An Incriminated Medium? The City as Urban Spectacle

Abstract

Just look at this city – whoever did the planning for all this wants his balls roasted. (taxi driver in Letter to Brezhnev , Chris Bernard, 1985) Spatial Stories and Iterations of Place Of the many ‘turns’ that have, with increasing regularity, come to define points of theoretical re-orientation in recent years, the ‘mobility turn’ has arguably been one of the most far-reaching and significant. As to what exactly ‘mobility’ refers to here I will elaborate further below. But it is important to stress at this juncture that it is within the theoretical framework of spatiality that these elaborative discursions are more specifically situated. In framing ideas of a ‘mobility turn’ in terms of the production of mobility (Cresswell 2001) my analysis is focused on the ways in which these are closely bound up with discussions relating to the production of social space, most notably those initiated by Lefebvre and others. In this sense the ‘mobility turn’ is understood as part of and inextricable from the ‘spatial turn’ that has left its mark on the social sciences and humanities over the last two or three decades (Warf and Arias 2008). As I will argue, approaching the production of urban mediations as a feature of the broader dialectical production of space and mobility enables us to map some of the contradictions which emerge between the representational and lived spaces of the city, and between virtual and embedded geographies of transit and deterritorialization.