Abstract
Staging Mobilities provides an illuminating analysis of how contemporary urban mobilities are shaped by a range of different interrelated processes of ‘staging’. As Jensen summarizes, ‘Staging Mobilities is about the codes, norms, and cultural patterns of interaction that take place often imperceptibly and with a high degree of complexity due to the speed of movement, the density of crowds and the complex networks of signs and codes we use to navigate through modern cities’ (p. 157). The book shows how this staging work takes place through a range of different sites and through a plethora of different actors. Echoing the distinction that de Certeau makes between top down ‘strategies’ and bottom up ‘tactics’, as its key conceptual motif the book takes the idea that mobilities are both staged ‘from above’, through the design and planning of material spaces, and ‘from below’, through social interaction and embodied performances. The discussion enrols an impressive number of thinkers from various different disciplinary traditions, most notably sociologist Georg Simmel, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and urban planner Kevin Lynch. However, as the dramaturgical title of the book hints, the conceptual figure that looms largest is Erving Goffman. Staging Mobilities takes Goffman’s symbolic interactionism in new directions by showing how the ‘material, physical and even architectural dimension of the setting’ (p. 15) are vital to understanding how social interactions unfold on the move.
What each chapter of Staging Mobilities shows is how practices of urban mobility are shaped by different agents, systems and networks. However, it is most keenly intent on drawing attention to the processes of design and planning that give rise to and sculpt urban mobility. Jensen insists that such a focus is important because it expands our apprehension of urban mobility by emphasizing how these particular forms of ‘staging’ are not just utilitarian in scope. Rather, processes of design and planning are tasked with creating new potentials, capacities and experiences. Indeed, one of the most powerful, and to my mind vital, imperatives that runs through the book is how urban mobility must be understood in ways that transcend narrowly instrumentalist rationales. Thus playfulness, pleasure, surprise, frustration, delight and confusion are just some of the momentary sensations that bead practices of mobility, and, as Jensen points out, it is these embodied experiences that can shape our dispositions and sense of self. At the same time, the book foregrounds a critical sensitivity to processes of social exclusion that take place through different forms of staging from above. I particularly enjoyed the chapters where the complexity of the staging of mobility was made most manifest: Chapter 7, which examines the different mobile negotiations that take place in Nytov Square in Aalborg; and Chapter 8, which considers how the design and planning of the Copenhagen Metro and Bangkok Sky Train each produce different forms of ordering and segregation.
Staging Mobilities provides cultural geographies of mobility with an extensive array of new terms through which mobile life in the city can be understood. These include: mobile biotopes, mobile sociopetals, mobile sociofugals, mobile geosemiotics, mobile assemblages, mobile semiotic grammar, mobile with, networked self, negotiation in motion, mobility aesthetics, mobile embodied performances, mobilities choreography, mobility code, nexus, mobility skills ladder, mobilities potential thinking, critical mobilities thinking, and mobilities design. The range of new terminology that this book introduces gives a clear indication of just how significantly processes of mobility can challenge our current social scientific ways of understanding life on the move.