Theorising “Detour” Mobilities

Résumé En

Detours are an integral part of social life, abundant in a wide variety of situations and registers: disruptions of traffic; avoidance of interactions, places, or specific travel modes; migrations; sightseeing tours, etc. Conceived as mobilities involving longer travel (spatially or temporally) than initially expected, they entail complex and heterogeneous experiences. But if detours are nothing new, they have so far received limited attention in the field of mobilities studies and beyond. This paper sketches a theoretical outline for why geographers should take “detours” seriously as a concept and metaphor in research. First, “detours” helps to pinpoint situations where space-time is elongated and, at times, manipulated to fulfil certain social purposes and intentions. Second, it simultaneously recognises less deterministic scenarios where space-time is constructed out of a confederacy of agencies that exceed human control. Third, “detours” challenges capitalist/productivist ideas of efficiency, parsimony and waste to contemplate other possibilities of sociospatial existence that can benefit from routes that have gone off tangent. The paper concludes with some future directions for geographic learning and applications of “detours”.