ABSTRACT

While the recent turn to mobility has been of enormous benefit in interrogating static versions of place and space, there has been little discussion about the relationship between mobility and temporality. However, Henri Lefebvre’s hitherto neglected Rhythmanalysis (2004) offers a starting point for investigating the complex temporal rhythms of the multiple mobilities that course through space. This chapter thus tentatively examines how rhythmanalysis might be applied to commuting while also critiquing academic and popular cultural discourses that represent commuting as a dystopian, alienating practice. In popular cultural representations, the commuter has often been represented as a frustrated, passive and bored figure, patiently suffering the anomic tedium of the monotonous or disrupted journey (for instance, as in the 1980s British television sitcom, The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin where the main character suffers the daily banality of underground ‘tube’ commuting and in the opening scenes of Hollywood movie Falling Down, where the angry protagonist leaves his car in the midst of a cacophonous traffic jam). In addition, as Lyons et al. (2007, 108) claim, many studies of commuting continue to construe travel-time as a ‘disutility’, a cost ‘incurred by individuals and society as a means to enjoy the benefits of what is available at the destinations of journeys’. Instead of these dystopian and functional visions, and within a broader analysis of the relationalities between rhythm, mobility and space, I explore the spatial and experiential dimensions of commuting rhythms and argue that commuting can be alternatively conceived as a mobile practice that offers a rich variety of pleasures and frustrations.