Interactive Metal Fatigue: A Conceptual Contribution to Social Critique in Mobilities Research

Abstract

The ‘mobilities turn’ has reinvigorated the social critique on the automobility system. Theorizing its profound reconfigurations of social life, relationist commitments invite a certain silence regarding the associated social pathologies, however. This article explores a critical-theoretical interpretation of the mobilities paradigm. It proposes the ‘interactive metal fatigue’ (IMF) concept, which theorizes the emergence of ‘interpassive’ social relations as socio-technical dialectics. Taking into account the contradictions that surround the critical-theoretical project, IMF paves the way for balanced critiques of mobilities. This will be shown through the case of Shared Space, an attempt to free public space from traffic management colonization.

Key words:

• Mobilities
• Critical theory
• Interactivity
• Traffic
• Public space
• System innovation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the participants of the 2012 IMF conference for lively discussions, and in particular Gijs Van Oenen for his comments on an earlier outline for this paper. The Shared Space case study referred to formed part of a dissertation research project, funded by the KSI research programme on system innovation and transitions.

Notes

1. Other than passing some kind of judgment on its ‘critical’ contents, which would require a far more extensive literature review that would not fit the scope of the article, I intend to characterize the ways in which the mobilities paradigm facilitates, and forecloses, the proposed critical interpretation.

2. Shared Space has proven to be an innovation that is open to different interpretations or translations (Pel 2012). It is most often taken as a spatial design and traffic approach, but this article pays relatively more attention to its social-philosophical claims.

3. Most influential for the introduction of the traffic separation principle has been Buchanan (1963): By keeping motorized traffic apart from slower transportation modes, the dangers of mutual frictions could be minimized. The principle has materialized in separated bicycle lanes, road lineage, traffic lights, as well as in the many prohibition and admonition signs.

4. By contrast, such respect for the car driver is conspicuously absent in the Frankfurt-style critiques. This concrete example only underlines the importance of precise critiques and consequential remedies.

5. These challenges, and the development of Shared Space as an innovation attempt, are described more extensively in Pel (2012), Chapter 6.

6. This somewhat exaggerating expression reflects the rhetoric of the late Shared Space standard bearer Hans Monderman. Once put into practice, critique should crucially become appealing and persuasive.

7. Theoretically, such ‘rewinding of dialectics’ even constitutes a contradiction in terms.

8. In fact, this signals another recurring critical-theoretical impasse: If social pathologies are diagnosed to have somehow ‘systemic’ roots, who is to blame for them? In the case of Shared Space, it seems that the ‘traffic sector’ is taking a disproportionally large share of the heat.