ABSTRACT While transport infrastructures have received scholarly attention as markers of aspiration and world-classness, their role in reordering the urban space has received scant attention. Transport spaces are important intermediary places, acting as potent venues for production and day-to-day consumption of urbanity. The sensorially intense atmospheres afforded by transport infrastructures present numerous opportunities for the intermingling of mobile bodies while challenging the status quo. Through a combination of design decisions and regulatory interventions, planners shape the production of atmospheres orienting transit users to a redefined, rarefied public ethic. Attending to the growing interest in public transport as a contentious public space, we deploy ethnographic tools of participant observation, conversations and interviews to interrogate the Kochi metrorail project in India while analysing the material and nonmaterial aspects of the system. Through an analysis of spatial practices in metrorail spaces, viewed through the lens of infrastructural citizenship and reinforced by project imagery and messaging, we chart the reconfiguration of the model passenger within the broader framework of metrorail exceptionalism. We argue that fostering citizenship and sustainability using public transport entails minimizing access barriers, embedding metrorail within urban socio-political contexts, and enabling the continuity of informal street practices across metrorail spaces.

ABSTRACT Sleeping while driving is a cognitive-based distracted driving caused by tiredness and drowsiness. The public considers sleeping while driving a dangerous act due to the driver’s inability to control the vehicle. In recent years, the advancement of technology has resulted in vehicles with different levels of autonomy that can perform various activities such as steering, changing lanes, braking and stopping. Such situations cause the drivers to have fewer driving activities and make them more likely to fall asleep. This study explored the public sentiments on incidents involving drivers falling asleep in autopilot-enabled vehicles. The study applied text mining on 14,954 comments from seven YouTube videos posted between 2016 and 2021. It was found that the public showed more positive than negative reactions, trust than fear and relatively higher anticipation sentiments on the drivers sleeping in vehicles with autopilot-enabled mode. The public used various keywords such as safe, fully automated, trust, good, lane change and cruise control to indicate their trust in the autopilot mode. The public comments showed their understanding of the law that requires the driver’s hands to be on the steering wheel when the vehicle is in autopilot mode. Furthermore, a significant number of comments pointed toward fear, mentioning the likelihood of crashes and the legality of the act. The public, however, fails to differentiate between autopilot and automated mode. These findings highlight the potential need for changes in laws and regulations to align with public expectations as the adoption of automated vehicles continues to grow.

ABSTRACT Through the case study of women’s experiences after the introduction of a modern light rail system in Tampere, Finland, this article examines the relation between technological development and gendered mobility within urban public transport systems. Using travel diaries and interviews, we find that the experiences of women using the tram reveal a discrepancy between the official “smart city mobility” discourse and the materiality and sociality of lived realities. We frame our findings as part of a fundamental conflict between technological acceleration to sustain economic growth and key elements of human experience, such as reliability, slowness, and social interaction. This conflict extends far beyond the realm of gendered mobilities, posing a challenge to the overall welfare and future of humanity. Our research points toward the need for more interdisciplinary mobilities research that could shed light on the general mechanisms underpinning the unsustainability of current human mobility systems.

ABSTRACT This introductory article to the Special Issue explores the evolving conceptualisation of tourism infrastructure through the lenses of assemblage thinking and the mobilities paradigm. Moving beyond traditional dichotomies of material versus immaterial infrastructure, it embraces a multidimensional, relational and dynamic understanding of infrastructure as an active agent in shaping tourism destinations, mobilities and socio-spatial inequalities. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from critical geography and mobilities studies, the paper situates tourism infrastructure within the broader infrastructures of everyday life, emphasising its entanglement with bodies, affects, policies and power relations. The Special Issue’s contributions expand on this framework through diverse case studies across Sweden, Canada, France, Spain and Italy, highlighting how infrastructures are co-constituted through tourist, residential and labor mobilities, and how they mediate access, inclusion and transformation at multiple scales. In doing so, the Issue introduces new methodological and conceptual tools – such as “transpitality”, “sensing transit” and the infrastructural backstage – to rethink accessibility, sustainability and territoriality in tourism. It ultimately calls for an “infrastructural turn” in tourism studies that critically engages with the fluid, politicised and experiential nature of tourism mobilities infrastructures in an era marked by crises, socio-spatial inequality and planetary change.

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to illustrate how mobility disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a reconfiguration of regulatory, migration and socio-material infrastructures. We share insights about the relationship between (im)mobile lives and infrastructural change by focusing on digital nomads (a group of location-independent workers from predominantly affluent countries working in locations with lower living costs), and coworking spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand (shared workspaces that provide socio-material and technological infrastructure for mobile workers to work from). Destinations that rely on international tourism experienced a devastating loss in foreign arrivals during the COVID-19 pandemic, of which digital nomads form a significant group of. Changes in regulatory infrastructures such as nation state-specific border controls, lockdowns and suspensions on visas, temporarily disrupted commercial and social infrastructures that usually facilitate location-independence. We address these changes through a discussion of findings from 12 semi-structured online interviews with international digital nomads and 11 semi-structured interviews with coworking space managers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interviews reveal how the pandemic has not only accelerated the shift towards the normalisation of remote work, but also highlight the emergent infrastructures of repair, shedding light on the importance of place, mobilities, materiality, and embodiment in the constitution of location-independence.

ABSTRACT Increasing cross-border mobilities for employment and livelihood opportunities has resulted in greater institutional and regulatory controls over migration. In this paper, through an analysis of the migration infrastructure for women between India and the United Arab Emirates, socio-spatial ruptures are discerned. The paper asserts that in addition to economic and political frameworks, social and cultural mores have been significant in shaping differentiated migration pathways for Indian women, which are conceptualised as, “gendered migration infrastructure”. Gendered migration infrastructure for Indian women is founded on normative understandings of domesticity and femininity and consequently, has made migration for women restrictive, circuitous and cumbersome. The failure and interruptions of migration infrastructure has occurred across borders and the differentiated migration pathways thus created lie at the intersection of formal regulations and actors (migration laws, recruitment and skilling organisations, state agents, border controls, civil society and bureaucracy) and informal intermediaries and practices (subagents, bypassing emigration procedures, irregular channels and corruption). By drawing on the narratives of Indian migrant women, the paper highlights the negotiations undertaken by migrant women and the impact of gendered migration infrastructure on their (im)mobilities, migratory experiences, and outcomes. Further, socio-spatial ruptures due to the COVID-19 pandemic created cracks in the migration infrastructure, deepening the precarities faced by migrant women. Overall, the paper aims to contribute to the literature on gendered migration and transnationalism in addition to shedding light on the migration of Indian women across income and legal categories, an under-researched topic currently.

ABSTRACT In this paper we consider how playful mobilities mediate and augment the power to transform the everyday and support a playful engagement with the city through design. Like other forms of mobility, playful mobilities is embodied; it involves multiple interactions with bodies, and different forms of movement within and through space. Drawing from playful mobilities, this paper explores how play can inform design decisions to compel action and affect, and offers insight into the nexus between playful mobilities and speculative design interventions. It draws on mobile autoethnography diaries focusing on e-scootering, cycling, and playing Pokémon Go to highlight how play orientates our bodies with our environment and others. Along with the site and precedent analysis, the autoethnography diary entries become the base for a series of speculative designs situated in Wellington, New Zealand. The design speculations couple playful mobilities and the materialities of designed interventions, making tangible the intersection between designing for mobile situations and potential atmosphere to enrich space and experience that take place along journeys.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the work of three photographers addressing the experiences of migrants awaiting decisions upon, or denied residency applications by the UK government. While Sam Ivin’s Lingering Ghosts portraits convey the emotional and embodied impacts upon migrants awaiting notification of asylum requests, Melanie Friend’s images of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) investigate the spaces of exclusion and detention within the UK border control system. The paper concludes by examining Yetunde Adebiyi’s images of protests outside Yarl’s Wood IRC, Bedford and alternative communities for “non-legal” migrants in Liverpool. These images are put in the context of a process of “social abjection” , whereby migrants have been increasingly marginalised through negative media and government policy, ultimately diminishing or denying citizenship to certain groups within society. This raises issues of mobility justice , in that individuals’ experience of mobility is in sharp contrast to that of UK citizens and impacted by multi-scalar entanglements of other (im)mobilities. Individuals’ bodily and spatial experience of, and agency over (im)mobility is related to their visibility, and agency over being visible. By exposing the relative experiences of mobility and visibility the photographs provide a potential site of advocacy for mobility justice but can also draw attention to the unequal experiences of citizenship of subject, photographer and viewer. By suggesting that photographs constitute and engender a social relationship between these parties, the paper proposes that photographic projects might offer a potential “civil contract” between those with very different experiences of mobility, visibility and citizenship.