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.
Car-based automobility remains dominant across Europe despite the high energy requirements such a system embeds. This system is becoming increasingly problematised. As part of an alternative vision for everyday mobility, an aspiration for vélomobility appears to be growing. In light of the persistent subordinate status of cycling across much of Europe relative to driving, attempts to lay the foundations for everyday cycling are often pursued through the implementation of redistributive cycleways and broader public space measures that prioritise active travel. These important attempts to change public space can be blocked through public opposition, which can feature as part of broader social practices that may politically sustain automobility as a dominant system. In this study, we explore how automobility is politically sustained in discourses of opposition to a major active travel scheme proposal in the context of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Ireland. We uncover how a normatively car-centric discourse of everyday mobility constructs driving as the essential mobility practice for the functional tasks of everyday life, while cycling is relegated to recreational and conditional mobility, and briefly consider how an alternative discourse of everyday mobility that decentres the car may be advanced.
Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery.
Research on ‘policy mobilities’ investigates the ways in which policies and ideas flow from one place to another across interconnected spatial and temporal boundaries. However, scholars have argued that policy mobilities literature has primarily focussed its analysis on the ‘spatial’ rather than the ‘temporal’. In evaluating the extent to which policy mobilities research has critically engaged with ‘time’, this paper aims to advance a temporal understanding of how policies and models circulate across the globe. Drawing from mobilities studies more broadly, the paper proposes four distinct temporal concepts – rhythms, tempos, synchronicity and disjuncture, and timing agents – to acknowledge the multiple and varied temporalities involved in the movement and assemblage of policies. After a comprehensive literature review, the paper sets out to operationalize the four temporal concepts in the context of COVID-19. Under the urgent conditions of a global health crisis, the pandemic has seen fast-shifting benchmarks and best practices circulate around the world aimed at suppressing the spread of the virus. Focusing on COVID-19 regulations in Singapore, the paper adopts a ‘multiple temporalities approach’ to interrogate how expertise and knowledge regarding pandemic response circulated within, to and from Singapore.
The implementation of fare-free public transport (FFPT) in Tallinn (Estonia) in 2013 sparked international media, policy, and academic interest in best practices, funding structures, and ridership. Initial studies showed marginal effects on modal shift, but increased travel by low-income households, and by younger and older passengers. Yet, the assumed social impact of FFPT has since been under-researched. Based on qualitative research with 22 transport-dependent users, including two semi-structured interviews and a seven-day travel diary, this study examines the daily experiences, mobility constraints, and travel practices of care mobilities, i.e., journeys made to care for others or a household. Findings indicate that the absence of fares, although a relative variable in modal choice, allows carers expanded activity spaces, independence from car ownership, and easier coordination of care tasks. I propose to frame accessibility as a relational process emerging from passengers’ encounters and the practices adopted to navigate shared spaces. With this, I argue that understanding public transport use and experiences at a micro-level offers an intersectional and justice lens to commuter-oriented transport and neoliberal urban planning policies.
This paper calls for greater attention to air deportation, defined as the multiple ways in which states utilize aviation systems for the purpose of expelling unwanted people under immigration and criminal law. Civil aviation is pivotal to the expulsion of people from the countries of the global North, yet scholars of deportation have rarely addressed questions of aerial mobility. The paper makes two moves to centre aerial and carceral mobilities within the study of deportation. (1) Empirically, and taking the UK for its case material, it brings scholarly attention to one particular practice of air deportation: the phenomenon of charter flights. These are special operations on which there are no regular passengers, just deportees who are out-numbered by Detainee Custody Officers and other authorities. (2) Conceptually, the paper develops three tools from this case to advance the study of carceral circuits and mobilities: custodial chains, affordances and encumbrances. By helping us better understand agonistic power relations, and by offering a contextualized account of change attuned to the interplay of a variety of factors, these concepts can promote a more mobilities-attuned understanding of deportation by plane. They can also help us better understand tension and transformation in carceral mobilities.
Many cities and countries have embraced transit-oriented development as an international growth management approach, shifting trips from car-oriented to transit. But in this race to become more sustainable, who is being left out? Using mobility justice as a theoretical framework, this paper presents a qualitative comparison between Malmö, Sweden, and Kitchener, Canada, two mid-sized cities where new rail-based infrastructure was completed in 2019. Using over 40 interviews with local residents, business owners and staff, planners, and private sector developers in each city, we found that transportation improvements have created unequal transport mobilities. In both cities, new transportation infrastructure did not improve travel times or access to transit for existing users; in Kitchener, local changes to make way for the new LRT had negative effects on the neighborhood, and bus transit times increased, while in Malmö bus services remained the same as the new train was barely used. This detachment of transportation needs from infrastructure is necessary for local and state politicians to promote new infrastructure as a branding approach. We call this transit boosterism.