Page - 10 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

10 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson, Rachel Thomas | Atmospheres and Mobility tions, and also places contribute to the formation of atmospheres. This is based on the assump- tion that the mobility of persons or objects alters the dynamic of the atmospheres of a situation or a place. Therefore, the question of the quality of mobility is asked, and it implies to engage with a micro scale of understanding. For example, while many studies consider on metropolitan, regional, national and transnational scales the harmful consequences of motorized movements, fewer works put into question their effects on the daily lives of pedestrians. In the same vein, we might ask how mobility-oriented development of urban territories influences inhabitants and passers-by perceptions, practices, and social relationships. And as multimodality and fluidity continue to be two of the most important agendas of urban and transport design, the question of the consequences of this model on everyday experience of place remains understudied. How are, for example, multiple logics of speed of flows managed in the same space-time? Here, the simple question of moving on foot, and its articulation to the kind of environment in which it happens, shows how space shaping has not only a direct play on atmospheres production, but also act on everyone’s (in)ability to use their body. Through the question of the potential mobile uses of the body, atmospheres appear clearly to act at social and political levels. Furthermore, mobility contributes to the urbanity of urban settings, as it consists of mixing anonymous individuals and testing their ability to live and act together; it is “a collective management of the risks of meeting others”, as Bordreuil (2000) nicely puts it. What is then the contribution of atmospheres in this production of urbanity, and how do these, again, need to be understood as being political? To illustrate, spaces of mobility, and more generally the mobile- driven urban design, organize physical and social proximity, but also come with a risk when it sometimes makes passers-by vulnerable by exposure to others, which can create mismatch, and even collision. Yet, public order is only rarely threatened by these situations of vulnerability, and a certain number of behavioural and perceptive rituals ensures its maintenance by the organi- zation of civil inattention (Goffman 1959, Joseph 1995). Mobility is therefore made possible thanks to a perceptive and social organization of the environment, but how is this organization constitutive of its atmospheres? And how do these atmospheres contribute – in feedback – to the maintenance of this order as they support motion? Recent works on the sensory enigmas related to the development of contemporary urban mobility have shown how diffuse processes of surveillance, security and policies of pacification of public urban spaces may incarnate them- selves in multiple affective registers that alter the ways to move and share these environments with others (Thomas, Masson, Fiori & Sanchez, 2014). Precisely, they put us in some “body state” as a state of “effervescence”, “disgust”, “tension” or “attraction” (Thomas 2014). In this work, “body state” not only describes what is felt or experienced within oneself, but rather a shared conduct, resulting from the interaction between the body, the sensory qualities of the environment and others. These works also contribute to point out that public mobile order is also a moral order, which is notably carried out through the sensory environment. When motion comes as a social injunction, for example in spaces in which loitering is forbidden, or in spaces in which flowing is part of the “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990), deviance becomes sub- tly inscribed within bodies, rhythms, speed, and so on. Therefore, the sensory and atmospheric dimensions of mobile space become active shapers of normativity, expected rhythms and cho- reographies that necessarily exclude certain bodies, and by extension categories of people that might become inappropriate to these specific branded, circulated, and implemented atmos-