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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: ISTE Invoiced
- Sprache: Englisch
In the entanglement of practices, protagonists, techniques and infrastructures that enable mobility, transportation places play a crucial role.
While transportation is often approached through the prism of networks, Geographical Places in Transportation invites us to shift our focus toward the places that link transportation and facilitate the movements of people, objects and materials. Through the myriad activities that unfold there, transportation places play an active role in the interdependencies that shape our daily lives.
This book looks at transportation production and experience sites as places–processes, where a considerable proportion of society’s challenges and the habitability of territories are at stake: ecological transition; social inequalities; roles of minorities and living beings; access to employment and other resources; role of atmospheres and ambiances; commercial strategies and security concerns; expansion of digital capitalism; and relations with both the near and the distant.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
I.1. Setting things in motion in and through places
I.2. The wide scope of places related to transportation
I.3. Transportation and its places as an immersion in social life
I.4. A humanistic and critical approach
I.5. The multiplicity of fixed or mobile places shaping transportation
I.7. The heterogeneity of parties involved
I.8. Shifting the focus beyond the Global North and urban worlds
I.9. Structure of the book
I.10. References
1 Infrastructure Networks and Major Transportation Places in the World: A Geohistorical Perspective
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Transportation in the pre-industrial era: organization of long- distance land routes and supremacy of waterways
1.3. The industrial and transportation revolution: scaling up, concentration processes and metropolization
1.4. Globalization today: a new geography of dominant places shaped by transportation networks?
1.5. Conclusion
1.6. References
2 Gateways or Globalization Taking Place(s): Interdependencies in Question
2.1. Introduction: staples of globalization
2.2. A kaleidoscope of gateways
2.3. Why do gateways matter?
2.4. Conclusion
2.5. References
3 Shifting Economic Models of Transportation Places
3.1. Introduction
3.2. From a public model to a market-oriented model: the evolution of transportation place economics
3.3. Explanatory factors: sectoral restructuring, liberalization, state transformation and circulation of models
3.4. Effects of these changes on the functions, forms and practices of stations and airports: models in question
3.5. Conclusion
3.6. References
4 Logistics Places: An Urban Geography of Post-Industrial Blue-Collar Workers
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Warehouse blue-collar workers and the social issues of diffuse urbanization
4.3. Delivering the city: working classes and mobile work in urban spaces
4.4. Conclusion
4.5. References
5 Public Space and Transportation: Friend or Foe?
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Transportation infrastructure as an integral part of public space
5.3. The contested role of transportation in the making of public spaces
5.4. Designing public space and transportation together
5.5. Conclusion
5.6. References
6 The Revival of Active Modes in Global North Cities
6.1. Introduction: extracting active mobility from the places assigned by functionalist planning
6.2. Words and watchwords of active mobility
6.3. The sharing of public space in question
6.4. Conclusion: active modes as vectors for the activation of places
6.5. References
7 Sensory Urban Mobilities: Experiences and Uses of Ambiances
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Ambiances and mobilities, ambiances of mobilities: specificities of an object and of an approach for places and transportation
7.3. Users as producers of ambiances: what sensory experiences of ordinary mobile practices?
7.4. The production of ambiances by the operators of transportation spaces
7.5. Power for ambiances? Safety in question
7.6. Conclusion
7.7. References
8 Paratransit Places: Spaces of In-Betweenness in Cities of the Global South
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Places that shape metropolitan areas
8.3. Places with high stakes and power relationships
8.4. The evolution of paratransit, a mirror of urban space hybridization
8.5. Conclusion
8.6. References
9 From Rapprochement to Separation: Transportation Places and Mobile Segregation
9.1. Introduction
9.2. Disjunctions in the frequentation of transportation places
9.3. The transportation place as a material and symbolic distancing device
9.4. Conclusion
9.5. References
10 Heritage Development of Transportation Places
10.1. Introduction
10.2. A traditional heritage development of transportation places: the example of stations and ports
10.3. The heritage development of roads: production of places and territories
10.4. Transportation and heritage development of the present: the example of airports
10.5. Conclusion
10.6. References
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1. The 20 largest ports in containerized traffic in the world in 2017...
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure I.1. “Because our door to the world must remain wide open”. Campaign pr...
Figure I.2. Pose in front of the slogan “The Falklands unite us” at the statio...
Figure I.3. Van with the colors of Ukraine in Paris
Figure I.4. Near the school of Kaupanger, a Norwegian village: “arrival zone [...
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1. The trajectories of French cities to reach Paris in space-time bet...
Figure 1.2. Feedback loop between accessibility and centrality. Adapted from B...
Figure 1.3. Number of passengers in various major airports in 2018 (in million...
Figure 1.4. Number of international passengers in various major airports in 20...
Figure 1.5. Cargo volume airports around the world from 2014 to 2018 (million ...
Figure 1.6. International Internet roads in 2018
Figure 1.7. The distribution of data centers as cloud computing materials
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. Kangiqtiniq Airport (otherwise known as Rankin Inlet), Nunavut Ter...
Figure 2.2. Movement of people, goods and cosmopolitanism in Dora, near Beirut...
Figure 2.3. Preparing to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea by the front...
Figure 2.4. The port of Beirut shortly after the explosions of August 4, 2020...
Figure 2.5. Cruise liner in St. Mark’s Basin and acqua alta phenomenon i...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. A retail space installed directly along the flows at Amsterdam-Sch...
Figure 3.2. Shopping malls (SNCF space) and advertising campaign (RATP space),...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1. Typology of Ile-de-France blue-collar places
Figure 4.2. Picket line at the Leroy Merlin warehouse in Valence (Drôme, Franc...
Figure 4.3. Press conference of the “Collectif des Livreurs Nantes en Lutte”, ...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. Acrobatics performance for drivers at a red light in the Roma dist...
Figure 5.2. Urban life around the ferry terminals and on the corniche of Istan...
Figure 5.3. Varied uses of roads and their surroundings in the urban fringes o...
Figure 5.4. Shift in space sharing at an intersection in the Cusset district o...
Figure 5.5. Temporary appropriation of a peripheral street in Old Havana
Figure 5.6. Licensed musician and stage installed by RATP in the Paris subway...
Figure 5.7. The new northern forecourt of Nantes central station, inaugurated ...
Figure 5.8. Street garden maintained by residents in Montreuil (eastern suburb...
Figure 5.9. Project to gradually transform the E40 highway in Brussels into a ...
Figure 5.10. Madison Square in Manhattan, after its redevelopment as part of t...
Figure 5.11. Berlin Tempelhof airport and its “careful” redevelopment project...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1. Screenshot of the page “vélo et marche” (“cycling and walking”) fr...
Figure 6.2. Active mobility in its places. Maisons-Alfort (Val-de-Marne, Paris...
Figure 6.3. Strasbourg, “archipelago city”. Areas where the share of the roadw...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1. Compact crowd and bustle at Montparnasse-Bienvenüe station during ...
Figure 7.2. The grandiose architecture of London St. Pancras station, all in v...
Figure 7.3. A sound and light installation that radiates the space with its pr...
Figure 7.4. White tiling and high luminosity, a paradigm that remains topical....
Figure 7.5. Strong lighting, a contrast between light on the platform and dark...
Figure 7.6. A “Point connect” (on right of picture) at Châtelet-Les Halles sta...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. Drivers play cards during off-peak hours at Station Deck minibus s...
Figure 8.2. Renovated minibus station at Ekuphumleni shopping mall in Khayelit...
Figure 8.3. On the other side of the shopping mall in Ekuphumleni: the minibus...
Figure 8.4. Near Bayside shopping mall (Cape Town), access restrictions for mi...
Figure 8.5. A space dedicated to the pick-up of e-hailing passengers at Cape T...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1. “We are all connected”: Who does the “we” in this advertisement at...
Figure 9.2. Motorcycle driver in Hanoi (xe ôm). Recent measures limit authoriz...
Figure 9.3. Fast-track access at Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport
Figure 9.4. Barrier limiting access to part of the subway platform for women a...
Figure 9.5. Serving the mobility of others as a grueling experience: poster in...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1. Chhatrapati-Shivaji station in Mumbai
Figure 10.2. Example of a reference to National Road 7: the fresco on the grou...
Figure 10.3. The indoor garden of Incheon International Airport in South Korea
Figure 10.4. The TWA Hotel at John-F.-Kennedy Airport in New York
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Begin Reading
List of Authors
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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SCIENCES
Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain
Infrastructure and Mobility Networks Geography,Subject Head – Hadrien Commenges and Florent Le Néchet
Geographical Places in Transportation
Coordinated by
Jean-Baptiste Frétigny
First published 2025 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2025The rights of Jean-Baptiste Frétigny to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025932167
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78945-174-0
ERC code:SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space SH2_8 Energy, transportation and mobility SH2_11 Human, economic and social geography
Introduction
Jean-Baptiste FRÉTIGNY
PLACES, CY Cergy Paris Université, Cergy-Pontoise, France
I.1. Setting things in motion in and through places
In its significant heterogeneity, transportation forms vast assemblages of actors, infrastructures, tangible and intangible networks, techniques and practices, ensuring the movement of individuals, objects and materials (Mérenne 2014; Cidell 2021; Libourel et al. 2022). While often approached from the angle of the networks brought into play, this book shifts the focus toward the sites where transportation is moored and set in motion, produced and experienced, where it literally takes place.
Let us think about the Ever Given ship, which is almost 400 m long and one of the most impressive container ships in the world. Owned by a Japanese group, flying the Panamanian flag, it is operated by a Taiwanese company. Following a sandstorm accompanied by strong winds of up to 74 km/h, it drifted and ran through the Suez canal, blocking all passage to and from on March 23, 2021. Due to this astonishing occurrence, the site of kilometer 151 of the canal became one of the most observed places on the planet. Tension about how long the obstruction would last continued until March 29, when the boat was finally refloated. The site, photos of which are circulating in the media and social networks, stands out in its materiality, its relative but extremely significant narrowness. The place is counted necessarily, in the sense that the dimensions of the waterway are limited in the face of the gigantic size of container ships. The desert environment entails exposure to climatic variations. The diagonally placed container ship is a remarkable event in the supposedly smooth and linear circulation of ships. Resolving the immobility of the Ever Given, at the local scale, depends on hundreds of ships, including supertankers, in the canal and on both sides, at the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Suez. Also at play is the end of the freeze on Egypt’s crucial source of foreign currency generated by ships in transit and, more broadly, an entire part of the globalized circulation of cash flows that accompany the flow of objects and materials. Supply chain disruption, already under pressure with Covid-19, worries a wide range of institutional actors, with the cost of blocking estimated at nearly $400 million per hour (Vlamis 2021). It is also a source of concern for many people who have purchased computer equipment or other objects on the Internet. Through this very place, at kilometer 151, the Ever Given dramatically and, in some respects, unprecedentedly gives transportation major visibility. The human cost of the complex bailout operation has been much less commented on, however. One of the Suez Canal Authority ships sank there and one of the workers on board lost his life (Ankel 2021). Here, the transportation place acquires another dimension, that of an intimate drama and the working conditions that made it possible.
This introduction is specifically devoted to the conceptualization, developed in this book, of how places and transportation interweave. It then points to the importance of broadening the view to rural worlds and to the Global South, in a context where a large part of the existing work concerns urban societies and the Global North. As this volume only partly escapes this bias, the challenge of this development is to contribute to further opening up research avenues. Finally, the presentation of the different chapters, in particular of their critical and humanistic dimension, will help to further elaborate the heuristic value of transportation and its places for the understanding of societies.
Adopting the formula that, in many respects, transportation is “first and foremost a place” (Lombard and Steck 2004), this book draws on the growing literature which, despite not formulating it in these terms with rare exceptions1, sheds light on the sense of place in transport and, therefore, contributes to understanding its significance for our societies. Transportation places are nodes of physical networks and sites that participate in considerable and evolving technical, travel-related infrastructures. However, this technical complexity is not enough to define them. As places, they are also, according to Doreen Massey’s famous theorization, “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself” (Massey 1994, p. 154). Through the many activities that take place there, transportation places actively participate in the interdependencies of all kinds that form the basis of our daily lives. More than any other places, they imply a form of self-overcoming, of trans-scalarity.
I.2. The wide scope of places related to transportation
The most spectacular overcoming is undoubtedly that of interchange hubs or multimodal platforms, otherwise referred to as “switches” (Lévy and Lussault 2003) or “synapses” (Brunet et al. 1992) to evoke the connections at the very heart of mass transportation systems. Changing from one mode of transportation to another (intermodality) or from one line to another in the same network (intramodality) turns these sites into “movement-places” (Amar 1989) both very connected on a large scale and sometimes very extensive on a finer scale. Let us think of the expansion of underground complexes combining transportation and other activities (retail, offices, housing, etc.) such as the one linking Paris Saint-Lazare train station to Auber, Opéra, Saint-Augustin and Havre-Caumartin suburban railway and metro stations, the subterranean space of La Défense (Grande Arche), or “the inner city” of Montreal. It has earned them the name of “urban mangroves” (Mangin et al. 2016). This distension of these places is paradoxical, since the raison d’être of these sites is precisely their locality, thus presenting a certain unity and specifically limited internal distances to ensure connection. The dimensions of these places are nevertheless sometimes considerable and lead to the insertion of various forms of transportation to reduce the distance: conveyor belts, escalators and elevators, but also in certain places, such as major airports, automated metros, buses or cars to access the plane for first-class passengers, or, in terminals, golf carts for disabled passengers, Segways for the police, bicycles and scooters for certain members of staff, etc. Large or compact, these transportation places involve social activities and interactions – be they to avoid contact or socialize – between people of heterogeneous social and spatial backgrounds.
Smaller transportation sites, such as bus stops, often materialized by a simple sign, are also invested with a major cultural, affective and social life, although little studied. We can think of the “bus-stop culture” of rural teenagers, identified by Moore (2003) in English villages of East Anglia. The social appropriation of a stop placed in a central position in the village, easy to reach and with a grocery store nearby, enables them to meet, drink, eat, or even smoke cannabis, not without some tension with residents who see it as problematic ways of “hanging out”. In their use for travel purposes this time, bus stops are also places where – often neglected – emotions can flourish or be appeased, prompted by the risk of being exposed to bad weather, but also to aggressions, on site or on the way. They are also complex performance sites, as illustrated by negotiations to access the bus at peak times. Studied by Rink (2016) in Cape Town, these negotiations mobilize social codes which are related, quite expectedly, to the proximity to the bus door, but also to the social position of each rider, in terms of power relationships of gender, age, race or disability.
Bus stops are part of a broader set of transportation-related places that can be described as traffic sites, corresponding to all thoroughfares or transportation routes. They are part of another overcoming of transportation places, a dimensional change “from point to line” (Lombard and Steck 2004) – the importance of which is both material and symbolic. Consider, for example, the zero point from which road distances are calculated. They reflect as much the centrality of the chosen location in the road network as the political recognition of its position in the urban order and the geography of power, as shown by Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the top of Capitoline Hill in Rome or the Plaza de Armas in Santiago de Chile.
Traffic sites are a form of planning, regulation and uses of places that facilitates their overcoming, the passage from place to place. Roads have typically been the focus of academic enquiry. This preponderance stems from the dominance of the system of infrastructure, practices and values that define automobility (Beckmann 2001; Flonneau 2008), while it can also be partly explained by the use of roads for other forms of land transportation, particularly active mobilities (walking, cycling, etc.). The study by Baldasseroni and Charansonney (2018) on the information intended for motorists in Paris and Lyon since the interwar period, for example, shows well how the accumulation of information devices over time changes the places traveled through and the relationship with them.
Facilitating access to other sites by setting up signage from place to place was the predominant device from the 1920s to 1940s. In the 1950s to 1970s, interventions in favor of the automobile brought about the installation of traffic lights and their coordination. This was the great period of “green waves”, intended to allow motorists, at a particular speed, to meet green lights on the move. This system illustrates the growing concern of elected officials and engineers to improve car traffic flow. The design of the transportation place as a place of transit stumbles on one of its key properties as a place: the fact that internal distances are limited and that congestion is always possible – against the backdrop of a car-dominant appropriation of the place.
The transportation place, from this point of view, is profoundly processual, a “process-place” (Cattan 2012) whose changing situation is decisive in understanding its content. Traffic conditions or the occurrence of works on Paris or Lyon’s thoroughfares are a case in point. From the 1980s onwards, real-time traffic information changed the relationship between users and the places they pass through with the reign of the so-called variable message signs placed on the Paris ring road (the Périphérique). It is also, and above all, the triumph of on-board information, for which the radio in the car is pivotal. Traffic information is disseminated by the radio data system (RDS), which uses the FM band. The on-board information is then obtained from Internet traffic information tools. In France, they were very popular during major public transport strikes of 1995. This episode reinforced the use of roads but also the consideration of the bicycle and, more broadly, non-car traffic, in the face of congestion. In this digital mediation between users and transportation places, private actors tend to prevail over public actors, who had until then been predominant in the field of information. From the end of the 1990s, in fact, connected objects such as satnavs, then, from 2008 onwards, digital applications on smartphones such as Waze have continued to bring digital platforms to the fore (Baldasseroni and Charansonney 2018). In the event of disruption, digitally optimized routes bypass congested sites and transfer traffic to more residential, narrower roads, shaking up the room usually given to traffic in these more local places and reminding us of how interdependent transportation places are. The study of these places calls into question the sociotechnical devices and the operational challenges but also the power relations between actors that play out through the production and consumption of mobility services.
I.3. Transportation and its places as an immersion in social life
Through its places, transportation introduces a dimensional change from the point to the surface, to the volume and, more broadly, to the social world as a whole. Let us take the “Yes to FRA” communication campaign (Ja zu FRA) led by Fraport, the airport authorities of Frankfurt am Main, that is, of Germany’s leading airline hub (Figure I.1). It plays with the use of IATA codes2 (FRA designating Frankfurt Airport), which, by extension, comes to refer to the city as a whole.
The narrative of the airport as a gateway to the urban and national territory aims to strengthen the acceptability of its activity and its territorial and volumetric footprint generated by air traffic. Its legitimacy is indeed questioned by an entrenched environmental conflict. The noise pollution along air corridors has crystallized a long-lasting conflict with residents and environmental activists, which led to the death of two police officers during the construction of the third track in 1987. Antagonism continues to fuel weekly protests against the intensity of trafficking in the middle of the departure halls of Terminal 1 (Frétigny 2016). Transportation places such as airports have thus not waited for the rise of climate activism to be targeted by environmental mobilizations.
Figure I.1.“Because our door to the world must remain wide open”. Campaign promoting Frankfurt airport
(source: Frétigny (2012)).
Transportation places are also often symbolic places of territories, that is to say, in charge of representing and making perceptible the material and ideal relationship of a collective to a given space, deeply imbued with values and ideologies. One of the key papers devoted to this notion (Debarbieux 1995) evokes from the outset the statues embodying the cities of northern France on the Parisian station Gare du Nord’s façade and the murals of Paris’ Gare de Lyon, which idealize the territories that are served toward the south-east of France. This symbolic dimension is all the more effective in transportation places because it is rarely identified, overshadowed by their highly visible functional nature. These places are nonetheless, more broadly, key vehicles of territorial ideologies, as shown by the signs that the Argentine Ministry of Transport has placed on the country’s roads, car parks, train stations and airports to make the claim to the Falkland Islands alive and self-evident, 40 years after the fruitless military confrontation with the United Kingdom to obtain sovereignty (Figure I.2).
Figure I.2.Pose in front of the slogan “The Falklands unite us” at the station of Retiro, Buenos Aires
(source: Frétigny (2022)).
This function of a symbolic place can take on more unexpected forms, such as the many vans that display the Ukrainian flag on their license plates or elsewhere. Present in European cities to circulate food, medicine or people to or from Ukraine, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they embody a material and symbolic bottom-up struggle in favor of its sovereignty (Figure I.3).
Highlighting the underpinnings of transportation and its places in the more encompassing field of political, economic, social, cultural and environmental issues of societies chimes with the perspective developed by mobility studies since the early 2000s. By focusing on mobility in relation to both place and change of place, and as what accompanies, precedes and prolongs travel, this strand contributes greatly to illuminating and contextualizing transportation and its places. One of the most cited programmatic papers on mobilities suggestively devotes an entire section to a transportation place: the airport, presented as a site of high complexity (Sheller and Urry 2006).
Figure I.3.Van with the colors of Ukraine in Paris
(source: Frétigny (2022)).
Through the mushrooming of work on transportation places, a broader convergence between mobility and transportation studies is taking place, called for by many authors (Fumey et al. 2009; Shaw and Hesse 2010; Cresswell 2011). Interdisciplinary in nature, it owes much to geographers, but also to historians, pointing to the role of transportation and its places in shaping the social world (Divall and Revill 2009; Flonneau and Guigueno 2009), as well as sociologists and anthropologists (Vincent-Geslin et al. 2019). The rise of rail transportation places like stations, with their large and small clocks, has thus played an essential role in the diffusion of a relationship with time valuing precision and punctuality. While each city had until then had its own local time and people very different time markers, the fulgurant expansion of the railway system has greatly contributed to the standardization of time, with previously locally set time of each aligned for each railway line, and then synchronized at the national level (Harrington 2003). Stations, the practice of which was not self-evident for the many neophyte travelers, were thus the cornerstone of people’s socialization to the codes and mobility cultures of modernity (Löfgren 2008).
The convergence between mobility and transportation studies is response to the aspiration for greater reflexivity in transportation geography with regard to its role in the social world (Goetz et al. 2009; Attoh 2014), particularly in relation to the climate emergency and glaring inequalities. To bridge perspectives from transportation and mobility studies can also inspire conversation between the two main axes of transportation geography (Dobruszkes 2012), namely networks, infrastructure and transport services on the one hand, and the consequences of transportation on society as a whole on the other. Transportation places are indeed boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) at the intersection of these fields of study.
I.4. A humanistic and critical approach
By probing transportation through its places, this book adopts a humanistic perspective, in this sense alighting on the humanistic geography developed from the 1970s and 1980s onwards and emphasizing the sense of place and relationship to place, which has contributed to influencing a large part of contemporary social and cultural geographies and, more broadly, of research related to mobilities. Through his attention to the vernacular landscapes of the United States and the role played by the car and the road, the pioneering work of Jackson (1997) illustrates the heuristic value of such an approach. Without giving in to an anthropocentric vision, the challenge is, alongside the functional logics of transportation, to pay heed to the relational nature of transportation and its places, entailing a historical depth, social interactions, power relations, collective imaginations and varied sensory experiences. From this point of view, the popularity of the idea of non-places (Augé 1992), which specifically targeted transportation places, beyond the eminently problematic character of the category, widely attested to by the literature (e.g. Merriman 2004), testifies to the relevance of their study in a humanistic perspective.
The aim of the book is to critically consider these places as key sites through which a considerable part of the challenges of our societies is played out, such as social and spatial justice challenges. The French Gilets Jaunes Movement, in the winter of 2018–2019 and in the spring of 2019, in response to the gradual increase in carbon taxation of gasoline prices, is a case in point. Predominantly composed of members of the working and lower middle classes (Collectif d’enquête sur les Gilets jaunes 2019), this movement was not only epitomized by these high-visibility jackets that had just become mandatory in cars. People took over the roundabouts of urban fringes to demonstrate, camp or block them, transforming them into emblematic transportation places refracting issues linked to car dependency in urban peripheries and rural areas. The growing academic interest in transport and mobility (in)justices demonstrates more generally the far-reaching importance of these issues (Verlinghieri and Schwanen 2020).
Transportation places are also very much involved in the challenges for the habitability of the Earth, posed by climate change and the biodiversity crisis, in a context where transportation is responsible for nearly 22% of global CO2 emissions linked to fossil fuels in 20193 (EDGAR 2020), an increase of 78% compared to 1990 emissions. They also play an important role in well-being and physical and mental health, from the perspective of active mobility, in the face of aging and the lack of physical activity related to sedentary lifestyles. Finally, they raise major planning and public policies challenges, linked to congestion, accidents, the place given to activities beyond transportation (be they lucrative or not), the harshness of the working conditions that are linked to these key sites of capitalism and logistics (Cowen 2014), health issues related to epidemics such as Covid-19, etc.
I.5. The multiplicity of fixed or mobile places shaping transportation
Like transportation itself, the places that constitute transportation are particularly heterogeneous. This variety is primarily linked to the growing diversification of transportation modes and networks. Aerial ropeway systems, for example, whether by cable cars or gondolas, are becoming increasingly popular for urban public transport, whereas for a long time they were limited mainly to mountain resorts. Deployment in Latin America, in Medellin in Colombia in 2004, then in Caracas, La Paz, Bogotá and Mexico City, has spread to Portland, Roosevelt Island in New York, and London, Brest in France or Saint-Denis on Réunion Island.
The diversity of these places is also due to the profusion of sites associated with transportation. It is striking when we consider automobility, conceived as the dominant, car-related, transportation system. Its importance is also reflected in the increased number of these places beyond the road: parking lots and parking spaces, garages, service stations, drive throughs for fast-food chains and mass retail, traffic control rooms, etc.
Other transportation systems and services are also major vectors for the proliferation of transportation places. Some new places take shape, such as community bike schools, where people can learn to ride a bike or get back in the saddle. Former shops transformed into warehouses for commercial orders located in urban centers, often referred to as dark stores, are another example. These staples of logistics chains are used by Uberized workers to deliver orders over their last kilometer, on scooter or by bike.
Many places are closely intertwined with transportation without being identified as such. Think of free zones, products of a neoliberal nature that grant tax and regulatory advantages for imported goods that are then exported. These sites call for rapid circulation and operate in symbiosis with transportation hubs, such as the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai. Linked to the deep-water port of the same name and Al Maktoum airport, it is owned by the DP World port operator. Covering 57 km², the equivalent of more than 7,000 football grounds, it is touted as the largest in the world by its owner and is said to be responsible for nearly 24% of the city’s GDP (JAFZA 2022). In contrast to these sites of accelerated object circulation, other places associated with stations, ports or airports are based on the logic of restricting individuals’ mobilities, detaining migrants in particular, as part of a wider set of holding facilities linked to opressive migration policies (Migreurop 2017).
Transportation places can also be mobile. Much less studied, they constitute an essential line of investigation, particularly relating to power relations and living conditions, evoked in its own way by fiction. An entire section of social, even political, life is played out through these passenger spaces, as shown in Jafar Panahi’s movie Taxi, released in 2015. This docu-drama was developed after the Iranian authorities banned the director from filming. To circumvent this censorship, he was filmed, as the driver, inside the taxi and in its immediate vicinity. The scenes with the various passengers bring into play the weight of repressive norms in conjugal relationships, in learning at school or in challenging the ban on women’s access to sporting events. More broadly, this microcosm allows us to address the question of human rights.
Among these places on the move, those that fall under the umbrella of mobile habitat are major vectors of lifestyles and territorialities. The movie Nomadland by Chloé Zhao, released in 2020, tells the story of a woman, played by Frances McDormand, who lost her job in Empire, Nevada, following the 2008 economic crisis. She buys a van and turns it into her domestic space, parked in vast parking lots, swinging from one seasonal workplace gig to another. In particular, she works in Amazon warehouses during peak periods, such as when orders pour in before Christmas. The multinational’s system, closely linked to logistics and transportation, is thus based on the exploitation of van dwellers, whose working and living conditions are marked by precariousness, the harshness of daily life and forms of solidarity, documented in the book by journalist Jessica Bruder (2020), of which the movie is an adaptation.
Ordinary mobile places of public transport are also sites of emotion and relationships of domination, particularly through harassment and assaults on female travelers. Cairo 6, 7, 8, directed by Mohamed Diab and released in 2010, is inspired by an attack on a young woman in Cairo who had filed a complaint and had to leave the country following a media campaign accusing her of damaging the country’s reputation (Florin 2020). It points to the extent of the phenomenon of sexual harassment, in these places and beyond, and the difficulty women face in asserting their rights when they overcome the feeling of shame caused by the attack.
By contrast, the rise of mobile places emblematic of business tycoons and other super-rich, whether on the seas or in the air, participates in logics of power that other social actors are seeking, literally, to deconstruct, through digital means. Super-yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs, present in Mediterranean ports or other tourist sites, have been the subject of intense visual open-source intelligence by activist Internet users to ensure that they do not escape the application of sanctions planned by Western countries in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These targeted pleasure boats, which often vary in length between 40 and 180 m, had been disconnected by their owners from the maritime automatic identification system (AIS) that facilitates sea navigation, indicating the position of each boat (Ungoed-Thomas and Handy 2022).
The private jet sector is also subject to militant attention in the environmental field. Private jets represent no less than one in 10 take-offs in France according to Eurocontrol data (responsible for the safety of air navigation in Europe) used by the European NGO Transport & Environment (2021, p. 20). The ADS-B system4, which enables aircraft to regularly broadcast their position by radio, makes their trajectories visible. The X (formerly Twitter) account @Elon Jet, followed by nearly 500,000 subscribers in the summer of 2022, thus reports, in an automated way, each trip and the associated carbon emissions of Elon Musk’s private jet. Other social media accounts scrutinize these practices, such as L’aviondeBernard5 on Instagram and X, dedicated to the jet of the luxury company LVMH, headed by Bernard Arnault, one of the richest people in the world. The cartographic data visualizations aim to highlight the extent and singularity of the environmental footprint of these mobile places, and therefore of those who practice them. From the dark store to the private jet, the diversity of places that constitute transportation is refracted by the sheer variety of their protagonists.
I.7. The heterogeneity of parties involved
The multiplicity of actors involved in transportation and its places is a key factor in their complexity. There is no doubt that public actors can markedly demonstrate their willingness to intervene in these places, especially when they are of strategic importance. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto decided in 2014 to transfer Mexico international airport, Benito Juárez, the most important airport in Latin America and largely overtaken by urbanization, 10 km away, to the northeast, in the federal area known as Lake Texcoco. The looming expropriation of residents, land urbanization and job losses in the neighborhoods surrounding Benito Juárez airport sparked local concerns and protests. There were also allegations of corruption focused on the gigantic construction site of the future airport and the contentious allocation of Benito Juárez airport land to real estate developers after its envisioned demolition. With work already underway, Enrique Peña Nieto’s successor and political opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, decided in 2018 to cancel the project. In addition to Benito Juárez, he launched a new airport project, 50 km north of Mexico City, on a military base. Named Felipe Ángeles and inaugurated in March 2022, this airport is itself highly controversial (Krauze 2022), showing the extent to which transportation places are instrumental in national and local political games.
The influence of private actors, large or small, is often considerable. Let us think of multinationals: container shipping companies such as MSC, managing very large port terminals, airport and freeway operators such as Vinci or digital platforms of ride-hailing services, as Uber. Other actors operate in less visible sites, participating in the diversification of activities occurring in transportation places, such as The Arch Company (2022) in the United Kingdom. It owns 5,200 railway viaduct arches in England and Wales and looks to rent them out to traders or other operators, such as in Vauxhall in south-west London, famous for its gay nightclubs Paradise and Fire under the station’s viaduct. This real estate company presents itself as the largest lessor of small businesses in the country while being owned by another real estate company, Telereal Trillium, and Blackstone Property Partners, a subsidiary of the gigantic American asset manager Blackstone.
These enmeshments between transportation and other activities are manifold. Japanese railway companies have for instance played a major role in the urbanization and the unfolding of Japanese social life around train stations, especially in the suburbs, by developing retail there, and then by building and managing offices nearby (Aveline 2003). The importance of these firms remains unchanged. Tokyo’s tallest tower, Tokyo Skytree, is a case in point. Elevator mobility – another transportation place – to enjoy the panoramic view at its top is not only an integral part of the city’s tourist circuit, with its light shows, music and acceleration and deceleration effects, just like the shopping mall it overlooks. It is also owned by the Tōbu Railway, a private railway company which built it, with other players, to enhance one of its brownfield sites and boost the number of visitors to Tokyo’s lower town through which several of its lines pass.
From a neoliberal perspective, public authorities often seek to involve private actors in the management or financing of transportation places, through privatizations or public-private partnerships. Cable cars crossing the Thames in the docks of London are a striking example of the latter. Their construction, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, was 60% financed by the airline Emirates and operated by Transport for London, responsible for the city’s public transport. For 10 years, from its inauguration to mid-2022, the London Cable Car carried the Emirates name, displaying advertisements for the company’s fleet in the cabins and stations. In exchange, Emirates acquired the name of this transportation system, getting the right to write its name literally on the map of London’s public transport.
Companies and places of economic activity also show how crucial it is to take a broad approach to transportation and its places. Public policies increasingly emphasize the role of employers in the production of mobilities. Employers can be made responsible for promoting a shift from individual car usage to less emissive practices and incentivized to redesign workplaces to facilitate e-bike charging or encourage pedestrian access. In France, for example, employer mobility plans have been mandatory for urban workplaces of more than a hundred employees since 2018. Such urban planning tool is a de facto recognition of the importance of these sites as locales where transportation takes place.
Beyond institutions, transportation and its places involve individuals and collectives whose analysis is just as fundamental. By conversing with “regular customers, traders, smugglers, and charterers”, especially at bus stations, where waiting makes them more available, Choplin et al. (2019) trace “a globalization of the poor”, in the wake of sociologist Alain Tarrius (2002). These intense mobilities of merchants, more discreet than the globalization from above of multinationals, cover a multiplicity of transport modes and market places (wholesale, semi- wholesale and retail markets), studied in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Relationships at play include border checkpoints, key places where the passage of goods is negotiated – often informally – and invite us to move away from Western- centric approaches focused on immigration. In the ports of Rotterdam or Le Havre, for example, traders come to Europe to ship second-hand goods made in China to Africa and the Middle East, where the quality of these goods is more appreciated than that shipped directly from China.
Attending to riders’ viewpoints is also essential, as well as of those who set in motion or maintain transportation places: lorry drivers, drivers of pirogues or tricycles for tourists, boatmen, gardeners looking after the vegetation on major urban streets, etc. Documenting the practices of women working in northern European ports (Lécuyer 2022), for example, by mobilizing the reflections of feminist geography, is an opportunity to elucidate gendering processes at stake in transportation places, an issue of particular importance in the case of ports, given how strongly they are associated with male presence. Alongside such scientific studies, fiction works such as Emmanuel Carrère’s movie Between Two Worlds, released in 2021 and inspired by the book by journalist Florence Aubenas (2010), contribute to making visible the arduous work and mundane life of women who, as shown in the movie, clean aboard the ferries running between the Normandy port of Ouistreham and Portsmouth.
Paying heed to the experience of transportation places by users is pivotal to challenge the stereotypical representations to which they are exposed. Contrary to the assumptions of decision-makers who focus their attention on saving travel time by creating new public transit lines (Gallez 2015, p. 222), studies show the importance of not considering the time of travel as lost for passengers (Jain and Lyons 2008). Travelers can appropriate the space-time of the transportation place and engage in activities they aspire to such as using Wi-Fi hotspots. More broadly, the challenge is to grasp the multiplicity of the relationships engaged both with transportation places and with distant places by passengers, which are themselves very heterogeneous (Frétigny and Lin 2021). To be sure, attention is also needed to other users of transportation places, such as those in a situation of homelessness, who can be strongly invested in them.
I.8. Shifting the focus beyond the Global North and urban worlds
If the sheer heterogeneity of transportation, its places as well as its actors, is challenging, so is the fact that most studies concern the Global North and urban societies. While I have sought to loosen this dominant prism in the preparation of this volume, this perspective remains largely to be pursued, bearing in mind the necessarily situatedness of every academic study. Developing knowledge freed from colonial logics in the field of transportation is now a growing concern in scholarship (Wood et al. 2020). For example, we need to take apart, as Schwanen (2018) invites us, the risks of casting as a universal model the division of public space in traffic lanes separated by speed: sidewalks, cycle lanes, bus lanes and general traffic lanes. This standardization, for the sake of optimizing speed and limit friction, goes hand in hand with a functionalist mindset of the urban order and (Western) modernity. It bears the risk of legitimizing the eviction of paratransit (also known as “informal transport”): minibuses, motorcycle taxis, tricycles, quadricycles, etc. Paratransit hardly fits in with these predefined spaces, since it is obliterated in their conception, as are alternative uses of the road, such as street vending, made out-of-place. Even though their drivers make their way through traffic jams, paratransit vehicles are often blamed for contributing to congestion. Paratransit, also present in the Global North, especially in tourist sites (Berroir et al. 2016), occupies considerable space in many cities and beyond. But its role is frequently neglected, as shown by its invisibility in official statistics. The same is true for its – potential – connections with other transportation modes, despite being socially innovative, such as carpooling or demand-responsive transportation.
Studies on transportation places in the Global South show their major contribution to the dynamics of societies and to forms of innovation. Collective transportation places in Angola, for example, whether buses, minivans, 4 × 4s or trains, are unexpected sites for the rise of alternative sociopolitical cultures in authoritarian regimes (Neto 2020). These original political arenas, referred to as “moving assemblies”, are crystallized through the confrontation of travelers, during their journey, with elements arousing mistrust, such as acts of corruption by police officers, demanding to be paid for each unconventional bag hoisted over a bus, leading to protests. The deplorable state of the transport infrastructure also acts as a trigger, as well as criticizing the exploitation of natural resources by Chinese companies, authorized by the Angolan president, at the sight of their trucks. Passing through the massacre sites of the Angolan civil war, whose memory is eminently political, also fuels the discussion. This emergent politicization of citizens through transportation places is difficult to control for local authorities, because of the number of people using these places and their constant movement.
Rural transportation and its places also receive limited attention. To be sure, transportation infrastructure is less present in rural areas, raising major questions of spatial justice. While the population is less dense, the places to be reached are more distant. A study in four counties in Wales, for example, showed that 71% of respondents had a bus stop accessible within walking distance. However, 69% of them considered that the service provided was “poor” or “very poor quality”, citing mainly the low frequency of buses, contributing to explain why only 29% of them used buses (Milbourne and Kitchen 2014). Bus frequencies have worsened due to austerity policies after the 2008 economic crisis, exacerbating the issues of car dependency.
Does the lack of infrastructure in rural areas lead to relativizing transportation and its places or, on the contrary, to their increasing visibility in everyday life and in people’s concerns? Porter’s (2016) study on Tanzanian villages without road access in the district of Kibahia suggests the latter. It points to the major role played by motorcycle taxis (boda-boda) from the end of the 2010s, with the irruption of low-cost models from China, against a background of no less intensive practices of walking and riding bicycle taxis. The materiality of the road, more or less passable, captures people’s attention, raising considerations ranging from its practicability outside of the dry season to the presence of potholes, to the point of appearing as the major concern about travel for women developing their own economic activity in rural areas of Nigeria (Seedhouse et al. 2016).
Figure I.4.Near the school of Kaupanger, a Norwegian village: “arrival zone [of children at school]”, “heart zone”
(source: Frétigny (2021)).
An equally important topic to address is the innovation at work in rural areas. Let us think of NGOs such as the Soft Vehicle Innovation association (In’VD 2022), located in a highland region in south-central France, in Castelnau-Pégayrols, near Millau. Its members leverage the attraction of vehicle-related innovations to initiate a broader transformation of road mobilities. They develop prototypes and acquire hybrid vehicles, intermediate between the bicycle and the car, such as tricycles or quadricycles with electric assistance. They are also called light electric vehicles, or in this NGO’s words, “soft vehicles”. Designed for multiple passengers and to transport objects, they are strongly reminiscent of paratransit vehicles. Other actors seek to shape mobilities by redesigning places linked to transportation such as schools in Norwegian villages where a car-free “core zone” is defined, forcing drivers to park further away to encourage walking and limit congestion, local pollution and accidents affecting children (Figure I.4).
Riders also creatively self-organize their transportation as shown by mundane practices in the outskirts of urban areas. Studying commuting in the rural-urban fringes of Grenoble and Aix-en-Provence, in the southeast of France, Pradel et al. (2015) identify multiple informal and inventive collective assemblages: parking lots acting as carpooling areas, storage of bicycles in the trunk during carpooling to use them on arrival at the cycle path, etc. There is no doubt that rural areas and the Global South are essential areas for expanding our understanding of transportation and its places.
I.9. Structure of the book
The book’s chapters provide a humanistic and critical analysis of transportation and its places by probing their diversity. Unlike many works, each chapter addresses transversally the different modes of transportation and associated places, while aiming to diversify the national contexts of investigation.
By drawing on the perspective of geohistory, the first chapter opens a passage between transport networks, analyzed through the lens of their deployment and mutations, and the related places, which are explored in more details in the following chapters of the book. Anne Bretagnolle and Christophe Mimeur highlight the extent to which networks foster the emergence of highly accessible places, working as major transportation places and developed in close connection with the city they serve. The inclusion of transportation and its places in long-term timelines and on different time scales is at the heart of the humanistic approach of this chapter, prompting us to nuance the seemingly unprecedented nature of contemporary changes affecting them. Its critical dimension lies in its exploration of the logics of domination that favor certain places and exclude others. The authors thus pinpoint transportation places that have been short-circuited by the restructuration of networks. The accentuated hierarchy of transportation places not only leads to the primacy of most central places in the networks, greatly benefitting from the processes of accumulation and concentration of populations and resources, but also to the marginalization of previously prominent places.
While this first chapter approaches the situation and accessibility of transportation places, Chapter 2 examines the role of interface that these places play, insofar as they are part of larger assemblages. These sites are indeed the physical and digital gateways to territories, highly interdependent and requiring the alignment of multiple actors, which are at the heart of their study. Nadine Cattan and I question these gateways as one of the most vivid spatial expressions of globalization “in the making”. Authors make sense of the great diversity of gateways by conceiving them in four major ways. They are identified as site gateways – such as stations or (air)ports – or corridor gateways – such as large international straits – or even as territorial gateways – such as transitional immigrant neighborhoods6 of metropolises, marked by the intense circulation of objects, people and information on an international scale. But through the relational lens of people themselves, subject gateways can also be envisioned, conceived as individuals who by themselves, in situ, ensure international connections, exemplified by Amazon delivery drivers who embody, hastily and at the doorstep of homes, the ultimate gateways to globalized transportation. The humanistic and critical perspective of this chapter stems from the attention paid to the actors of these gateways, whether regarding the challenging – or even elusive – governance of these gateways, the “informal alongside the official” or the role of the subject gateways and their bodies. It also lies in the discussion of the ideological dimension of gateways, highly politicized, in the context of geopolitical games between states, with their social, humanitarian (from a migratory perspective) and environmental consequences also being highly contested across multiple spatial scales.
Chapter 3 delves into transportation places to illuminate the economic rationales underlying their development and operational management. Juliette Maulat and Mathilde Pedro highlight the growing enrolment of private actors and funding in their business model. Shaped by complex neo-liberal processes that affect urban infrastructures more broadly, these sites are increasingly considered as assets whose value needs to be enhanced from a commercial, advertising and real estate point of view. Through the study of railway stations and airports, the authors explore the processes of the growing diversification of funding sources for transportation places. Market liberalization, the success of new public management policies and the privatization of transportation operators are major drivers to these changes. Additionally, the international circulation of urban planning models, such as the real estate development of railway stations in Japan, inspired by the United States and now spreading to Europe, plays a significant role. The critical and humanistic content of the chapter lies in the deconstruction of these co-dependent dynamics, as well as in questioning the scope of the resulting changes in the business model. While the diversification of the activities engaged by transportation infrastructure managers leads in some cases to developing social housing on their land, it tends most often to favor upper-class travelers and consumers, by building housing and offices to accommodate them. These class-based policies pursued for the sake of financialization affect the experience that users of railway stations and airports have. They also lead to strong discrepancies and tensions with the expectations of local actors, confronted with unwanted rising prices, commercial competition and urban densification. In addition, Juliette Maulat and Mathilde Pedro expose the unstable nature of this diversification funding, which can undermine the proper functioning of transportation places. They also insist on the inequalities that these changes create between transportation places, and consequently between (urban and rural) regions, fostering a two-tiered network, where major transportation places generate the expected resources, unlike intermediate or smaller places, whose financing and their experience by users are affected by the lack of care, employees or adapted waiting spaces.
It is also as key sites of capitalism that transportation places are envisioned in Chapter 4, scrutinizing those specialized in the mobility of objects, from the standpoint of logistics. Nicolas Raimbault explores the very male-dominated world of delivery drivers and warehouse workers, such as forklift drivers. Logistics operatives represent a large and increasing segment of the contemporary working class and of vehicles on the road. Tellingly, in Paris, with the rise of e-commerce, a quarter of all motor vehicles in circulation are dedicated to deliveries. Drawing on examples from Europe and North America, the author lays out a geography of logistics workers and their places, showing how much it reshapes the contemporary popular centralities of urban regions. Logistics parks, and the associated employment, are developing far beyond traditional working-class settlements in the industrial suburbs, typically on the edge of urban fringes. Situated far from workers’ home, they involve long daily commutes. By examining delivery services, especially concentrated in urban centers, Raimbault shows that employers demand such a fast pace that complying with the traffic code becomes challenging. These delivery rhythms threaten road safety for both drivers and other road users. They are all the more arduous due to increasing restrictions on the access of motorized vehicles to urban centers. The humanistic and critical perspective developed in this chapter
