University of Minnesota Press. Tim, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
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Tim Cresswell
Thanks. I'm really happy to be here.
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Stephen Pimpair
So I wonder if you might start us off by telling folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what it is that brought you to this particular book.
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Tim Cresswell
Yeah, so I'm a professor of geography at the University of Edinburgh and a poet as well. And what brought me to this book is like a lifetime of different things, really. One is Sort of weirdly autobiographical is that I travel constantly and never really lived anywhere longer than six or seven years. And so mobility has always been part of my life. But I suppose more intellectually recognizing that as a geographer, that we're all really interested in place and territory and landscape and things that I suppose you might think of as at least has the illusion of being fixed in some way. And there's another side to that, which is the ways that we move. And I think that particularly over the last few decades, the ways that we move have become very important for who we are and how we distinguish ourselves from each other. Like, you know, literally like flying first class or flying business class or flying economy as a metaphor for life. And very important in all kinds of different scales across the world for the construction of various kinds of social and cultural hierarchies. How we move, the ease with which we move, or the difficulty with which we move, or how we are stopped or not stopped are really important for constructing those hierarchies. And that can range from a city street to global migration.
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Stephen Pimpair
So you've already sort of gestured toward this a little bit, but I wonder if you might just say a little bit more for folks who may not be geographers and may not be familiar with this. I wonder if you might say a little bit about what you all talk about is a new mobility's paradigm and sort of what you do with that. And then more generally, when you're talking about a politics of mobility right beyond that sort of hierarchy you gestured toward, when we think about flying, what are we talking about there? What's the universe of things? And then we'll start digging in more deeply.
- [04:26]
Tim Cresswell
Yeah, so the new mobilities paradigm is a cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary, I suppose, move that recognizes, starting in around 2000, that recognizes that a lot of the ways that we think are based on the ideas of ideals, of fixity, for instance, that people belong in a certain place or that places, regions, nations make sense in some way, and that mobility, therefore, is always disruptive, something to be minimized, something that we don't. We have an expression called black box. In other words, we don't talk about it. It's just assumed that you get from one place to another somehow. So it's true that various people, like transport people, and migration theorists have talked about various ways that people move. But Starting in around 2000, people started to say, well, what is mobility? How do we think about it? How do we give it the same richness? The people writing about place, for instance, had been giving Giving place for decades before that, and what happens when we do that? So rather than starting with the assumption of a fixed world and a fixed geography, if you like, we start from mobility. We start from while people move. And I'll give you an example. Also, migration theory, classically, was the idea that there's a bunch of things about one place that you live in and a bunch of things about another place somewhere else, and a bunch of things about that other place attract you to it. In other words, there's a cost benefit analysis. And you say, where I am now isn't as good as where I could be for various reasons. It could be economics, it could be you're being persecuted, it could be all kinds of things. And so you move. So the movement there is simply an outcome of the difference between two places. If you start from the mobility, from the journey itself and the way the places are then made through mobility, that no place is just a thing that's rooted in history and not an impermeable, but the places are made through mobility, then you start seeing things differently. So the new mobility paradigm is really a way of thinking about the world in sociology, anthropology, geography, and increasingly literary studies in the humanities, which says, what if we start with mobility rather than think of it as always an outcome or an end point? The politics of mobility is just a recognition that when we start to do that, we start to see how people relate or not relate to each other. The ordering happens. Ordering in society and culture happens through the ways that we move. And government, corporations, individuals, all interact in particular ways in the ways that they move that create hierarchies and therefore power and also possible resistance to that power or transformation of that power. So we can see this in city streets, where you get things like stop and search powers for police that get applied particularly to people of color. And that's true in North America, it's true in Britain, it's true all over many parts of the world. So that being stock becomes a regular part of many people's lives. Mostly, you know, people of color and not so much white people. And therefore there's a very different. There's a way in which a hierarchy is being created through that, through that relationship between whether you can move freely or not or stop or be stopped. And moving freely, as has been recognized in all kinds of law cases, is seen as central to being a proper citizen in the world. It's like, you know, when you're a citizen, you are a citizen of a place. You know, you're a citizen of the US or the citizen of the uk. But at the same time, being a citizen means at least, you know, for the last sort of 400 years, that you can move freely throughout that place, most of it, and you can also move freely across the borders of that place, that you have something like a passport, and therefore you have the right to, you know, be protected, as it were, as you travel across those borders. And. And so insofar as sometimes some people can't do that, then their citizenship is not complete. It's. It may. May be. It may be a legal category, but it is not lived. It's not a social and cultural reality. And obviously we're seeing that a lot more now in, you know, the times we're living in, where being stopped or being allowed to move become. Have become really, really important. But it's actually very long history. It goes back to medieval Europe when people like vagabonds were identified as people that shouldn't be able to, or had to move, in fact, shouldn't be allowed to stay, which is a different thing.
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Stephen Pimpair
Perfect segue. Say a little bit more about that, because you put those two categories in tension throughout the book, the citizen and the vagabond. What should people know about how to think about why those categories matter?
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Tim Cresswell
Yeah, So I use those categories not as sort of empirical, like historical facts, although there are some. There is some of that in there, but as figures. And what I mean by a figure is that the idea of a citizen or the idea of a vagabond gets mapped onto people in particular ways. So I've already said a citizen is somebody who can move freely within a country or within a place and across its borders. Not. Not always and not completely freely, because there's a process of going across borders, but in general, yes, you have a passport and you can travel across certain borders. So a citizen is a mobile figure. It's partly identified by mobility, but at the same time there's another figure, which is the vagabond, which is also a mobile figure. When we think of the vagabond, then we could throw in various other words like vagrant or tramp or hobo or. There's different things in the American context. These are all figures that also are identified as mobile, but not in a way that is approved of, not in a way that is part of our imagination of being a successful economy or culture or society, and often moved in ways that are forced. So they're either forced to move on constantly. The idea of just move on, can't stay here. We can't sleep on the streets, you can't do that. You can't do this. Or even sometimes in romantic versions of it, choose to do that to escape the confines of normal society. Well, that is a highly romanticized image, but it's a persistent one through western culture. So I use these two figures, both defined by their mobility and to show how there's a kind of relationship between them. In other words, the movement of some people is based on the fact that other people can't move. To be a citizen doesn't make much sense unless there are non citizens to start with. I mean, that's a definitional thing. And so you start to use those figures to think about, to map them onto ways of moving. Now, so without being literal citizens of vagabonds, the idea that, for instance, on city streets in London or in Minneapolis or in New York, that some people can move freely and some people can't. So yeah, so I use these figures to think through mobility. And then that leads on to, well, what are the different aspects of mobility that the citizens of vagabonds experience to differentiate them? It's not just moving in a broad sense. It is different aspects of ways that we move. So the book is then divided up into chapters on speed, on routes, on friction, and on rhythm. And then finally a kind of turbulence chapter about irregular and chaotic mobilities inspired by Covid.
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Stephen Pimpair
Why don't we work through those, Start us off, maybe talk a little bit about roots.
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Tim Cresswell
So when we move, we don't move like sort of spilt water on a flat surface. We don't kind of just move in a. In a sort of spread out way with. With no friction and no, you know, no controls on it. People used to imagine in kind of mathematical formula about the ways that we move, that we do that we just. Why do you know, what makes us move one place to another or is sort of distance? And then we think, well, we can just get from here to there. And that's easy. If it's shorter, it's easier, and if it's longer, it's not. But we know that's not true because the routes matter. Something can be a convoluted route to get to somewhere not far away. I mean, I was just in Humboldt county in Northern California a few days ago, and it can be like 10 miles away, but it's still an hour to get there because of the roads. And we know that. We know that if there's a highway, then you can get somewhere quicker. And even if it's further away, so we know that our mobility is rooted. And so when I started to think about routes, I started to think, well, routes are kind of like mobile versions of borders. We think about borders all the time as lines on maps that are places where we are stopped or where we are or processed in order to be able to move. And the other lines on maps are routes like a normal political map. They're routes. So. So these lines on maps are actually what inscribes power into a landscape in particular ways. If you look at a map of the Roman Empire, it's a map of Roman roads. In old versions of ideas of the wilderness, the wilderness was thought of not so much as a place without boundaries or a place without buildings, but a place without ways through it, without roots. It's a rootless with a U rootless place. And so the way those routes then get inscribed becomes something highly political that divides citizens of vagabond. So one example would be the way in which highways were planned in the US in the 1950s. Often very large highways through the middle of cities that were planned almost always to go through the areas of poor and people of color, marginalized, racialized people, which both meant that their houses were knocked down through compulsory purchase orders in imminent domain, and that their neighborhoods were split up either from each other or reduced the connection to wealthy parts of the city and to white parts of the city. So those routes both, although in technical terms they sped up, like how you got from the suburbs to the center of the city. And yeah, they did that at the same time. They did all this social engineering. The routes did lots of work. The city was being rooted in a particular way. Another example today that's very prominent is in the west bank where the Israeli government is making a series of roads to connect the illegal settlements to keep them safe from Palestinians. So they had walls around them and at the same time making roads for the Palestinian population, which are winding, meandering roads that a lot harder to traverse, take a lot longer to get to, and are divided up literally. Sometimes roads come together and there's a big wall between them. So they're sort of dividing up, they're rooting these two kinds of life, one of which is valued in a citizen like way, and one of which is a vagabond like existence. And so, you know, roots are fundamental to how we. They're not just like instrumental ways to get from A to B. They are very significant. They also have meaning attached to them. And we can think of like Route 60 or the transcontinental highway or transcontinental railroad or, you know, routes that become objects of conflict. There's one, I think, being built in the Yucatan Peninsula or just finished in Mexico, which has been a great controversy about it. It's not just. It helps you get somewhere quicker. It's got power attached to it.
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Stephen Pimpair
So talk to us a little bit about how you're thinking about speed. And I wonder if you might do that in the way that you do in the book and talk a little bit about Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.
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Tim Cresswell
Oh, yeah, sure. So we think of speed as a privilege. That is, you pay for it. You pay to get quickly through the airport, or you pay to get packages delivered or whatever or Internet connection. Speed is something has been thought of as a privilege for a long time, but so has various forms of slowness. So, you know, the slow food movement, slow cities movement, the ability to be slow, the ability to, you know, work at home, I suppose. Not that we were working slowly at home, but, you know, those things that happened during COVID that also there's a kind of politics to how our control over the velocity of our lives. The reason that Charlie Chapman comes in is that in his film Modern Times, which I find is a perfect, like, teaching tool, if you like to think about this. Charlie Chaplin's figure, the Little Tramp. So a kind of literal vagabond is working in the beginning in a factory on a conveyor belt, which is, you know, part of the new system, the new system of Fordism, just not that long ago, well, maybe 15 years earlier, had been introduced by Ford, so mass production was happening. So his job is to tighten these bolts on this conveyor belt. This conveyor belt's moving his objects and he's just tightening them with his hands. And of course, the conveyor belt moves at a certain speed, which dictates what speed Charlie Chaplin's Tramp has to work at. And he goes a bit crazy. I mean, he wants to do things defined by nature like scratch his armpits or wipe his nose, and he's immediately behind and he has to go and catch up. And he eventually driven crazy in this process. He ends up being sort of swallowed into the machine and comes out and then starts dancing in a kind of ballet like way, which is completely different kind of mobility and disruptive of the system at the same time. There's a boss that is shown regularly in this movie sitting in an office, doing a jigsaw, reading the newspaper, who occasionally just shouts into the microphone, speed up. More speed. And say, charlie Chaplin has To move faster and faster as the conveyor belt gets faster and faster, while the boss just is slow, is allowed to be slow. So. So there's a. So. So Charlie Chaplin's speed is very much defined and it's driving him crazy. And this comes from a conversation Charlie Chaplin had with workers. In it, he was like, apparently in a diner and he was speaking to people who were literally driven crazy, had psychological issues from working on these new production lines where it's just impossible for them to keep up with what it is they were supposed to be doing, which is actually, you know, it feels very antiquated. And we don't have that mass production system anymore, but we do. I mean, it's just turned into working in an Amazon warehouse where you have a. A device attached to you and you have to do a certain number of picks in a certain number of time, set amount of time. And. And people are being. There are medicalized issues happening in Amazon warehouses and in other companies, not just Amazon. So, you know, there's a lot going on at the moment. There's a lot of discussion of speed in the ether of. Mainly around how we have to respond to emails and that kind of temporal dimension of life sped up. But this is a. This is actually a moral panic that's been happening incessantly and forever as soon as anything happens that I found, like stories of people saying that the. The speed of a stagecoach going, you know, across the British landscape was gonna. Was too much. Or, or if you go over 30 miles an hour in a train, you're, you know, you're. Your organs will fall out of your body and you'll have a heart attack. There's a guy called George beard in the 19th century writing a thing called Neurasthenia, which is like steam power, clock time. And interestingly, the mental activities of women, for whatever reason were driving people crazy. And it is very similar to people writing now about things like acceleration and resonance helmet. What's his name? Hartmann Rose is a German theorist who writes a lot about this. And it's been going on for a long time. But what actually, rather than just saying speed is bad or slowness is bad or slowness is good or speed is good. I'm more interested in how speed and slowness create these hierarchies, continue to be part of this process by which we are being divided up by our capacities and maybe our autonomy over the way that we move or not.
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Stephen Pimpair
You also use modern times to talk about what you call the politics of rhythm differences. I wonder if you might tell us a little bit about that.
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Tim Cresswell
So another part of moving is rhythm. I mean, we think of rhythm as a musical thing mainly, I suppose, and a temporal thing. But the French theorist, urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, famously wrote that short provocation called rhythm analysis where he looked down on a square in Paris and he looked down and he saw all these people moving, the traffic lights, the cars stopping, people crossing the road. And he noticed the clock on the government building and the trees growing. And he said, what's actually happening here is a bunch of different rhythms. There's a sort of natural rhythm that comes from our bodies and from nature. And then there's an imposed rhythm that comes from the state, from corporations, from regulation of various kinds of. And what he argued was that any attempt to produce a kind of new reality or a new sort of ideology, if you like, needs to impose a rhythm that is part of it. And we can think of our, you know, a 9 to 5 working week, a 40 hour or 35 hour working week, the 9 to 5 day. The systems of bank hollow, of bank holidays, as we call them in Britain, or, you know, national holidays, public holidays. These are all rhythms that happen at different scales through the day, through the year, through the week, through the year. And these are all results of conflict, if you like. The call was in, for instance, in I guess, the early 19th century in the US eight hours work, eight hours sleep, and eight hours for what we will. That was the big march, and it was late. Hours of leisure was like what we. That is important. And it was fought over. And that's why we have what we have. And so there's mobility. That idea of looking down on a square and seeing all these mobilities interacting means that there's a kind of rhythm imposed. So when Charlie Chaplin's in the factory, not only is speed being imposed on him, but also literal rhythm in the way that he has to continue to do these things with his body. It becomes. Henri Lefebvre's term is dressage. Like the horses that you see in the Olympics that are doing weird dances, that our bodies have been trained sort of do this dressage where we have to conform to various rhythms, and then there are various rhythms that don't conform. So again, if you look at the stop and search policies and arrests in New York a while ago that were eventually declared illegal, where black bodies in particular were being stopped at an incredibly higher rate than any other kind of body in New York City, often the reason given on these little tickets was called furtive Movements. And it was just a list of like you turned around and did this. You put your hands in your pockets and they're all things that we all do. And that was one of the reasons the judge finally said it was illegal is it was an unreasonable. I mean it was a silly. And it's a kind of rhythmic thing. Similarly in. And race is often a part of this in American football. You know, the origins of end zone celebrations after a touchdown were predominantly black athletes dancing, doing things together, doing little celebrations. And the predominantly white authorities that ran the National Football League have been trying to ban them ever since and. Or given penalties or something like that. So there's been a huge contestation over that. And that can extend to much larger systems. So the kind of rhythm of moving in and out of the country as a business person and how surveillance systems can detect unusual rhythms. So drones have. There's a kind of program. This is pre AI. God knows what it's like now with AI but pre AI there was like a system called Pattern of Life Analysis. And drones would basically be watching figures and doing various things. And if suddenly it was doing something different. In other words, not going to the market on a normal day, not going to the mosque on the normal day. If these drones are flying over Afghanistan or Pakistan or somewhere and you start to identify a rhythm that doesn't look quite right and then that becomes the basis for a kill order. This is after it used to be that individuals had to be identified with a particular crime in order to be killed by a drone. And then it became generalized through these pattern of life analysis. And that's a rhythm thing. It's like where does the rhythm not quite look, doesn't it look right? Is something strange. And rhythm can then be used as a form of possible transformation resistance as well. So I was interested in Roland Barthes idea of ideorhythmy, which is that people in monasteries in very small societies can have their own rhythm. They can sort of control their own rhythm in a particular way. And how that might be a model for various parts of society where we could control our own rhythms. And again, maybe post Covid homeworking would be an example of that. How people are struggling now over maintaining the right to do homeworking and control their own rhythms in the day.
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Stephen Pimpair
You mentioned drones. And we are recording this conversation at the end of March in 2026. And this is not an example that is in the book, but I am thinking of Iran closing off the Strait of Hormuz and. And how that fits into your conversation. About friction. I wonder if you might say a few things about that.
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Tim Cresswell
Absolutely. So mobility doesn't just happen again, it doesn't happen on a smooth surface. In fact, it would be impossible if it was a frictionless surface. We couldn't move if we tried. You just fall over if you tried to walk. So friction is part of what makes mobility possible and also part of what makes it stop. Right. The way things are stopped is really important. So again, stop and search in New York City, the border walls in place on the US Mexico border or in the west bank of Palestine. These are all examples of ways that friction is imposed. When do you stopped is an important question. And in an international sense, yes. There are certain points where people who want to disrupt systems find points of friction that make that system end. So we know that our contemporary economy is based on things moving, right? Like things get value by moving from one place to another. That's how trade works. Like you put something in one place, move it and it gets. And it increases in value when it where it arrives as part of that process. We live in a globalized economy. So what that means is that there's been a network of relatively frictionless, smooth and fast routes that are created for people and goods and money. And so if you want to, if you are in a position where you want to either just protest that or possibly disrupt it completely, then you find points where friction is going to stop that flow. So what is happening there in the Straits of Hormuz is exactly that. The recognition that there's one little point that's like a pressure point in that global system of flow that is a very small passage of water that's pretty much hard, impossible to make entirely safe. And Iran recognizes that as it's in a position of relative weakness compared to the military powers that are engaged with Iran at the moment chooses that point to disrupt a system that everyone depends on and therefore gives it a lot of power. Other examples in part have included strikes that have closed down like ports in Seattle and elsewhere. Or protesters in Thailand at regular intervals are taken over the airport in Bangkok to try and change the government, usually wearing yellow or blue or some color that signifies support for the king or not support for the king or something like that. Strikes have frequently involved slowing things down. Sit ins. Stopping roads has been a big thing recently with environmental movements. So just stop oil stops roads in Britain walks very slowly along the peripheral road. The M25 disrupts normal life. Normal life. It depends on mobility happening in a particular way and gets lots of attention. Black Lives Matter did the same thing. I remember when I was in Boston, Black Lives Matter would be marching down roads, big roads in Boston, and stopping the traffic. Stopping the traffic makes everyone pay attention because the traffic is part of our normal expectation of life. That again, fundamental reason why mobility is important is that's just what we expect to happen. So, yeah, so the Friction chapter is about both how certain spaces at different scales stop various people, but also how people who want to transform the world change it, protest it can also use the fact that mobility is so central to life in the 21st century that they can make a big impact in a relatively small way.
- [30:41]
Stephen Pimpair
So as we work our way toward concluding, Tim, I wonder if you might finish off by telling us a little bit about how you think about turbulence.
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Tim Cresswell
Yeah. So turbulence is, I mean, literally in physics, it's unresolvable, unmoddable and unpredictable form of mobility, which is opposed to laminar or linear flow. So the ideal model is a kind of smooth linear flow of stuff just moving in a way that is predictable. But what happens is for reasons that are very, you know, we all know chaos theory, right? The butterfly flaps its wings in China and there's a hurricane in the Atlantic that sort of gets to that sense of unpredictability. Turbulence is unpredictable, and it's caused by either mobilities rubbing up against each other, or mobilities and stationary things rubbing up against each other and creating these turbulent eddies. So I use this idea of turbulence or disordered or chaotic mobility to think about COVID And so one of the impetuses for the book was being, although I started it a long time before the COVID lockdowns, but during COVID there was this sense of, you know, how important mobility was. Like it was suddenly you can't move. I mean, you can move around your house. You can go in Britain, it was a one hour walk. You go for a one hour walk, you could go to get groceries and you can go to medical for medical help. But really our world's changed completely. And in that lockdown process, which was of course caused by again, those global flows existing. We wouldn't have had a pandemic if capitalism didn't exist because it wouldn't have traveled the way it travels now. So it's caused my mobility. And then we have to. So we have to control the mobility to control the virus. And then that control led to all kinds of obviously negative consequences for many of us, but also more for people who couldn't stay at home. So again, that politics. Mobility comes In I could stay at home in Edinburgh, quite not happily, but reasonably happily, and be served by people delivering things to me or by healthcare workers or taxi drivers that had to keep moving, who were predominantly people of color, women. You know, if you look at the death statistics in Britain, then there's a clear sense in which this was a mobility disease and mobility lock and anti mobility lockdowns that sorted people in terms of death basically. But also there were these moments of utopian thinking within it too. So when these sort of things locked down various cities, including my own, tried to start opening up streets for pedestrians and cyclists and say, well, we want a new normal when we come back, like Milan for famously just transformed a load of streets to make it less car dependent. And of course there were protests against that ongoing to this day. But there was these utopia, maybe we can work at home, maybe for many people there's a profit, that's a thing that's preferable. So that has stayed actually quite, for many people, usually quite privileged people, they can stay at home and for some days of the week or all the days of the week and do their work. And that was true for me, even though I'm a university professor who often worked at home. Anyway, it became recognized. My brother who works in aeronautical safety with helicopters could just work at home more. He used to go to the office, now he works at home. So it did change. But obviously the new normal was never that utopian and it reverted to the old normal often. So that didn't happen. But I used the experience of COVID as a mobility problem and the lockdown as an mobility solution to think about all of these things together. How speed and routing and friction and rhythm all got tangled up in that sort of two year period. The Diamond Princess in Japan, big ocean liner had to be kept in quarantine. How quarantine itself was a word that came from Venice in the early days of capitalism, when ships started to arrive with spices, with people with various diseases on board and they had to keep them for 14 days before they could come on land. It's the entanglement of trade and mobility as normal, with trade and mobility as pathological. Or not trade as pathological, but mobility as pathological. That gets all entangled in that in interesting ways and shows us and reveals to us very clearly those hierarchies I was talking about at the beginning of this conversation, like who gets to move quicker, who gets to slow down, you know, who gets stopped, what power, the power of mobility is. I think it showed us a lot about that. And I was teaching at the time, and it was like a teachable moment. The whole thing was like, look outside the window in your house. Because I was teaching online. And you'll see what I'm talking about.
- [35:58]
Stephen Pimpair
You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network, and we have been speaking with Tim Cresswell, who's the author of the Citizen and the Vagabond, A Politics of Mobility from the University of Minnesota Press. Tim, thank you for joining us today.
- [36:11]
Tim Cresswell
Much thanks. I really appreciate it.