Small arrangements with self and others: A visual study of the everyday ordinary on Paris’s A train

Abstract

It is generally considered that public transport is a more restrictive, less freely chosen form of public space, one that generates less chosen encounters than other public spaces. Daily travel can nonetheless be considered a context of familiar everyday experience, and public transport a place that is likely to reconcile exposure to others with a certain form of privacy. In our research, we used video to observe the ordinary experience of day-to-day mobility in situ on the A train that serves the Paris urban area (France). It reveals a taxonomy of the small arrangements with self and others that travellers display on public transport, by investigating the patterns of attention to others and the methods employed by individuals to cope with the anonymity and ambivalence of everyday experience.