Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus

Blog post by Bradley Rink


Created
3 May 2022, 10:36 a.m.
Author
Bradley Rink
DOI
10.1177/00420980221088123

Abstracthttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00420980221088123#abstract

 

As we travel through urban public space(s) in public transportation our mobilities are mediated by omnipresent processes, policies and sorting mechanisms. After years of using the Golden Arrow Bus service in Cape Town as a member of the fleeting micro-community of the bus and staring at the Conditions of Carriage posted within every vehicle—while straining to read the small print—I began to question how the quasi-public space of the bus was mediated through an interlocking system of legal statute, company conditions, and societal codes of behaviour.

My paper seeks to highlight the myriad ways that urban public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled through rules of conduct that differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus. The Conditions of Carriage demonstrate how policy shapes mobility practices, thus mediating the publicness of public transportation. Together they provide the parameters within which the public is expected to negotiate mobility, stillness, relationships and behaviour within the mobile assemblage of a public conveyance. Using a combination of quantitative content analysis of the Conditions of Carriage in combination with ethnographic reflections of the lived experience of mobile public space of the bus, the findings highlight the myriad ways that public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled.  The rules of conduct as evidenced in the Conditions of Carriage help to differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus, allowing the findings move beyond dualistic construction of inclusion and exclusion in public space. Empirical evidence from the Conditions of Carriage and their lived experience demonstrate how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors on the bus within a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion. At the same time, the findings evidence the mediation of (in)civility in mobile public space through the deployment of a specific array of social norms as contextualised in the culture(s) of the bus’s operational environment.

The interdisciplinary field of mobilities is well-developed in the social sciences, yet exploration of the ways that mundane mobilities and the shaping of urban public space through the lens of mobilities continues to develop. My paper, and the special issue in which it appears, take an important step in furthering our understanding of the public space(s) of public transport and the ways in which such mobilities are mediated through policy, legal statute, company conditions, and societal codes of behaviour.

 

Read the accompanying article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

 


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