Afterword: Moving Along

Abstract

In Kevin Lynch's (1960) classic formulation of the image of the city, he asks us to think about urban environments as a series of topographic registers on the landscape, from monuments to mountains, paths to edges, nodes, and junctions. There is a human element to this vision, with its concentrations and convergences in social space; think of the hangout value of a street corner or how the cut of a railway marks off a cultural district. However, these registers can also seem static. The city is laid out (Lynch was an urban planner after all) and people move within its gridlines. The authors of the articles in this special section—Samprati Pani, Annemiek Prins, Catherine Earl, and Nikolaos Olma—posit a different imagining of the city: diverse forms of mobility, understood sensorially. These are ethnographies attuned to the movement of bodies through space, where the image of the city is the movement itself. This sensorial approach highlights a particular relationship between city and society by focusing on daily practices of mobility and their repetition through urban space—practices that are individual and begin in the body but have social, political, and cultural resonances and ultimately forms. These are mobility practices that make grooves in the urban landscape and shape people's lives. I think of this experiential and sensorial approach as key to “the moving city,” an idea developed in my own research about how Delhi's new metro rail system reorders that city's landscape (Sadana, 2022). The reordering is not only due to the physical imposition of new lines and stations but also because of the new itineraries being forged and followed by millions of riders. Similarly, in this special section, readers are treated to a range of ethnographic engagements with mobility practices and how they cultivate social and cultural pathways.

Each author begins by showcasing a particular form of mobility—walking, cycle-rickshaw driving, experiencing traffic, and taxi driving—as historically and materially situated in an urban and Asian context. “Asia” here is a place and continent more than an area, concept, or geopolitical monolith. There is nothing cohesive about Asia but there are shared characteristics across its urban public spaces. The four articles span Central, South, and Southeast Asia, across the cities of Tashkent, Delhi, Dhaka, and Ho Chi Minh City, and are located in the nation-states of Uzbekistan, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, respectively. These are places with different population densities and climates, though they are all imbued with colonial and imperial histories, postcolonial built environments, and more recent economic liberalizations, resulting in rising middle classes, persistent and entrenched inequalities, and new or changing mobilities. The cities’ infrastructures reflect these new “mobility regimes” composed of “norms and rules that shape movement, space, behavior, and conduct” (Sheller, 2018, 95), and yet there is also more going on here, in the interstices of norms and rules.

Samprati Pani's article on bazaar-going women of the historic Nizamuddin neighborhood of Delhi takes the ordinary urban practice of local outdoor shopping to make a compelling case for how low-income, Muslim women produce public space on their feet. They do not merely go to the bazaar, but they also walk through and around it in a repetitive manner interacting with shopkeepers, traders, and other shoppers. The bazaar is an extension of home-making activities, as described by Pani, where women have purpose and things to buy for their families, but it is also a place of serendipity, community, and city-making, where “a detour spurs other detours.” Pani reminds us of the linguistic connection between “city” and “citizen” without going into the grand narrative of citizenship. The connection is both lighter and more relevant in how these women take to the street. The bazaar-going women she talks to are not waiting for their male relations (who often hold the purse-strings) nor the state to tell them where to be or go. In their basti (low-income neighborhood), it is their own bazaar after all, and that is exactly how they see it. What Pani sees are the creative and political dimensions of their ordinary routine.

The bazaar as described by Pani intersects with the cross-class space of Delhi's metro, which connects many bazaars across the city, including Nizamuddin's. The metro also provides a space for gendered mobility, especially in the designated women-only coach featured in each train. But the Delhi metro is a more globalized space, as it connects multiple localities throughout the city and moves people within a hyper-modern government-made infrastructure. Pani's bazaar is not only more local, but it can be seen as an extension of these women's homes. Sometimes women even watch the bazaar from their doorsteps on days they cannot go. Pani shows how this idea of proximity can be liberating. You do not have to traverse much urban space for it to be transformative. There is also an intimacy of the bazaar that refuses public or private distinctions that curtail women in particular. No one watches or cares much about these women's perambulations within the basti, where “boundaries between leisure and necessity are blurred” within the very practice of walking.

Annemiek Prins moves to a city-wide frame of mobility practice in her article on cycle-rickshaw drivers in Dhaka. As in many Asian cities, in Dhaka the cycle rickshaw is not only at the lower end of the transport hierarchy, but it is also considered an outmoded and regressive form of transport by planners and elites, one that clogs streets and conjures an inhumane image of one human pulling another. Prins emphasizes the cycle-rickshaw drivers’ perspectives on their own labor and why they do it: the necessity of “instant cash” to manage their rural lives (families to send money to) while accessing urban mobility. That this access requires them to enter the bottom of the transport hierarchy is the cruel logic of the urban-rural continuum. There is the image of the city—Prins tells us that cycle rickshaws are so pervasive in Dhaka, one cannot imagine the city without them—and the timescape of transport, one that is nonstop and always moving, even when in a jam.

Dhaka, like Delhi, is set to have its own metro system soon, and I wonder what this will mean for the city's cycle-rickshaw drivers. In Delhi's transport hierarchy, cycle-rickshaw drivers were similarly considered anti-modern until the Delhi metro came around with its hundreds of stations. Commuters needed last-mile connectivity like never before and cycle rickshaws seemed to fit the bill perfectly since they could be lined up around stations. There is still pressure, as there is in Dhaka, to phase them out. If the metro marks the city as hyper-modern and global, what does it mean for there to be cycle rickshaws jostling alongside it? In Delhi, I would argue that this issue is about how the city is imagined and by whom. The metro's real value is not simply as a gleaming stand-alone object, but rather as part of an integrated set of transport options. Yet these two contrasting visions often exist side by side, with implications for urban planning, among other things. Every other major city in India now vies to have a metro system, whereas much cheaper bus rapid systems have much less support. Cities are in some cases being replanned around costly metro systems that will not be extensive enough to warrant their expense. Closer to the ground, new electric rickshaws are taking some but not all the places of cycle rickshaws. Whether in Delhi or Dhaka, this particular mobility regime points to the precarity of cycle-rickshaw drivers’ lives and livelihoods.

Catherine Earl's article dwells on the whole of the transport landscape, as she offers a unique analysis of the experiential components of traffic in her consideration of Ho Chi Minh City. Earl draws on avant-garde musical concepts to argue for a different way to regard the trope of the chaotic and disorderly Global South city, “an alternate modality for conceptualizing mega-urban mobilities.” The idea is to account for movements that seem to fall outside of manufactured flows, forms of cooperation that are not always implemented by urban plans or infrastructures but rather through trial and error. This method of moving through traffic may not create brute speed or a brisk pace but instead proceeds at a tempo that still gets you where you want to go. Here mobility is about adaptation that may cause dissonance but can also lead to reintegration—think marathon runners and street dancers. What looks like chaos from the outside has its own rhythm.

By drawing a parallel between sound and movement, Earl offers a portrait of mobility that includes the cacophonous rather than sees it as an aberration or distraction. This kind of sensory anthropology deepens our idea of the social environment and thickens our descriptions of it, but in this case it also does more than that. Earl's “rhythmanalysis” approach makes us understand how traffic and congestion are composed. And it is the avant-garde form of composition that “challenges structures” and “destabilizes universality.” So, it is not just about seeing or even hearing but rather physically imbibing alternative movements. Earl articulates something we (who regularly get immersed in this kind of traffic) all know: It may look chaotic, but somehow “the system” works, it has a harmony of its own, even as it transgresses norms or, perhaps, because it does so. And it does so by “negotiation, coordination, collaboration, cooperation and mutual regard among actors on the streets.”

By highlighting the avant-garde, Earl breaks down what traffic is composed of and how elements go in and out of flows. There is a rhythm to it, but one offering “a contrasting composition of urban mobility relations that are co-produced, differentiated, multi-layered, overlapping and polyrhythmic.” One of the most repeated phrases I heard from Delhi metro commuters was that they could now predict their travel times since metro trains always showed up. They had a predictable rhythm. The metro is another layer in the city's transport landscape and intersects with other, less-predictable forms, but the system (because of its size and reach) has an overall stabilizing effect for people who use it for the bulk of their journeys.

Nikolaos Olma offers yet another way into the question of mobility and the image of the city through the concept and practice of orientiry, the Russian word for “landmark” that people in Tashkent use to describe how they give directions. So, instead of saying, “Take a right on 5th and go three blocks to Broadway,” you might say, “Take me to X hotel, or Y restaurant, or Z café, or this metro station, park, or market.” It is not that you are going to any of those places, but where you need to go is in the vicinity of any one of them. It is a kind of shorthand for the city and a way to communicate with your taxi driver. Olma is interested in the cognitive practices that create a shared set of urban landmarks for people, and the way “orientiry result from a dynamic interaction between people and their environment.” Orientiry tend to be landmarks that people have feelings about, creating “images that stay with people.” This proliferation of images is something that is not only a spatial production of place but also one reflective of time. Depending on when one moved to the city (especially in terms of rural migrants who also make up a sizable portion of Tashkent's taxi drivers) or one's age is a big part of how orientiry may change over time. These landmarks are about people's experiences of the city and memories of places, so even a hotel or restaurant that no longer exists may still exist in the collective urban psyche and remain part of orientiry.

Olma's depiction of orientiry made me think of how I used to feel about getting around in Delhi. Before the metro came, I often took auto rickshaws to get around, and over the years I learned the city through this kind of orienting language of landmarks with rickshaw drivers. I usually did not know street names and as in Tashkent, where those names often changed in the post-Soviet era, Delhi-road names went from being British to Indian and now sometimes Hindu. As in Delhi, orientiry in Tashkent is only partly a bottom-up practice, where individuals contribute daily to reaffirm particular landmarks for wayfinding. Orientiry also indicates the relations of power that surround naming and remembering practices. But chiefly, orientiry is a mechanism for greater mobility and more access to the city. It is an informal shorthand that still reflects who in the city has the upper hand.

As for the bazaar-going women of Nizamuddin, orientiry is about repetition, though rather than an urban practice of walking, it is more usual for it to be used in taxis. This manner of wayfinding enables greater reach across the city. It is also a reservoir of shared knowledge produced by people's own mobility practices, a kind of verbal urban infrastructure, communicated again and again. What Olma's elucidation of orientiry helps us see is just how much mobility can be a collective process. Though, it is not that everyone has equal access to ways of knowing the city. Orientiry is reflective of ethnic, linguistic, and class divides with middle-class, Russian-speaking Tashkenteres at “the top of the hierarchy;” yet there are entry points, such as for migrant taxi drivers “pretending to know the city” and making their own way in “a geography of difference.” I see this pretending as part of the improvisational aspect of all the mobility practices discussed in this special section.

As this special section demonstrates, mobility practices offer a different way to conceptualize the moving city, especially when they are located in bodily experiences and through the senses. This approach is more inclusive and critical in its capacity to locate the power dynamics of mobility in urban places and in the interstitial spaces of movement itself. These dynamics reveal how infrastructures can be somewhat elastic; they can be contributed to in a ground-up manner, through walking, driving, or being driven. This contribution generates its own images of the city, ones that foreground circulation and human experience. There is an elasticity to infrastructures precisely because of the inconsistencies and contingencies of people's movements, based on where they are coming from and their own stations in life. In these elastic infrastructures, it is the sensorial experience of moving through or along them that creates unexpected smoothness and friction—in the course of the stretch. Even the city's denseness, in terms of its built environment and population, gets cut through and manipulated again and again. In the density of movement on streets and in bazaars, forms of movement intersect and social and transport mobilities overlap. This intersection and overlap highlight the proximity between bodies and infrastructures, how bodies are positioned toward the city, in the traffic landscape, a neighborhood bazaar, from the seat of a cycle rickshaw or in a taxi. There are a variety of vehicles, widths of roads, intersections of by-lanes, flyovers, and highways, along with indoor and outdoor activities that merge in the city. The landscape is uneven, as is the social experience of traversing it.

Mobility is about access and movement, while it is also about being stuck (Hage, 2009). People wait for passengers, wait in traffic, wait for a metro train, or even wait to go outside. That infinitesimal shift between the feeling of waiting and the feeling of being stuck is about how time is regarded and framed by a host of spatial and other factors. The feeling of being stuck goes against the feeling of belonging, connection, and promise that mobility can inspire, what Ghassan Hage (2009) calls “existential mobility.” Navigating the city, as this special section shows, connects transport and existential mobility through the sensorial. How you walk, drive, or move through the city informs your existential being. Meanwhile, being stuck—on the road, in life—is part of the push and pull of mobility practice, the speediness and slowness of it.

Velocity takes us places but also gives us ideas. This is true for the authors’ own comings and goings as they seek to be part of the flows that they study. They ride in taxis, buses, metros, scooters, motorbikes, and more, and those trips are linked to longer ones that often include university campuses and airport infrastructures. This kind of anthropology of moving along has become a regular feature of many urban ethnographies. If we think about multi-sited ethnography as not only about following production across different cities, or countries, or ports, but also about following people (and their things) to understand their everyday practices of mobility, we can see how these ways of studying mobility in cities must often be radically multi-sited. The ethnographic method is well-suited to documenting and analyzing mobility practices, though we should see this method as more than participant observation, which seems a little sedentary by comparison. In this more mobile ethnography, your participants are often on the move and your observations may include your own negotiation of infrastructures. You are out in the city, sensing the movement, and detecting rhythms. This experiential method points perhaps to the inherent contradiction in ethnographic descriptions of mobility. We fix and identify, holding in place through language. With mobility, the goal is to move through or move along, often at varying speeds.