Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space

Julie Cidell, David Prytherch, Julie Cidell, David Prytherch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138891340
• eBook ISBN: 9781317486671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The contemporary urban experience is defined by flow and structured by circulating people, objects, and energy. Geographers have long provided key insights into transportation systems. But today, concerns for social justice and sustainability motivate new, critical approaches to mobilities. Reimagining the city prompts an important question: How best to rethink urban geographies of transport and mobility? This original book explores connections – in theory and practice – between transport geographies and "new mobilities" in the production of urban space. It provides a broad introduction to intersecting perspectives of urban geography, transport geography, and mobilities studies on urban "places of flows." Diverse, international, and leading-edge contributions reinterpret everyday intersections as nodes, urban corridors as links, cities and regions as networks, and the discourses and imaginaries that frame the politics and experiences of mobility. The chapters illuminate nearly all aspects of urban transport, from street regulation and roadway planning, intended and "subversive" practices of car and truck drivers, planning and promotion of mass transit investments, and the restructuring of freight and logistics networks. Together these offer a unique and important contribution for social scientists, planners, and others interested in the politics of the city on the move.

1 Introduction Transportation, Mobilities, and Rethinking Urban Geographies of Flow

David Prytherch and Julie Cidell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315709680-1

Urban Inquiry at an Intersection

Asked to imagine the city, most of us cannot help but think of place. We conjure the landscape: buildings, streets, objects, people, and the land they occupy, whether a neighborhood or district, bustling street or central square. Geographers and others contribute much to our understanding of the city, including a cartographic imaginary that underlies urban policy and planning. Making sense of such assemblages—their processes, patterns, and experiences in space—is the defining challenge of urban inquiry across disciplines. For nearly a century, urban geographers have made important contributions to understanding how environmental, economic, political, and cultural processes combine to produce the built environment and dynamic social relations within it.

But our urban imaginary has often neglected to capture a most essential element of this same urban scene: motion. Urban places, despite their apparent solidity in space and our imaginations, pulse with flows of people, objects, energy, and ideas. Stand at the corner of a busy intersection, and one is reminded how the built environment is but conduit and channel for circulating matter and energy, flowing in networks from the molecular to the global scale. To the degree we are oriented to the material landscape and its social organization, and conditioned by the visual and cartographic, our theories and representations of urban life often can’t help but fix space and time. Indeed, that’s what our theories and maps are designed to do: abstract the complexity of urban process and objectify it in the concreteness of epistemology or cartography. But all the objects of urban and geographic inquiry, mapping, and theorization are but immanences temporarily embodying dynamic flows or relations. And the structures we trace are just the contours of networked material flows and social relations in space, including the intersections that unite them and the boundaries that divide. No matter how nuanced, theories and maps offer compelling snapshots of a dynamic world, but in doing so impart a stasis in place of the city’s dynamism.

The 21st-century city thus presents a major epistemological challenge: How best to comprehend and theorize the city as both space and circulatory system? No topic presents this challenge more clearly than transportation, the most explicitly motive force in urban life. Transportation technologies and systems structure the movement of people, objects, and energy through urban space, and have long been an object of urban analysis. But interest in transportation has waxed and waned in urban geography and related fields. Questions of spatial interaction and movement once central to the subdiscipline’s early intellectual history, and integral to once dominant positivist traditions that modeled urban flows, were progressively marginalized with late 20th-century critical and cultural turns, their theorization largely ceded to quantitative and policy-oriented debates among regional scientists, economists, and engineers.

Faced with surging scholarly and popular interest in urban transportation and mobility, however, urban scholars are considering how to re-approach flow. This means engaging those literatures for which circulation has always been central. In transportation geography, for example, one encounters well-developed theories and techniques for understanding accessibility and spatial interaction, defined by traditional strengths in quantitative and spatially explicit modeling (Hanson and Kwan 2008) and links to civil engineering. Such largely positivistic approaches have made transportation geography policy relevant (Goetz 2006), but at times insular (Hanson 2003). Meanwhile, critical scholarship in ‘new mobilities’ has emerged to assess the political, social, and cultural forces shaping the experience of movement (Cresswell 2006a; Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Blomley 2011, 2012) and the “politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2010). These new critical and qualitative approaches, however, can neglect the larger spatial contexts, indeed infrastructures, of transportation and its established theories. Fortunately, exciting work is emerging at the overlapping boundaries of transportation geography and mobilities scholarship, engaging their relative strengths to address what they individually neglect. Focus on the urban landscape reveals how much potential remains for such engagement.

In the journey towards a more integrative perspective on the contemporary city, urban studies and geography thus stand at the intersection of key questions and debates:

• How do urban places intersect and function within wider transport networks and flows?
• How is transportation experienced, represented, and contested within networked urban places?
• How are mobility/immobility spatially and socially distributed within (urban) transportation systems and their governance?
• How are transportation places and networks co-constructed through mobility and circulation?

To answer these questions, this book critically examines how urban space is structured and articulated through transportation infrastructure and everyday flows, exploring connections in spatial theory and practice between transport geographies and new mobilities in the production of networked urban places. It joins other recent work that attempts to rethink transportation geographies, whether by engaging with mobilities perspectives (Keeling 2007; Bergman and Sager 2008; Canzler et al. 2008; Knowles et al. 2008; Adey 2010; Cresswell and Merriman 2011; Shaw and Hesse 2010; Shaw and Sidaway 2010; Henderson 2013; Jensen 2013, 2014), the materialities of flow (Hall and Hesse 2013; Graham and McFarlane 2015), or the larger political and economic systems that structure the movement of people, goods, and fuel (Aaltola 2005; Cowen 2010; Huber 2009; Siemiatycki 2013; Moraglio and Kopper 2015). It seeks to contribute a fresh, diverse, and international perspective on the spatialities and power-geometries (Massey 1994) of urban places of flows (akin to Castells 1999, 2000; see also Zavestoski and Agyeman 2015). Transportation geography and mobilities studies offer distinct and complementary contributions to understanding movement and urban space, but each needs to be better linked to the other and to the urban places where movement is practiced, experienced, and governed. Urban geography, with its long-standing emphasis on urban places and the networked spatial relations, and a history of integrating positivist and critical approaches, offers one venue for linking sometimes disparate debates to the everyday experience and governance of urban flow.

Standing at major intersections, like where Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive join in Chicago’s Loop, one is struck less by surrounding skyscrapers than the incessant, negotiated circulation of cars, bikes, and buses on the streets, pedestrians along sidewalks and up staircases and elevators, elevated trains rumbling above and the subway below, passenger and cargo planes crisscrossing the sky, and boats traveling along the Chicago River, whose portage between the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds made the city possible (as portrayed so effectively by Cooke and Lewis 2009). How such complex flows are negotiated, planned, and structured in and through urban places is central to urban life. Only by engaging such spaces with empirical sensitivity and theoretical rigor can scholars and practitioners fully rethink how urban places function as nodes/intersections and corridors/links within networks of potentially global scope, and the experiences of people and materials and energy within them. To stand at such an intersection is, therefore, to stand at a key crossroads in 21st-century geographical debates.

Urban Geographies of Transportation and Mobility: Found and Lost and Found Again

It is worth recalling that urban studies and geography have always been concerned with mobility and networked spatial relations of movement and flow, if not consistently so. Indeed, urban geography’s origins can be traced to the Chicago School’s dynamic systems metaphor of urban ecology (Fyfe and Kenny 2005), which modeled neighborhood and change as processes of ‘invasion’ and ‘succession’ among people and land uses (Burgess 1925). Descriptive regional geographers emphasized the role of cities within regions as “element complexes,” noting “the face of the earth includes moving objects that are constantly connecting its various parts” (Hartshorne 1939). Relations among urban places within a geometrical matrix of spatial relations, such as transportation and its costs, defined the locational theories of Von Thünen, Weber, Lösch, and Christaller.

A network perspective was also at the heart of urban geography’s quantitative revolution, as the locational analysis of Isard (1956) and Haggett (1965) attempted “logically and empirically rigorous investigation of the spatial relations of phenomena and related flow patterns” (Barnes 2009). Statistical and modeling approaches understood spatial structure in terms of movement (interaction between points), networks (lines of linkage between points), nodes (convergence of links), hierarchies (differential role played by nodes), and surfaces (spaces between nodes) (ibid.). Urban geographers led the application of locational analysis (Berry 1973) as urban geography and regional science became deeply entwined (Wheeler 2001a). At the same time, the time geographies of Hägerstrand also theorized the trajec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Approaching the City as Place of Flows
• 1 Introduction Transportation, Mobilities, and Rethinking Urban Geographies of Flow
• I Intersections Everyday Places as Nodes
• II Corridors Links in the Network
• III Networks Cities and Regions in Wider Context
• Moving Forward
• List of Contributors
• Index