ABSTRACT
Mobile situations and inconspicuous materialities Imagine a rainy autumn afternoon. You are walking along the pathway on your route to do some grocery shopping. In a few more steps you will enter a tunnel, providing a passage under a big road. As you move through the tunnel, you get a moment of shelter from the rain. A few kids enter from the opposite direction, stopping to shout some words, which resonate in the enveloping concrete space. You notice some new, bright graffiti on the concrete wall, and quickly – without deliberation – you stroke your hand across it. As you exit the tunnel, you encounter the rain and grey skies again. You make a turn to the left and must put some effort into getting across a muddy puddle on the side of the path before you move slightly upwards. You now have a view of a parking lot. Not that many cars are there, and you stroll directly onto the asphalt surface. A few larger puddles have collected here and there, and as you walk around one, you notice a trace of oil in it. In one of the others, a toddler is jumping up and down, laughing loudly. You run into an acquaintance along the way and stop between a parked car and the shopping-cart shed to greet him and chat. A bit farther on, you reach the supermarket. After your shopping, you need to go to the pharmacy. It is located on the other side of the road, only a few hundred metres away. You make your way with your grocery bags to the verge of the road. It is slippery now; only small tufts of grass keep the ground from getting too muddy. Some cars drive by, and you move back a little to avoid getting splashed. Shortly after, you seize the chance to take some quick steps across the first two lanes and you reach the central reserve. Again a few cars drive by. This time you cannot avoid your clothes getting splashed. There’s a pause in the flow of cars and you continue across the road. Along this imaginary journey, you have been engaged with various ordinary materialities of mobilities: a pathway, a concrete tunnel, a muddy reserve, an asphalt parking lot, a wide road, etc. In diverse ways, these materialities have enabled and put constraints on your journey. They have been performative in coorchestrating your experience and practice of mobility. But these materialities have not acted in isolation. Rather, they have worked in situational effects, with multiple visible and invisible material and immaterial bodies: the rain, your
(wet) shoes, your grocery bags, cars and many other things. Not least, as you moved through these physical environments, many other people have been on other journeys, creating myriads of small interactive situations. The many small interactions with other people and with materialities are marked by routine and the mundane habitual practice that you are hardly conscious of . A few may, however, have been marked by their breaks in routine. As you travel, you are ‘doing mobilities’ as a set of embodied performances that reaches from walking on various pavements to measuring your quickest route and negotiating your crossing of a big road. This book is about Mobilities Design. Obviously, the mobile situations of everyday mobilities, like the imaginary ones above, are marked and defined by decisions taken elsewhere: in planning departments, architectural offices and city governments. Design contributes to ‘staging mobilities from above’. But a large number of decisions and choices are also made by you, ‘staged from below’, either in a non-reflexive, routine manner or in deliberate and conscious accord with your values and perception of Self (for example, sustainable transport-mode choices or the way you choose to walk past people or the negotiation of a seat on the bus). Mundane mobile situations are taking place in physical environments, often as social interactions and always as embodied performances. This ‘situational approach’ to mobilities is presented theoretically and empirically elsewhere (Jensen 2013, 2014). In this book, we wish to zoom in on the material dimension of mobile situations by exploring the physical sites and artefacts of mobilities. We will not omit the social and the embodied dimensions (which are the two other elements in the situational analytical framework) but we will centre attention on the ‘doings’ of designed materialities, as these provide the physical environments for mobilities to be played out. We shall in particular look into the urban design field, which contributes by shaping mundane mobile materialities, and we will explore how the fascinating nexus between materialities and bodies on the move pan out in specific designs. En route, we shall visit again the inconspicuous and ordinary material sites of the imaginary journey above. These belong to some of the ubiquitous material realities of our mobile, everyday lives. By connecting the situational understanding of mobilities as they are practised and experienced with urban design, we ‘learn to see’ such ordinary mundane ‘non-places’ (Augé 1995) as materialities ripe with mobilities design issues significant to our well-being, social life, safety, equal rights and the future of cities and mobilities. In short, the sites we will visit epitomize both important design potentials and design problems. We hope you are ready for the journey, which most likely will take you to familiar territories but hopefully in fairly unfamiliar and rewarding ways. The structure of this introductory chapter is the following: after the imaginary journey and the opening motivation above, we walk you through the background for our articulation of the field of mobilities design. Hereafter, we shall make a formal and brief introduction to the ‘mobilities turn’ as the research field within which we locate our work. Next, we devote a section to identifying the relevant dimensions of the design field we propose to engage. In this initial voicing of
mobilities design, we are predominantly looking towards urban design. After the urban design identification and discussion, we explore a wider set of issues related to the ways in which designers more broadly contemplate, act and innovate – what we term ‘designerly ways of thinking’, which we appreciate as a nerve to mobilities design. Following this exploration, we present the three selected ‘matters of concern’ for this endeavour into mobilities design: atmospheres, environmental sustainability and inequality. We shall motivate their relevance and presence within this work and we shall qualify their relationships to three empirical cases that we also present in an overview format. The chapter ends with an outline of the general structure of the full book.
