This article is greatly inspired by the mobilities paradigm in its investigation of the transnational novel Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita by paying attention to a particular form of mobility, walking, practiced by the marginalized migrants in the landscapes. It argues that the novel reveals walking firstly as an alternative mobility for those migrants to claim for the visibility of the overlooked landscapes where they inhabit; secondly as an imposed form of mobility on the migrants, who perceive mobility injustice in the construction of the taken for granted landscape, the freeway; and thirdly as an oppositional mobility to be used by the migrants to claim landscape and home. In this way, transnational fiction would enrich the studies on walking by drawing attention to the connection between walking, marginalized migrants and landscapes, taking into consideration mobility (in)justice; it would also contribute to the exploration of various forms of oppositional mobilities; but most important of all, it would add one more layer to the discussion about mobility by connecting the exploration of mobility to that of landscape construction and finally to the envisioning of a new approach to home.
Focusing on three ludic journeys through an autoethnographic account of Wellington, New Zealand, this paper explores how the performance of playful movements can alter the meaning, practice, and feeling of urban spaces. Attention is drawn to becoming hybrid, how technology mediates and augments the power to transform the everyday and support playful engagement with the city. These three ludic stories focus on e-scootering, cycling, and playing an augmented reality game, and highlight how play orientates our bodies through a sense of ‘with-ness’, with our environment and others. It also looks at orientations of ‘against-ness’, a leaning away from the materiality of objects, spaces, and events through play. This paper concludes by drawing on how space feels, and how it may open up the design potentials that these mediated practices offer.
This paper seeks to contribute to current discourse at the intersection of mobility and architecture studies, by examining the divide between immobility and mobility through the lens of tiny homes. While home is the archetypal image of stasis, belonging, and rootedness, recent mobility studies have considered the potential of architecture as mobilizing, rather than purely permanent, animated through mobility. Our focus on tiny homes highlights the shifting relations between ‘immobility’ and ‘mobility’ as ‘homely mobility’ to create a sense of homeyness and happiness. We examine this homely mobility through an analysis of the YouTube channel Living Big in Tiny Homes, which challenges static conceptions of the home and allows us to emphasize the multi-scalar and multiple forms of homely mobility, spatially and temporally, through micro and macro movements. This paper has a particular interest in how bodies-with-tiny-homes transform and are entangled in movements and flows, but also how the ideas of tiny homes, or ideals of homes generally, stay, are sticky or get stuck.