The “Mobility, Infrastructure, and the Humanities” Special Issue of the open-acces journal MOBILITY HUMANITIES is now out! It draws from the 2022 Global Mobility Humanities Conference held in Seoul and co-organised by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) of the University of Padua, the Academy of Mobility Humanities of Konkuk University, and the Royal Holloway University of London Centre for the GeoHumanities.
The special issue, which includes several papers in creative formats, is edited by Peter Adey, Jinhyoung Lee, and EDM members Giada Peterle and Tania Rossetto:
Mobility, suggested John Urry, is fundamental as one of “the infrastructures of social life” (13). Yet mobilities are as equally undergirded by infrastructures of systems that can both enable and disable mobilities. This special issue emerged from the 2022 Global Mobility Humanities Conference, and in this introductory article we open out several problematics which framed some of the conference and introduce further the themes explored by the special issue papers. First, we tease out the academic networks, practices and relations of a broader “infrastructuring” of the (mobility) humanities. Secondly, while theorising a mobility humanities of infrastructure, we introduce the papers by way of exploring several cross-cutting concerns. That is, we discuss how the methodological possibilities stimulated by a humanistic lens may produce nuanced accounts of infrastructures (“Methods as Infrastructures”); how mobility humanities can present the polyvocality of infrastructures, enlarging the conceptualisation of both infrastructure and infrastructuring (“Pluralising Infrastructures”); and how infrastructures can be interrogated ethically and politically in terms of a wide variety of critical issues that pertain to mobility equality, sustainability, and inclusiveness, that is, the notion of mobility justice (“[Ex]change: The [Broken] Promises of Infrastructures.” Thus, we hope this special issue functions as a powerful and productive trigger to stimulate more encounters and develop generative conversations.
Have a look at the MOBILITY HUMANITIES journal website and explore the results of a fruitful collaboration!
“The station is certainly a technical object, but it is also a social object that interacts with users through their moods and feelings and requires them to use specific skills. It therefore seems illusory to think that mathematical modelling, however sophisticated, can take into account the multiplicity of experiences involved in passing through a station, the choreography that is performed at each moment.” (P. Detavernier, Le marcheur de la gare. Une architecture des corps, Metis Presse, 2023, p.14, my translation).
Pauline Detavernier’s book Le marcheur de la gare. Une architecture des corps, published by Metis Presse in October 2023, testifies architecture’s growing interest in the affective value of such spaces, in particular the reciprocal influence between these spaces and the way we feel in and move through them. The originality of Detavernier’s book lies in the fact that it highlights the affective character of a way of walking which, at first sight, one would be inclined to see as emblematic of the instrumental, almost mechanical use of the body: moving from one place to another. On the contrary, the “genealogy of the figures of the individual in motion in the station” (ibid.) offered by Detavernier – who focuses mainly on Parisian stations – is elaborated precisely from the different affective and spatio-temporal experiences that have followed one another from the advent of stations to the present day, to analyse the different architectural “spatial responses” to them.
The experience of the station space as a place of encounter with the train, which shares with the station the character of a “threshold” between the city and “elsewhere”, permeates the six figures identified. By means of a precise historical reconstruction, Detavernier shows how the succession of figures embodied by the station-walker is the result of historical, social, and technological changes.
Frightened and at the same time fascinated by train travel, the station-walker of the 1930s and 1940s, who embodies the figure of the “traveller”, whose mobility is “classified […] guarded, controlled” (ivi, 35) by architectural measures designed to prevent the paths of travellers from other social classes or departing/arriving from intertwining. The decision taken in the 1880s, following the example of English railway stations, to allow travellers more independent access to the tracks meant that they were no longer confined to waiting rooms until the train arrived. However, their movement continued to be regulated by measures designed to guide the now “incompetent user” of the station, who had to be instructed on the route to be taken to reach the trains. When, in the 1930s, urban expansion led to the spatial fragmentation of work activities, this figure was replaced by that of the “commuter”, whose priority was not to find his way around but to get through the station as quickly as possible, hence the implementation of architectural measures to “dilute” the flow of travellers (such as increasing the surface area of waiting rooms, now crossing rather than waiting places).
The abolition, in the second half of the twentieth century, of ticket controls at the entrance and exit of the station removed one of the elements that gave the station its function as a “threshold” and “opened” the station to the city, as evidenced by the proliferation of passages, allowing such access directly from the urban streets. The station thus acquired the status of an “urban” space, where citizens stop, meet, shop, transforming, under the watchful eye of the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF, founded in 1939), into “customers” whose needs had to be met.
To restore the attractiveness of rail travel, which had lost its patina of novelty with the advent of the plane and the car, high-speed trains were born. With them, the station becomes a “node in a larger network” of interchanges, a “moving place” whose users – who are now “particles” of a flux – must be helped to make as many travel choices as possible (such as changing and/or correcting their route at the last minute). Stairs, lifts, mechanised ramps respond to this need, in line with the increasingly “consumerist” logic to which station walking is subject. Like department stores, stations are increasingly taking on the appearance of a “town square”, an urban space for the sale of all sorts of products in waiting rooms that have become “shopping galleries”, inviting the “consumer” – this is the figure in which the station walker is now identified – to make purchases.
No longer an activity to be shortened as much as possible, but an “opportunity to be amplified” (ivi, 122) for commercial purposes, the station walk must take place equipped with a series of “capturing devices” capable of extracting the consumer from the flow and making him buy. The most prominent of these is the one – to be installed in French stations from 2015 – that digitally records data on how the presence of travellers is articulated in the station, to predict the consumption “needs” determined by the detected spatio-temporal use of the station.
In this way, the return of a controlling instance to the station walk is outlined, an instance now revisited in an “inductive” key: the station walker must be induced to make the “right choice” – a concept whose ambiguity is underlined by Detavernier (ivi, 137) – in line, for example, with more sustainable community behaviour. This is made possible by the use of the “nudge”, a “psychosocial device” that consists in creating an environment conducive to certain choices by exploiting precise cognitive biases (e.g. encouraging people to use the stairs instead of the escalator by indicating the number of calories lost by using the stairs).
This demonstrates the shift in the gaze of the station walker – now identified as the “subject” – to the influence of the environment on the choices of use of that space. It is, therefore, the way of living and moving in this space-environment that increasingly determines the spatial-architectural choices of contemporary stations. Detavernier’s research aims to promote precisely a better understanding of the psychology of the individual in the station and his or her relationship with the spatio-temporal environment, not for consumerist purposes, but to emphasise – following Michel De Certeau (1990) – the fact that walking is an “active practice”, a way of “doing with” the environment. This leads the author to define four “attitudes” that can alternate during the same experience of passing through the station: the “strategic”, the “automatic”, the “tactical” and the “walker” (promeneur). The most relevant attitude is the latter; anchored in the spatial context, the walker relates to the discontinuity given by the contingent situation with a spirit of research and curiosity, seeing in it a source of personal enrichment.
Such an attitude appears as an antidote to the instrumental, mechanical, “disconnected” use of the body, an antidote inherent in the very experience of moving from one place to another. Whoever adopts this attitude seems to have grasped an aspect that is present in Detavernier’s book, even though it is never made explicit: the fact that space itself has its own mobility, which drives its traversers towards each other, opening up those who adopt a curious attitude to what the philosopher Henri Maldiney calls the experience of “encounter” (Maldiney 2003, 2012). The latter is the experience in which, in the presence of otherness, we transcend ourselves ceasing to merely “live” and begin to “exist” in a “meeting place” that makes its way through us and our movements.
“Affirmer que le paysage est une traversée c’est aussi dire qu’il ne s’arrête jamais nulle part, qu’il est sans limites et sans frontière. En l’encadrant, on le domine en quelque sorte, on s’en fait « un tableau» […] ce qui a toujours été un moyen de lui donner une identité et de le posséder. On sait aussi que le paysage n’appartient à personne et que, témoin de l’histoire des communautés qu’y ont vécu, il évolue et se déplace avec elles. Ce qui n’est pas sans conséquences politiques. Car la traversée est tout le contraire de l’appropriation. Nous ne possédons nullement le paysage, nous le partageons simplement. Les vivants, humains et non humains, migrent sans cesse et rien ne peut les arrêter : le vent, les courants marins, les animaux transportent les graines par le monde, ils traversent les frontières et construisent la dynamique des paysages que les hommes accompagneront en voyageant eux aussi et en se mêlant sans cesse aux communautés où ils s’installent. ”
Gilles A. Tiberghien, Le paysage est une traversée, Parenthèses, 2020, p. 12.
“Le terme ‘géopoétique’ renvoie d’ailleurs à des pratiques créatrices dépassant la poésie au sens strict. Comme le souligne Michel Collot, la notion est liée à ‘une réflexion sur la poïeisis entendue au sens large comme création littéraire et artistique’ (Collot, 2014, p. 105). Non seulement le travail chorégraphique de Fabrice Guillot s’inscrit en ce sens parfaitement dans une démarche ‘géopoétique’, mais en plus, il donne une réalité physique, concrète à ce concept. En effet, selon Kenneth White: ‘La géopoétique commence avec un corps en mouvement dans l’espace’ (White, 2002, p. 84). Or la danse n’est-elle pas l’incarnation artistique par excellence du ‘mouvement dans l’espace’?”
Cécile Torrent, La danse comme réécriture “géopoétique” de l’espace? Retouramont : de la géo-graphie urbaine vers un lyrisme géo-chorégraphique, dans “Géographie et cultures”, n. 96 (2015), p. 11.
“The problem with this spatial logic, according to the greek philosopher Zeno, is that we would have to traverse an infinite distance of intervals in order to arrive anywhere. Thus, movement would be impossible. The same result occurs, according to Zeno, when we understand movement as a series of temporal now-points or instants. If every unit of time is indefinitely divisible, it will take an infinity of time to move from one point to another. The problem is that movement cannot be divided without destroying it. By thinking that we can divide movement into fixed, immobile stages based on departures and arrivals, we spatialize and immobilize it. Movement, according to such a definition, is just the difference, between divisible points of space-time, but there is no real continuity.”
Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 12
Starting from 1st December 2023, the WALC (Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures) project is active and will run for the next two years. The WALC project is funded by the PRIN PNRR 2022 call of the Italian Government’s Ministry of Universities, in the funding line dedicated to ‘green’ topic projects presented by researchers under 40. The WALC project was set up within the framework of the international research centre CRPM (Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues) of the Université Paris Nanterre, in particular the research axis “Espace et Mondialisation” and the project “Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité”.
All the members of the research group (RU Bologna, Padova and Milano Bicocca) have been working together for years, as they are part of the international research center CRPM. In this context, the members of the research group had the opportunity to confront through an interdisciplinary approach the way in which different discourses – literature, art, architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural memory – configure and extend spaces in a dynamic relationship of continuity that underpins the human experience of space, and thus they are fundamental to understanding how women and men experience the place they inhabit and within which they move.
The main objective of the WALC project is the analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective (critical-literary, geographical, sociological) of walking in urban spaces as an intangible cultural heritage of contemporary urban mobility in European cities. The social and humanistic perspective proposed by this project suggests the importance of walking as a cultural practice that has to be re-evaluated especially in light of the aim to rethink cities and urban mobilities in the post pandemic time and of the current social changes and climatic crisis that ask to rethink the transport means and practices by which we move in space. In European cities, walking in urban space is an often neglected but widely accessible everyday activity: allowing one to reflect on the conformation of the city, perceive and embody the map of the city, and identify new routes for experiencing and exploring everyday environments.
The geographical distribution of the RUs in three urban contexts, Bologna, Padova and Milano, represents an opportunity to test this approach in different cities; furthermore, the disciplinary specificities of the three RUs’ coordinators allows to read walking landscapes through a complex, transdisciplinary lens, bringing experts from literary criticism, geography, and sociology into conversation. The outputs of the project will be both scientific publications and policy proposals for cultural institutions, in order to bring urban cultures to the centre of the international socio-political debate.
The RU in Bologna, coordinated by Filippo Milani, will be more focused on literary representations (history of literature, literary criticism and cultural studies) and creative writing laboratories and practices, through the collaboration with walker-writers.
The RU in Padova, coordinated by Giada Peterle, will promote an art-geography collaboration to explore walking as a mobile and creative method, and to reflect on the ways in which urban cultures can be shaped and resignified through creative and narrative practices.
The RU in Milano Bicocca, coordinated by Luca Daconto, will focus on the environmental, social and behavioural dimensions related to urban walking, paying particular attention to the planning of inclusive and walkable cities through the involvement of policy-makers, stakeholders, and citizens.
The WALC team firmly believes that a humanistic approach is fundamental to face the challenges of Europe’s present and future, in particular to achieve some of the Sustainable Development Goals, included in UN Agenda 2030: Goal 4 Quality Education; Goal 5 Gender Equality; Goal 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities; Goal 17 Partnership for the Goals.
Au retour, dans l’encombrement des voitures qui rentraient par le bord du lac, la calèche dut marcher au pas. Un moment, l’embarras devient tel, qu’il lui fallut s’arrêter […]
Les voitures n’avançaient toujours pas. Au milieu de la longue file des coupés, fort nombreux au Bois par cette après-midi d’automne, brillaient le coin d’une glace, le mors d’un cheval, la poignée argentées d’une lanterne, les galons d’un laquais haut placé sur son siège. […]
Les premières voitures se dégagèrent et, de proche en proche, toute la file se mit bientôt à rouler doucement. Ce fut comme un réveil. Mille clartés dansantes s’allumèrent, des éclairs rapides se croisèrent dans les roues, des étincelles jaillirent des harnais secoués par les chevaux. Il y a eut sur le sol, sur les arbres, de larges reflets de glace qui couraient. […]
Et le défilé alla, dans les mêmes bruits, dans les mêmes lueurs, sans cesse et d’un seul jet, comme si les premières voitures eussent tiré toutes les autres auprès d’elles.
Tout allait en se mourant. Dans l’effacement universel, au milieu du lac, la voile latine de la grande barque de promenade se détachait, nette et vigoureuse, sur la lueur de braise du couchant. Et l’on ne voyait plus que cette voile, que ce triangle de toile jaune, élargi démesurément. […]
Émile Zola, La Curée, Gallimard, Folio Classique, p. 39 sq, 2002 (1871)
Le départ du roman ; les voitures à l’arrêt. L’embouteillage. Les calèches marchent. au pas. Le vocabulaire de la voiture, qui deviendra durablement ou momentanément celui de l’automobile, une vingtaine d’année plus tard : coupé, glace, cheval, poignée, lanterne, siège, roues. Le défilé qui devient littéralement un train de voiture. Entre ces éclats, l’espace du bois et de Paris organisés en fonction de la voiture-point-de-vue. Les encadrements. L’animation de l’espace de loisir et sa progressive disparition ; l’entrée dans le monde de la bourgeoisie spéculative : Paris.
In the earliest EDM seminar at Nanterre, we have been able, thanks to Giada Peterle, to dig into the distinctive im/mobilities within the realm of comics. Like other cultural representations, mobility in comics is not merely portrayed but is intricately woven into the very fabric of experience and imagination. This unique interplay between representation and practice underscores the interdisciplinary nature of graphic im/mobilities, as we explored the intersection of mobility studies and comics. Giada’s journey amalgamated theoretical insights and methodological reflections from diverse fields, including social sciences, comics studies, narrative geographies, and creative geohumanities approaches, in order to create a possible theory (and practice) about GeoGraphic Narrative.
Approaching the subject from the vantage point of a geographer-cartoonist, the presentation delved into the utilization of comics as a research practice within the realm of mobility studies. Based on Giada’s repertoire of original examples and graphic fieldwork experiences in various European cities (such as Lines or Quartieri) we explored the innovative use of creative and narrative mobile methods. These methods, showcased through a series of compelling instances, shed light on the depiction of mobile subjects, practices, and infrastructures within urban landscapes.
The presentation culminated in a reflection on the profound capacity of comics to allow us to explore multi-layered perceptions of time-space, by a combination between sequentiality and simultaneity. We asked ourselves: is a graphic novel also a map? By engaging with comics, we gain access to the mundane, intimate, affective, and emotional dimensions intertwined with everyday mobilities.
