Networked mobility and temporal spaces: Cycling as jugaad in post-pandemic Kolkata

Abstract

The wider shifts in the conditions of mobility wrought by the pandemic, on the one hand, invoke anxieties around the ideas of health and wellness; and on the other hand, occasion the use a variety of health apps meant to carve out niche ‘safe spaces’. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with leisure cyclists in Kolkata, in this article, we demonstrate how app-enhanced cycling practices, primarily intended as a wellness activity during the pandemic, manifest certain ‘temporal spaces’ – quasi-virtual spaces, as extension of the online/digital-offline/material continuum, connected to locally contingent data environments – through tactical use of jugaad. In this scheme, individual practices of mobility eventually yield solidarities – digitally-mediated ‘networked publics’ – wherein human agencies, technological materialities and socio-political relationalities imbricate toward reconfiguring urban geographies. This phenomenon of informal place-making leverages the affordances of the very digital apparatus that, during the pandemic, has often underpinned the statist techniques of surveillance on mobilities.