ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how moving in the city contributes to creating an urban commons – a space shared through mutual practices and collective memories. As architect Stavros argues, the city as a commons is not only a space given to people according to specific terms, but a space taken by the people and moulded by them according to their aspirations. It is a space where continuously re-emerging ways of using and improvisatory tactics shape local rules and ever-contested boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Mobility, arguably as a constitutive feature of urban life, can thus be seen as a key aspect of sensing and (re)living the city together. Based on analysed sensobiographic interviews from Finland and Slovenia, the ethnographic research participants and the researchers explore urban space and reflect on their other mobility practices. The chapter focuses on ways of moving within cities that somehow, if often very tacitly, challenge the prevailing urban order, suggest fugitive trajectories out of it, or seek to accommodate the surrounding sensory environment to “our” wishes and needs. The chapter seeks to elaborate the dynamics of how modes of moving make cities sensible for us, and even more importantly, how this sensing “us” emanates along with the broader process of place-sensemaking.
