ABSTRACT
Introduction As argued in Chapter 1, there is a need to better understand the dynamic social, political and cultural entanglements of tangible mobilities sites, as well as to better work with their design potentials beyond affording utilitarian movement. Hannam et al. talk about ‘moorings’ (2006) and Adey calls them ‘enablers’ (2010): materialities that shape and facilitate our highly mobile lives and societies. The mobilities turn deals with how physical environments are not inert backdrops on which mobilities simply happen but performative material actors that co-orchestrate everyday life worlds. Likewise, urban design and architectural practice and research are associated with such performances, as a substantial part of acknowledging that materialities not only have certain looks, styles, shapes, symbolic meanings or uses but are also active mediators in how we inhabit the world. This counts, not least, for the fragmented, urban infrastructural landscapes, which will be our focus in the following chapters of this book. In this chapter, we want to draw the attention to the repercussions of the nonrepresentative and pragmatic understanding presented in Chapter 2, we also connect mobilities design to Actor-Network Theory. The situational perspective and the relational-processual understanding of mobile practices lead us to rethink the role of artefacts, materialities and agency. In this chapter therefore, we suggest to ‘mobilize’ designed artefacts. Our suggestion implies a move from what we could term a static, or ‘sedentarist’ (Cresswell 2006) thinking about materialities of mobilities, which is influential in, for example, transport planning (Urry 2007), where it has been suggested that design and architecture are too often thought of in sedentarist terms (see Adey 2010; Till 2009; Yaneva 2012). It is our observation that the design of materialities of mobilities tends to be a technical concern of organizing inert matter to facilitate efficient flows. Designed artefacts tend to be confined to fixed solidities, to ‘static objects’ in Euclidian space (see Latour and Yaneva 2009; Yaneva 2009a, 2012). Sedentarist thinking about mobilities artefacts and sites tends to reduce mobility, fluidity and contingency. Such rough reductions are widespread in architecture and design as a means of imposing ‘architectural order’ on a messy reality, and architectural scholar and practitioner Jeremy Till has therefore argued that, in architecture,
there is a need to overcome the gap between thinkers and practitioners who would have the world be one of reason and order, and the way the world really is ‘in all its contingency’ (Till 2009: 48). This divide is arguably not confined to architecture or design; rather, it is present in the modern project as such (in all its strived-for order). Yet, indeed, it is observable when architects’ drawings present a ruthless editing of contingency, trying ‘to manipulate that world into (a semblance) of order’ (ibid.: 37). It is important to acknowledge the great need in design to balance complexity and comprehensiveness of lived worlds with clarity and comprehension, simply in order to be able to approach concrete design tasks. A central aim of this book is, therefore, to work towards the articulation of mobilities design as an approach which can recognize mobility, contingency and relationality in design and design research. Let us illustrate the point with a brief example. If we think about the design potentials of, for example, an ordinary site of mobilities, such as an asphalt parking lot, we are often occupied with its functional place in the ‘chain-like’ infrastructural system of the car. Infused with a sedentarist mindset, ideas of boundedness, authenticity and representation will have priority (see Cresswell 2004). A search for redesign potentials of that parking lot might then be initiated first by its functional efficiency, then by trying to fix its real meaning, to find the essence of its identity. The overflow of mobilities of that space will probably seem like a threat to such an essence. What are we to make of a space which is utterly mundane, where nobody stays, where the car rules and where asphalt and concrete dominate? We will perhaps denominate it as ‘placeless’ or as a ‘nonplace’ to point to its perceived lack of authenticity and cultural and social value (Augé 1995; see also Arefi 1999). The following quote from geographer Edward Relph, who addresses the ‘mass movement of people’ as well as the deficient relationship between many mobilities sites and their surroundings (‘the landscape’), makes this point vivid:
Roads, railways, airports, cutting across or imposed on the landscape rather than developing with it, are not only features of placelesness in their own right, but, by making possible the mass movement of people with all their fashions and habits, have encouraged the spread of placelesness well beyond their immediate impacts.
