The social aspect of global mobility

Adrian Favell wrote a very interesting article (published on GaWc website http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb150.html) on London-bound european mobility, contrasting with the contemporary economic geography of globalization. "Rarely is any kind of human face given to these macro-level transactions and data-sets" he writes. He argues that in spite of London's global reach and global city status, it reatins national specifics and requirements and many of the middle class profession migrants have trouble adapting fully.

Here is an exerpt -and one of the best paragraphs written on the subject.
"The image of effortless, frictionless mobility given to us by theorists of globalization, and portrayed in the stylized übermenschen of global yuppie magazines such as Wallpaper , gives way here to a very different image: of average middle class Europeans, aware of the benefits and freedoms that mobility has bestowed, but struggling to get by in a global city that cannot satisfy all of their cosmopolitan hopes and aspirations. It turns out – as with ‘flexibility' in the new post-industrial economy (Sennett 1998) – that it is not such an easy thing to build a complete, fulfilled life out of ‘mobility': there are costs as well as benefits to free movement. The lives of the Eurostars are extraordinary precisely because it is not easy to opt out of the standard social trajectories offered to middle class children in European nation-state-societies. Thus, they remain, for all their numbers, the exception in a generally immobile Europe. European residents of London are having an impact on the city, and do embody one important facet of its current internationalisation. Yet their experiences also remind us that global mobility is much easier in theory than in practice; and that even in the most of global of cities, not everyone feels as much at home as everyone else"