Transcending the Concrete: Promise in the Datafication of Mobility Infrastructures

Keywords: affect, promise, transcendence, infrastructure, digitality, mobility
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58

Abstract

New digital tools for urban transportation have intensified the datafication of mobility and its infrastructures. In the collision of two paradigms—one based on data, platforms, and users; the other on movement, infrastructures, and the public—has emerged a promise of transcendence. The promise claims that the efficient and intelligent manipulation of information will enable us to escape the crumbling roads, congestion, and political conflicts of our actually existing systems of transportation. This paper draws on literature from affect theory, information studies, and digital geographies to trace the articulation of this promise and its strategies. It focuses on affective orientations towards the sublime stories of software and away from the mess of the concrete. A qualitative study of planners and travelers identifies specific practices of promising transcendence, including the substitution of platform-based services for infrastructural investments and the conflation of data analytics and mobility interventions. It also identifies a persistence of material and social obstacles to digital transcendence in the particular embodied and emplaced practices of getting around the city. Further, the promise itself, experienced as much as an affect as a representational statement, is felt differently among the multiple producers of infrastructure. In the end, information technologies’ promise to transcend transportation infrastructures has instead foregrounded its permanence as materially situated and socially plural.