Staging Mobilities

Ole B. Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135089757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, the social sciences have taken a 'mobilities turn'. There has been a developing realisation that mobilities do not 'just happen'. Mobilities are carefully and meticulously designed, planned and staged (from above). However, they are equally importantly acted out, performed and lived as people are 'staging themselves' (from below). Staging mobilities is a dynamic process between 'being staged' (for example, being stopped at traffic lights) and the 'mobile staging' of interacting individuals (negotiating a passage on the pavement).

Staging Mobilities is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It explores how the movement of people, goods, information, and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment. Moving towards a new understanding of the relationship between movement, interaction and environments, the book asks: what are the physical, social, technical, and cultural conditions to the staging of contemporary urban mobilities?

Jensen argues that we need to understand the contemporary city as an assemblage of circulating people, goods, information and signs in relational networks creating the 'meaning of movement'. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, urban studies, mobility studies, architecture and cultural studies.

Part I

Staging Mobilities

Review and Positioning

1 Staging Mobilities

Introduction

Cities are an everyday invention. They are formed and imagined by many people at a time. A city’s physical form is expressed in a vortex of temporal relations, mirrored in the activities of a collective body of individuals interacting with each other. Cities are an open stage for complementary and conflicting encounters, and allow for multiple identities to emerge and evaporate. They are backdrops for dreams and desires, a platform for departures and arrivals. As individuals pass through, new connections arise while others fade away. By wearing various masks and playing different roles, people change the urban landscape through their encounters

Petra Kempf, You Are the City, 2009, p. 2

Introduction

Imagine travelling (by car, bus, train or bike) to work and walking from the car park or station to your office. During your trip you must certainly have been involved in multiple interactions with fellow drivers and pedestrians. You are likely to have drawn on routines as well as having to improvise to make your way. Regardless of whether you can recall what was on your mind, the trip is sure to be a reflection of who you are and how you relate to the built environment and your consociates. The morning trip to work is thus an embodied practice, often influenced by other human subjects and always within a material and physical setting. Your situational mobility from the morning trip, moreover, has elements of your own choice, such as selected route, mode of transport, relaxed or aggressive driving, choice of seat etc. These elements are all expressions of a ‘staging’ with a relatively high degree of self-determination. But along the way your practices were modified by traffic lights, timetables, road design, traffic regulations, information systems etc., reminding you that there is a ‘staging’ going on from above as well. If you think about the actual situations of getting to work in this way, you are very close to the key theme of this book: situational mobilities.

Put differently, this book is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between points A and B. It concerns how the movement of people, goods, information and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment. The book takes its point of departure from the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ (see Cresswell 2010b; Sheller 2011; and Vannini 2010 for review articles, and Adey 2010 and Urry 2007 for review books on this topic) but takes the analysis further towards a new understanding of the relationship between movement and interaction and their environments. Mobilities do not ‘just happen’ or simply ‘take place’. Mobilities are carefully and meticulously designed, planned and ‘staged’ (from above). However, they are equally importantly acted out, performed and lived as people are ‘staging themselves’ (from below). Staging Mobilities explores the dynamic process between ‘being staged’ (as, for example, when traffic lights command us to stop or when timetables organise your route and itineraries) and the ‘mobile staging’ of interacting individuals (as, for example, when we negotiate a passage on the pavement, or when we choose a particular mode of transport in accordance with our self-perception). The rationale for the book is therefore to address the following overall research question: What are the physical, social, technical and cultural conditions for the staging of contemporary urban mobilities?

As a particular contribution to the field of mobilities research, the book offers a number of theoretically derived and empirically enriched concepts that contribute a new lexicon of mobilities. An example is the notion of the ‘mobile with’, which may be exemplified as the dynamic and ephemeral flowing in and out of groupings as one moves in the city, or the ‘team’ on the move such as friends, family or couples. Another example is the notion of ‘temporary congregations’, which may be experienced when we walk towards a road crossing and, by stopping for a red light, become a group waiting to cross, or the elevator ride with people with whom, until we embark on the ride, we have no common interests. The notion of ‘negotiation in motion’ is equally derived from the Staging Mobilities perspective to describe the dynamic interaction that takes place when we perform mobilities in a busy transit space or when the ‘mobile with’ is engaged on more or less explicit decision-making concerning routes or modes of transportation. A number of other concepts derived from the Staging Mobilities framework are developed and will form the backbone of this book’s contribution to mobilities research. The key insight is that we need to understand the contemporary city as an assemblage of circulating people, goods, information and signs in relational networks creating the ‘meaning of movement’. The lifescapes of such mobile and networked conditions create individual experiences as well as collective processes of inclusion and exclusion. Sites, areas and people may be ‘switched on’ or ‘switched off’, thereby becoming subject to complex relations of mobilities capital and capacity to move (motility). As the book takes its point of departure from the ‘mobilities turn’ (e.g. Adey 2010; Cresswell 2006; Cwerner et al. 2009; Freudendal-Pedersen 2009; Larsen et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2000a, 2007) it brings the analysis closer to the material and design-oriented realm by stressing that ‘how it materialises’ is essential to ‘how it works and feels’ (and this will be followed up in even more detail in an accompanying book entitled Designing Mobilities). Somewhat parallel to Urry’s argument for a ‘resource sociology’ connecting the material resource base of societies to their sociality (Urry 2011), I argue here for a shift to include material and technological dimensions much more directly in relation to the social dimensions of mobilities research. In particular the design dimension seems less theorised and analysed. This book is thus the first of two aiming to remedy and bridge this gap. The book foregrounds the meaning of movement to social and cultural practices by paying particular attention to the way infrastructures, technologies and networks are designed, laid out and built. The main objective of the book is to contribute theoretically to the mobilities literature by adding the dimension of design and architecture of the built environment to a sociological framing. The book is organised so that it theoretically illustrates the state of the art of the ‘mobilities turn’ in which it positions itself. Empirically the book is rich with illustrations of how mobility is practised in the everyday life of the contemporary city.

Staging Mobilities

As mentioned above, mobilities do not ‘just happen’ or simply ‘take place’. According to the Staging Mobilities framework we should think of mobilities as being carefully and meticulously designed and planned ‘from above’, as one might say. However, they are equally importantly acted out, performed and lived ‘from below’. Mobilities are staged and people performing mobilities are engaged in social interactions of staging mobilities. Staging Mobilities is therefore a process of creating lived mobility practices and the material preconditions to these. In this research, contemporary urbanism is understood as highly influenced by the staged mobilities of planning, design, architecture, governance systems and technological networks as well as by the social interactions, cultural meanings and the production of social order. Staging Mobilities is a socio-spatio-temporal process designing mobile lifescapes ‘from above’ and performed mobile engagements and interactions ‘from below’. There may be seen a certain affinity with the notion of DeCerteau wherein he speaks of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ as the top-down regimes versus the bottom-up resistances of everyday life (DeCerteau 1984). However, this resemblance only goes so far since DeCerteau argues that ‘strategies’ are dominant and ‘tactics’ are emancipative. Such a pre-coding of the staging from above and from below does not apply. The creation of infrastructures as scenes for our everyday-life mobilities in planning, architecture and design cannot a priori be seen as dominating. And equally the multiple mobile interactions taking place between social consociates cannot always be seen as emancipating. Until now the mobilities literature has not sufficiently grasped the dynamic and complex interactions of people in motion mediated by material sites and networked technologies. Staging Mobilities therefore brings a new perspective to mobilities research by documenting how the urban situation at the brink of the twenty-first century must be understood from a perspective that sees ‘staging’ as a dominant feature of mobilities. It must be said that this work is predominantly focused on cities and the urban context for mobilities and is, as such, an example of the ‘urban bias’ Vannini find in much contemporary mobilities research (Vannini 2011). However, given the fact that this work comes out of a Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology in general, a research group for Urban Design in particular and from the hands of a professor of urban theory, a certain urban focus might be expected. Moreover, the world is becoming more and more urbanized, thus increasing the reliance on urban infrastructures as sites of mobilities (Graham 2010:2). This does not, however, mean that I do not sympathize with Vannini’s criticism on a more general note (and surely many of the insights provided by this book may apply to non-urban settings). Likewise, does the foregrounding of mobilities not mean that everything is in flux, that there is no social stability or that ‘everything solid melts into air’, to borrow a phrase from Marx? Rather it means that places, sites, buildings, terminals, cities and regions must be understood in their complex relationship to the fluid and fixed, flow and stasis, friction and movement. Staging Mobilities moves beyond the dichotomy of sedentary and nomad ontologies and epistemologies and points at dynamic lived mobilities as they manifest themselves in relation to three key themes: the physical settings, material spaces and design; the social interactions; and the embodied performances (see Figure 1.1). Each of these three areas are discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively. This division is obviously made for operational reasons rather than as a claim to be the only and all-embracing model. Moreover, within the physical and material dimension I shall include the infrastructures and networked technologies mediating and affording contemporary mobilities. As I speak of staging from above I want to propose the metaphor of ‘scenography’, as in the sense of creating ‘scenes’ within a manuscript or a play. To capture the staging from below I propose, in a similar vein, the metaphor of ‘choreography’. Obviously choreography may also be created from the vantage point of a disengaged director. But here the immediate embodied and sense-oriented dimension is what makes me prefer this metaphor for the bottom-up and embodied acts of self-choreography that individuals perform as they create ‘mobilities in situ’.

Figure 1.1 The staging mobilities model.

The perspective of seeing ‘staging’ and ‘the staged’ as the key metaphors for framing mobilities is inspired by the work of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman was the student of the ‘ordinary’ and the everyday social order par excellence. In earlier works I have developed an emerging understanding of the fruitfulness of Goffman for mobilities research (e.g. Jensen 2006, 2010a). However, with this work a more fully developed analytical framework is constructed that takes key insights from Goffman’s perspective of role play and ‘dramaturgic’ analysis of social interactions. One of Goffman’s best-known concepts might serve to briefly illustrate this point. In his notion of ‘front stage/back stage’ many urban scholars have seen the distinction between public and private spaces (e.g. Madanipour 2003). In the light of Staging Mobilities, however, I want to bring this concept into a much more dynamic and complex framing. What takes place accordingly is a ‘mobile front staging/back staging’ process within which mobile subjects undertake performative work in a process of negotiating ‘staged’ demarcations of front and back stage as well as ‘staging’ their own mobile lines of demarcation. For example, when we appropriate space in the train compartment by means of mobile objects (newspapers, books, mobile phones etc.) or whatever takes place within the car as a mobile domestic site (back stage), these actions are often utterly publicly transparent (front stage). By applying the front/back stage metaphor to the Staging Mobilities frame we see a process of ‘mobile territorialisation’ illustrating the dynamic character of contemporary urban life. The key idea behind the Staging Mobilities perspective is thus to capture the fact that mobilities are being staged, as well as the fact that the social interaction taking place must be understood in the light of a ‘staging’ process. The analytical perspective of Staging Mobilities explores who stages mobilities, and how, why, where and by which technologies, artefacts and design principles does ‘staging’ takes place? Equally, the perspective engages with who are staged, how they perceive staging, how they enact or react in accommodating or subversive ways, how they feel about being staged and moved in particular ways and using particular modes of mobilities? Staging Mobilities is, as explained, an investigation of concrete and ordinary mobile situations. However, it also grows out of a research agenda I term ‘critical mobilities thinking’ (Jensen 2009a). By this is partly meant that there is a focus on the social repercussions that different mobility arrangements and designs may have in terms of social inclusion/exclusion. This applies both as mobilities may be staged ‘from above’ in controlled systems as well as the power plays ‘from below’ between moving people. Importantly, moreover, is the fact that ‘critical’ thinking means to question the taken-for-granted assumptions about mobilities. This goes both for the way we think about mobilities in academic and theoretical understanding and, equally importantly, for the way we comprehend it in our daily lives, in ordinary practices and in policy-making and planning of mobilities. The position points at seeing mobile situations as much more than instrumental acts of movement from A to B. The importance of relating mobilities research to the physical layout of the city may sound trivial at first but it contains a number of significant social and cultural processes that reveal it to be not so trivial after all. Any location, building, city or site derives its symbolic meaning as well as its physical functionality by means of its accessibility or its inaccessibility. Or, in the words of Lynch and Hack:

Access is the prerequisite to using any space. Without the ability to enter or to move within it, to receive and transmit information or goods, space is of no value, however vast or rich in resources. A city is a communication net, made of roads, paths, rails, pipes, and wires.

(Lynch and Hack 1984:193)

Moreover, what takes place as people negotiate the material environment and engage in social interactions as they move is crucial to the functionality of cities and the wellbeing of its inhabitants. In the words of Goffman:

when the individual is in a public place, he [sic] is not merely moving from point to point silently and mechanically managing traffic problems; he is also involved in taking constant care to sustain a viable position relative to what has come to happen around him, and he will initiate gestural interchanges with acquainted and unacquainted others in order to establish what this position is!

(Goffman 1972:154)

Many other classic and contemporary mobilities researchers and thinkers are brought into this book. But if one key thinker should be emphasised it is Goffman. This work sets ‘Goffman on the move’, so to speak, in order to develop a new and innovative perspective on the mundane and ordinary...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I Staging Mobilities Review and Positioning
• Part II Framing Mobilities
• Part III Practices of Mobilities
• Part IV Towards a Sociology of Staging Mobilities
• Bibliography
• Index