John Urry

John Urry was a British sociologist who helped found the mobilities paradigm, an approach that argued sociology had wrongly treated societies as fixed, bounded, and sedentary and needed instead to place the movement of people, objects, information, and ideas at the center of social analysis. In The Tourist Gaze (1990) he examined tourism as a socially organized way of looking, shaped by expectations, media images, and markers, that structures how tourists perceive and consume places, and his later work extended these concerns to systems of transport, communication, and global mobility more broadly. Urry's mobilities approach influenced sociology, geography, and transport studies by treating movement itself, rather than only the fixed places movement connects, as a proper object of social scientific analysis.