Small arrangements with self and others: A visual study of the everyday ordinary on Paris’s A train

Introduction

Public spaces (PS) are a feature of everyday urban life that are recognised as a source of exposure to otherness and informal socialisation. The rules of interaction that govern them foster peaceful coexistence between strangers and contribute to the urban character of the city. As such, and as generic arenas, public spaces usually enjoy a ‘positive’ image. Public transport (PT) spaces are less commonly seen in such a positive light, first, because the general attitude towards day-to-day mobility is that routine travel is inherently a waste of time and PT journeys are often time-consuming, and second, because PT spaces are a particular type of public space that entail several potential sources of inconvenience or discomfort. They are acknowledged to be more restrictive, less freely chosen places and to generate less voluntary encounters than other kinds of public space. PT is undoubtedly a constrained environment. Other analyses, on the other hand, argue that day-to-day mobility is not valueless or meaningless; that minimising the time budget is not necessarily the key criterion in travel choices; or that routines can actually help individuals to manage their time and protect them from contingency in conditions of constraint. The narratives and body language of travellers demonstrate the ambivalence of PT travel, at once positively social, creative and life-affirming, as well as stressful, alienating and intimidating.

In this paper we aim to bring a contribution to the growing literature on the plural and ambiguous experience of PT, arguing that travel on PT can be seen as a context of familiar, though unpredictable, everyday experience, and public transport as a public space that encompasses the dual possibility of exposure to others and preservation of privacy, acting as a kind of antechamber to social times and spaces, which may not be a simple waste of time. Indeed, PT journeys can be valued as a special kind of buffer between two social roles. In this capacity, while public transport necessarily demands awareness of others, it does not require focused attention or full engagement and leaves people free to simply do nothing, to entertain themselves, or to carry out activities. In the best-case scenario, the implicit codes of coexistence that simultaneously guarantee anonymity and minimal social control make for a kind of transitional playspace that provides a period of distancing from social roles, while the repetitive experience helps to maintain the feeling of familiarity. On the one hand, other people are not absent but are complicit here in a controlled form of social escape. On the other hand, each individual can re-create their personal space–time through repeated and/or various behaviours and habits.

How do individuals manage the day-to-day collective experience of travelling on public transport? What ‘methodologies’, routines, or tactics do individuals employ in these conditions? These questions were the starting point for a survey undertaken on Paris’s A train service using in situ video observations of ordinary, everyday experience before the COVID-19 pandemic. The research provides evidence of the content of this ordinary, infra-significant time that shapes everyday life. It surveys the small arrangements with self and others that travellers display on their daily journeys on PT by investigating the patterns of attention to others and the methods developed by individuals to cope with anonymous, everyday experience. Ultimately, we argue that analysis of the footage supports the view of PT as a physically and socially constrained space and time characterised by the coexistence of a sense of both familiarity and anonymity.

The first section of the paper presents and discusses the elements that support the hypothesis that PT is a space and time in which these feelings of familiarity and anonymity can coexist. The second section describes the fieldwork and the method used. The third and fourth sections set out the evidence collected in support of the research hypothesis by documenting (i) the different ways in which attention to others is manifested and (ii) the different personal methods used to deal with the everyday experience of public transport.

A space–time that allows feelings of familiarity and anonymity to coexist?

Public spaces are a part of everyday urban life (Hannerz, 1980) that leaves room for unplanned encounters and interactions between strangers – in other words exposure to otherness and human heterogeneity – with the consequence that individuals do not mix exclusively with people of their own kind. As such, they contribute both to individual self-formation by fostering reflexivity and social hybridisation, and to socialisation by fostering the practice and sharing of collective codes of conduct. Indeed, according to Goffman (1959), social life and the ‘performances’ people enact with those around them follow expectations shaped by cultural norms. The accessibility of public space and the necessity for people to share it entail rules and rituals of interaction, often couched in an unspoken or ‘silent language’ (Hall, 1959) that allows strangers to occupy the same space. In this kind of egalitarian environment (Joseph, 1997), ‘civil inattention’ and ‘poor forms of interaction’ (Goffman, 1959), requiring awareness, tolerance and studied avoidance of others, are conditions of peaceful anonymous coexistence and social concord.

In fact, the term ‘public space’ is itself acknowledged to be problematic and questionable, notably because the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are changeable, culturally and historically shaped, and dominated by Global North perspectives (Tuvikene et al., 2021). A growing body of literature contests the publicness of some places that are publicly owned but tend to exclude certain populations and be informally privatised by others, whereas some private places, like cafés or malls, have features in common with publicly-owned places. Tonnelat (2010) claims that PS should be defined as places that are mentally and physically accessible to the public rather than publicly owned open spaces. Ownership, access or use are criteria commonly applied in the definition of public space. In France, the law (Article 2, Law of 11 October 2010) defines it as public roads, places open to the public or allocated to a public service. Kemmer et al. (2022) suggest that the ‘publicness’ of a space should be addressed less in terms of its legal, economic or political classification or even its degree of openness or intended purpose, and more in terms of the way it is actually used and produced and the degree of socio-spatial exposure it displays. In this respect, although public transport cannot be described as free open space, it is commonly considered one of the forms of PS.

However, public transport and its use concentrate particular features that imperil its image as pleasant public places and a source of positive experience. First, routine day-to-day mobility in general is seen as lacking value, being associated with trivial everyday experience or wasted time, and public transport trips in particular are often long. Certainly, in the scientific literature, spatial mobility is seen as a means of accessing social and economic opportunities and mitigating inequality in the distribution of resources, but at the same time, daily mobility represents a cost and a waste of time. Sociological research emphasises the social requirement placed on individuals to move in order to access opportunities (Fol, 2010). In economics, mobility is defined as a disutility that people seek to minimise. Finally, the travel time for a given trip is usually longer by PT than by car (Liao et al., 2020).

Second, public transport is considered less desirable than other PS because it presents a more restrictive environment. Obviously, the sharing of PS between strangers is not always a trouble-free experience: it presents a risk of offence, intrusion or aggression that impairs the self when social rules are violated (Goffman, 1959). PT in particular is a setting of great physical density, a place of ‘sensory sharing’ (Vollaire, 2013) that potentially intensifies these risks, especially since a bus or a compartment in a moving train are closed spaces that people cannot leave any time they want. Moreover, in other public spaces (park, street, café, shopping centre, etc.), strangers partly choose each other insofar as they decide to be in that place rather than another: ‘I choose this café rather than another because I have an idea of the kind of people I’ll be sharing the space with’. Unconsciously or not, the company is to some extent selected, and people are less exposed to unplanned social encounter and otherness. Conversely, in public transport, there is less choice over the space or the company. For a given destination, the travel options are limited. It could even be argued that PT is one of the last instances of a genuine public space, characterised by the most diverse mix of people. In this respect, some authors have pointed out the difficulties that can arise from unwanted social diversity, which can lead to a rejection of otherness (Lamer and Breux, 2019).

Nonetheless, day-to-day mobility is not unarguably devoid of value or meaning, and public transport in particular is increasingly studied as a more balanced experience. First, not everyone rejects social diversity and research has shown that travelling by PT shapes the experience and perception of others (Bissell, 2010; Bisselll, 2018; Koefoed et al., 2017; Ocejo and Tonnelat, 2014; Wilson, 2011). Travelling by PT entails tacit obligations and relational practices to navigate intense copresence securely through both avoidance and tolerance. It involves acknowledging the presence of others without engaging in focused interaction with them yet maintaining non-verbal communication. Body language functions as an ‘externalisation of evidence’ (Koefoed et al., 2017): a display of intent that can be read by anyone and seeks to match the situation (Bissell, 2010). People make efforts to demonstrate that they belong; social rules are most frequently accepted and followed, underpinning mutual tolerance. Differentiation processes exist and conflictual situations occur, but PT is also a territory conducive to embeddedness (Tillous, 2016), a place where ‘situational communities’ (Tonnelat, 2012) and ‘negotiation in motion’ occur in ‘temporary congregations’ (Jensen, 2010), and where repetition creates a sense of mutual belonging (Heringa et al., 2014; Wilson, 2011) amidst anonymity.

Second, not everyone values or prioritises immediate geographical proximity to destinations. Zahavi and Talvitie have shown that minimising travel time is not necessarily the key motive for individual choices (Zahavi and Talvitie, 1980). Other criteria can take precedence and even prompt people to maintain they daily travel-time budget (Metz, 2008). For example, there may choose to move further away and travel longer distances as a trade-off for homeownership, provided they have access to higher-speed transport. Over time, day-to-day mobility has become increasingly crucial in urban life and PT is a cost-effective mode of transport. Qualitative approaches have explored the ways in which day-to-day mobility contributes to the socialisation of teenagers and their emancipation from local social control (Buffet, 2006; Devaux and Oppenchaim, 2012). Travelling by PT is time-consuming but studies show that this time is not empty (Adoue, 2017; Flamm, 2005). It is the only time when some users can pursue activities (play, read, knit, contact friends etc.) that would otherwise be difficult to accommodate. PT leaves people free to just do nothing at all or to pursue chosen activities.

Travelling by PT can thus be seen as a special kind of buffer between times and spaces and between social roles (at trip origins and destinations: working, parenting, shopping etc.). It situates people between two more attention-intensive roles and does not require their full focus or engagement. This fragile anonymous in-between place within the everyday routine may make it easier for people to escape from the stressful course of daily life and/or enjoy ordinary personal activities – an impersonal yet familiar space that leaves people free to do their own thing. According to De Certeau (1980), constrained conditions are conducive to ‘poaching’. Through their routine practices and ‘arts of doing’, ordinary people develop a creative resistance to situations or spaces, playing along with, yet resisting, these environments by employing opportunistic ‘tactics’. PT could be thought of as a type of restrictive environment that users handle and divert from the basic function assigned to it, both abiding by social rules and performing familiar private rituals and routines.

Against the idea of routines as symptoms of alienation, De Coninck (2015) argues that individuals maintain agency and construct routines in order to manage and preserve their time. Developing routines has become an even more strategic individual ‘grammar of action’ (a personal way to navigate through the norms and to deflect the constraints) in a modern age where individuals endure extreme tensions between complex temporalities. By repetition of the same, routines both protect individuals from contingency and give them a sense of confidence and continuity (Giddens, 1991). According to Javeau (2006), routines not only protect people, guaranteeing their ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1991), but serve to preserve their privacy behind a smoke-screen. However, in order to develop, routines need familiarity with a space and/or situation. Public transport, as a locus and stage of social interaction, may well provide a setting for such familiarity to unfold.

All in all, it can thus be said that PT combines the features of a context where users experience both exposure and privacy, and of a daily experience subject to sharp constraints yet compatible with some degree of latitude. As such, PT could be construed as a space–time that allows feelings of anonymity and familiarity to coexist. This kind of space–time might be said to play the role of an ‘antechamber’ between other everyday social spaces and times, one that leaves room for both social and private rituals.

‘Take the A train’: Using video to record in situ observations

This research employed video as a tool for the observation of the ordinary experience of day-to-day travelling on PT. Quantitative approaches often define day-to-day mobility as all journeys undertaken by local residents below a specific threshold of distance from home (100 km in France). Alternatively, because ‘day-to-day’ is not restricted to proximity and residency, it can be defined as any trip made by an individual, regardless of the distance and the person’s status. For an investigation that aimed to look at day-to-day mobility on local PT by direct observation, it was this second definition that was adopted, since a train compartment contains individuals who may or may not be local commuters or regular travellers, and may be travelling for various purposes. Observing peak and working hours on a regular rail line was the minimalist option through which to capture ordinary experience of travel by public transport.

The study was conducted on the A train (RER A) on Paris’s suburban rail network (Réseau Express Régional). With 12 million inhabitants, the Paris Region (Île-de-France) is the biggest urban area in France, accounting for 23% of the country’s jobs and 19% of its total population. It has a large public transport system with a substantial range of subsidised fares and travel passes for workers, students, older people and the unemployed. In 2018, the modal share of PT in the region (amongst residents) was 22% of all trips and more than 40% of commuting trips. The A train itself is the busiest urban and suburban line in France, carrying over a million people a day and linking the west and east of the region over a distance of 70 miles. The whole line connects and passes through many of Paris’s economic clusters: from Nanterre University and La Défense (a major business district) in the west, through central Paris, to the eastern suburbs that are home to the Descartes Campus (which includes Gustave Eiffel University and other educational institutions), Euro Disney centres, and the Marne-La-Vallée high-speed train (TGV) station.

The survey investigated only part of the eastern line, from ‘Nation’ (the last Paris city station) to ‘Noisy-Champs’ (in the suburbs), that is, a 9-mile section encompassing six stations, covered in 17 minutes, partly underground (in the denser area), partly above-ground. At peak hours, the railway service runs at a frequency of one departure approximately every five minutes. The Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) is the PT operator that manages the service on this leg.

The seven stations and municipalities served by the line are in four different départements (counties): Paris in the centre, Val-de-Marne and Seine-saint-Denis in the inner suburbs, and Seine-et-Marne in the outer suburbs. These four départements are quite different: Paris is the richest of France’s 101 départements, ¹ whereas Seine-saint-Denis is one of the poorest (ranked 94th by household income). Val-de-Marne and Seine-et-Marne are rich in national terms (7th and 10th, respectively) though in the bottom half of the ranking within the region (which has seven départements). However, the specific municipalities served by the seven stations of the survey are not as different as the four départements. Neuilly-Plaisance and Noisy-le-Grand in Seine-saint-Denis have significantly better socio-economic indicators than their département as a whole (their share of taxable households is 71% and 68% compared with 55% for the département) and the eastern arrondissements (districts) of Paris have significantly worse socio-economic indicators than their départements (the poverty rate in the 20th arrondissement of Paris is 20% compared with 15% for the département as a whole). Bry-sur-Marne and Vincennes (in Val-de-Marne) are the wealthiest of the seven municipalities whereas the others are similar in their socio-economic indicators. Both have one-fifth non-taxable households (against a third for the others) and an employment rate of 9% (between 11% and 14% for the others). As for Seine-et-Marne, the département that hosts the largest number of stations on that branch of line A (further east), its population predominantly consists of family-oriented, middle-class residents with stable jobs. The median disposable income per consumption unit is close to that of the Île-de-France region as a whole. The poverty rate is lower (11.8% versus 15.6%) and the proportion of stable jobs (permanent employment contracts) slightly higher (81.5% versus 78.4%). Yet the proportion of adults who have been through higher education is markedly lower (30.1% versus 42.5%). Homeowners are over-represented (61.8% versus 47.1%) and small-sized housing under-represented.

Several reasons determined the geographical choice for the field research. On the one hand, the RER A was a compelling option as a significant and busy urban line linking central Paris with the suburbs. On the other hand, choosing the busiest segments and directions would have made filming too difficult because of the high rate of occupancy. For this reason, it was decided to travel against the direction of the most intensive peak hour traffic between the centre and the eastern part of the line (which is less busy than the western part), that is, travelling outbound in the morning (centre to east), and inbound in the evening (east-centre). Another factor in favour of the eastern line was that this segment is part of the daily commute for the main participant in the film (see below) and for the author of the research. This made it much easier to devote the time needed to collect this kind of material. It could be argued that the directions and segment chosen introduce an observational bias as these journeys are less uncomfortable and thereby less likely to give rise to situations of tension than the others. Nonetheless, though not the busiest, these routes still carry very high passenger traffic. Furthermore, the core object of investigation was less the reactions of users in high stress conditions than the ordinary course of people’s presence and routines. The train occupancy levels were thus high most of the time, without often being a source of tense situations, and at times lower (which I specify in the descriptions). A longer segment or another line (e.g. the B line from north to south) could also have been selected if the initial research question had concerned differences between places and types of people. The largest proportion of the literature on micro-mobility behaviours actually focuses on race and class relationships, but the goal here was more modest: to arrive at a taxonomy of the embodied behaviours adopted by travellers to manage their journeys. Finally, the population of users of the sample network is both diverse – students, workers, tourists and TGV passengers – and somehow homogeneous – with no great social difference between middle-class local residents and local workers (a gap that would have been greater in the western part of the line). That is largely why, apart from gender, the ‘demographic’ coding of the travellers was not particularly significant in the video analysis.

In recent decades, micro-mobilities research and mobile methodologies have developed quickly (Jensen, 2010; Sheller, 2011; Spinney, 2011). The recording of observations through film is an option that has been justified in several ways (Durand, 2001). In the present case, a key reason was that, being very familiar with the experience of commuting on this line, the researcher might be concerned about a lack of proper distance from the field. That is also the reason why floating observation was chosen over a sharply focused and hypothetical-deductive approach. The video camera was chosen as an instrument of observation that would allow a more comprehensive retrospective view. There are certainly disadvantages in distancing oneself from the immediate context of events and conducting the analysis in a purely visual rather than multisensory way. But the screening, sorting, and re-screening of the video recordings genuinely resulted in the highlighting of occurrences and situations that in the case of certain scenes escaped notice during the initial observation. No interviews were conducted (except one debriefing on one particular point with X, specified below). In the case of observation, it could be argued that ‘seeing’ is often already interpretation. Some of the meaningful scenes that were not detected in situ are quite obvious in their content when the filmed material is examined, whereas others are less clear and leave room for a range of interpretations. The scene described below as a case of ‘uncivil attention’ is open to criticism for mis- or over-interpretation. As the whole sequence is so long and the attitudes so tenuous and ambiguous, they were only revealed when highlighted through editing and the result is debatable. Editing is a writing process conducted with the purpose of shaping data into findings. It is not specific to video-based research. A more particular critique that is addressed to the use of video as compared with traditional non-participant observation is that the intrusive presence of a camera might sometimes prevent both usual and less acceptable behaviours (e.g. offensive behaviour) from taking place. This effect has been well-documented in the literature that deals with the issue of the perceptions or misperceptions that arise from the use of video as a research tool (Lallier, 2009; Mottier, 2016). What is witnessed may have occurred in spite or because of the presence of the camera, in the same way, for example, as the context of an interview can trigger speech despite the intrusive situation or in response to the interviewer’s questions. Either way, the camera does not prevent common micro-gestures and body language from occurring, and filming with great frequency and over long timeframes, as well as the viewing and identification of repeated or more unusual behaviours, prevents total misrepresentation – whereas qualitative approaches do not seek to be fully representative. Finally, a well-known effect in documentaries is that, over time, the main protagonists end up forgetting the presence of the camera.

The images were shot exclusively inside the train carriages over a period of seven months, from November 2015 to May 2016. All were double-decker trains, each stage (on either side of the compartment’s central entrance) containing 22 seats facing each other in rows of one, two or three. Filming took place at different times on working days but mostly during peak and working hours. Total footage was 34 hours. In the case of film, research ethics are a major concern, as film engages with the person’s image. On the one hand, the collective and ever-changing context of a train compartment obviously precludes the possibility of asking each person’s permission to film. On the other hand, French law allows filming in public spaces without formal permission from individuals provided that the images cause no impairment to their dignity. However, it was not conceivable to enter a train and just film the passengers. The protocol chosen was to film a colleague (X) ² and her surroundings during her daily trips to and from work on the same section of line, to capture her and their ways of acting and being and the micro-interactions between her and other people around. In that way, the other passengers could both deduce who/what was being filmed and be aware of the possibility that they were in the frame. On occasions, a few other colleagues (like Z) agreed to be filmed on their way home. Other methods were also used: filming people from the shoulders down and also, in the underground parts of the line, filming people’s reflections in the darkened windows. This last technique, however, proved more problematic, since people remained quite recognisable while most probably being unaware of being filmed. The extensive material collected was analysed and edited into clips of various lengths. The present paper neither claims to deliver a full analysis of the entire research nor to establish a definitive set of categories of conduct on public transport.

Finally, two historical factors need to be emphasised. First, the fieldwork started after the terrorist attacks of November 2015 in France, which could have affected passenger behaviours. In the experience of a longtime user (which the researcher is), there was actually nothing to suggest this during the seven-month period of observation. The fact is that France had experienced several waves of terrorist attacks in the past, some of which took place on public transport. A security programme against terrorist threat (‘Vigipirate’, created in 1991) was already active and visible on PT, so the risk context was quite familiar to regular PT users. Second, the study took place before the COVID-19 outbreak. Although it is of great importance to explore the effects of the pandemic on ridership and behaviours on PT, this does not affect the pertinence of the present study, in which the aim was to explore the very ordinary context of day-to-day mobility.

The ways in which attention to others shows

The hypothesis that public transport is a time and space that allows familiarity and anonymity to coexist is supported by evidence showing (i) the ways in which attention (or inattention) to others is manifested and (ii) the private methodologies used to deal with the daily experience of PT. This section addresses the former. The types and degrees of attention to others are expressed through combinations of sensory and ‘automatic’ behaviours that refer to routine and familiarity (partial involvement, awareness without alertness) as much as to the embodied, accepted duty towards a situation that brings together people who mostly have no other expectation of each other than the desire to ‘remain unproblematic’ (Berlant, 1998, quoted in Wilson, 2011). Attention to others is revealed in different ways that range from manifestations of respect to uncivil attention, including deficient attention. Notwithstanding the limitations associated with the use of a video camera, no situation of offensive or worse behaviour was recorded over the course of the survey.

The private methodologies for dealing with the daily experience in public transport

The private methodologies that people develop in PT consist in attitudes and activities that seek to arrange a comfortable experience in the presence of strangers. Three categories of methodologies were witnessed in this research: (i) making room for oneself, (ii) performing activities (or inactivity), and (iii) performing familiar personal rituals.

Conclusion

Public transport constitutes a space and time that may be experienced through both feelings of familiarity and anonymity, a setting that combines exposure to others with the preservation of privacy. The research on Paris’s RER A train highlighted the small arrangements with self and others that travellers display in day-to-day mobility through various forms of attention to others and the personal methods they use to cope with the everyday experience. While the stresses and discomforts of PT are there for everyone to see, the gestures identified are also clearly intended to be socially facilitating. It can be assumed that PT fosters a sense of familiarity enabled by a shared set of norms of conduct that takes others into account and underpins a set of private methodologies that gives travellers a sense of confidence and continuity (Giddens, 1991). In PT, the combination of familiarity and a high degree of anonymity helps to constitute this daily experience as an ‘antechamber’ between less anonymous social roles. Personal rituals in particular could be interpreted as self-constructed rites of passage that ease the transition as well as the ambivalent experience of exposure to strangers. This transition does not exempt one from playing – and overplaying – a role within the shared collective patterns under the control of the people physically present in the coach, but this role may be less rigid than that demanded on either side of this transitional space, at the origin or destination of the journey.

Yet, that no aggressions were perceptible throughout the investigation does not mean that they did not occur. From micro-aggressions to miscellaneous facts, we know they exist and the former are the most difficult to spot. The social codes that pacify daily life are also the breeding ground for pretence. The most invisible mute interactions escape observation the most. They can escape the camera as well as an interview since the debriefing of the ‘scene of uncivil attention’ with X showed that she did not perceive the scene the same way. This pleads for further exploration that would address variations in these small arrangements, included in the light of gendered, social or generational factors.