Inhabiting simultaneous lives: analysing process of reversibilization of mobility practices in Italy

This chapter aims to study some emerging mobility practices in Italy and the consequences they have had on the use and configuration of spaces. A growing number of people live their lives across a vast space consisting of work, family, and friendship networks, and are travelling longer distances, in shorter periods of time, than ever before. This paper addresses the hypothesis that those transformations are modifying the relationships between people and territory, allowing people to live simultaneous lives, and increasing relationships within multiple territories. I will use biographies of highly mobile people as a tool to describe this process. Describing and analysing their mobility behaviours allow to show how people try to “catch ubiquity and simultaneity” (Ascher in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie. PUF, Paris, p. 53, 2005) in their everyday lives, highlighting how far those practices have transformed the relation between people and territory and the spaces of mobility. The first results presented here consist on the identification of three territorial profiles based on the geography of personal relationships and revealing how this geography interacts with a general transformation of everyday urban rhythm in the construction of simultaneous lives.