Introduction

Jean-Baptiste FRÉTIGNY

PLACES, CY Cergy Paris Université, Cergy-Pontoise, France

I.1. Setting things in motion in and through places

In its significant heterogeneity, transportation forms vast assemblages of actors, infrastructures, tangible and intangible networks, techniques and practices, ensuring the movement of individuals, objects and materials (Mérenne 2014; Cidell 2021; Libourel et al. 2022). While often approached from the angle of the networks brought into play, this book shifts the focus toward the sites where transportation is moored and set in motion, produced and experienced, where it literally takes place.

Let us think about the Ever Given ship, which is almost 400 m long and one of the most impressive container ships in the world. Owned by a Japanese group, flying the Panamanian flag, it is operated by a Taiwanese company. Following a sandstorm accompanied by strong winds of up to 74 km/h, it drifted and ran through the Suez canal, blocking all passage to and from on March 23, 2021. Due to this astonishing occurrence, the site of kilometer 151 of the canal became one of the most observed places on the planet. Tension about how long the obstruction would last continued until March 29, when the boat was finally refloated. The site, photos of which are circulating in the media and social networks, stands out in its materiality, its relative but extremely significant narrowness. The place is counted necessarily, in the sense that the dimensions of the waterway are limited in the face of the gigantic size of container ships. The desert environment entails exposure to climatic variations. The diagonally placed container ship is a remarkable event in the supposedly smooth and linear circulation of ships. Resolving the immobility of the Ever Given, at the local scale, depends on hundreds of ships, including supertankers, in the canal and on both sides, at the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Suez. Also at play is the end of the freeze on Egypt's crucial source of foreign currency generated by ships in transit and, more broadly, an entire part of the globalized circulation of cash flows that accompany the flow of objects and materials. Supply chain disruption, already under pressure with Covid-19, worries a wide range of institutional actors, with the cost of blocking estimated at nearly $400 million per hour (Vlamis 2021). It is also a source of concern for many people who have purchased computer equipment or other objects on the Internet. Through this very place, at kilometer 151, the Ever Given dramatically and, in some respects, unprecedentedly gives transportation major visibility. The human cost of the complex bailout operation has been much less commented on, however. One of the Suez Canal Authority ships sank there and one of the workers on board lost his life (Ankel 2021). Here, the transportation place acquires another dimension, that of an intimate drama and the working conditions that made it possible.

This introduction is specifically devoted to the conceptualization, developed in this book, of how places and transportation interweave. It then points to the importance of broadening the view to rural worlds and to the Global South, in a context where a large part of the existing work concerns urban societies and the Global North. As this volume only partly escapes this bias, the challenge of this development is to contribute to further opening up research avenues. Finally, the presentation of the different chapters, in particular of their critical and humanistic dimension, will help to further elaborate the heuristic value of transportation and its places for the understanding of societies.

Adopting the formula that, in many respects, transportation is "first and foremost a place" (Lombard and Steck 2004), this book draws on the growing literature which, despite not formulating it in these terms with rare exceptions1, sheds light on the sense of place in transport and, therefore, contributes to understanding its significance for our societies. Transportation places are nodes of physical networks and sites that participate in considerable and evolving technical, travel-related infrastructures. However, this technical complexity is not enough to define them. As places, they are also, according to Doreen Massey's famous theorization, "articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself" (Massey 1994, p. 154). Through the many activities that take place there, transportation places actively participate in the interdependencies of all kinds that form the basis of our daily lives. More than any other places, they imply a form of self-overcoming, of trans-scalarity.

I.2. The wide scope of places related to transportation

The most spectacular overcoming is undoubtedly that of interchange hubs or multimodal platforms, otherwise referred to as "switches" (Lévy and Lussault 2003) or "synapses" (Brunet et al. 1992) to evoke the connections at the very heart of mass transportation systems. Changing from one mode of transportation to another (intermodality) or from one line to another in the same network (intramodality) turns these sites into "movement-places" (Amar 1989) both very connected on a large scale and sometimes very extensive on a finer scale. Let us think of the expansion of underground complexes combining transportation and other activities (retail, offices, housing, etc.) such as the one linking Paris Saint-Lazare train station to Auber, Opéra, Saint-Augustin and Havre-Caumartin suburban railway and metro stations, the subterranean space of La Défense (Grande Arche), or "the inner city" of Montreal. It has earned them the name of "urban mangroves" (Mangin et al. 2016). This distension of these places is paradoxical, since the raison d'être of these sites is precisely their locality, thus presenting a certain unity and specifically limited internal distances to ensure connection. The dimensions of these places are nevertheless sometimes considerable and lead to the insertion of various forms of transportation to reduce the distance: conveyor belts, escalators and elevators, but also in certain places, such as major airports, automated metros, buses or cars to access the plane for first-class passengers, or, in terminals, golf carts for disabled passengers, Segways for the police, bicycles and scooters for certain members of staff, etc. Large or compact, these transportation places involve social activities and interactions - be they to avoid contact or socialize - between people of heterogeneous social and spatial backgrounds.

Smaller transportation sites, such as bus stops, often materialized by a simple sign, are also invested with a major cultural, affective and social life, although little studied. We can think of the "bus-stop culture" of rural teenagers, identified by Moore (2003) in English villages of East Anglia. The social appropriation of a stop placed in a central position in the village, easy to reach and with a grocery store nearby, enables them to meet, drink, eat, or even smoke cannabis, not without some tension with residents who see it as problematic ways of "hanging out". In their use for travel purposes this time, bus stops are also places where - often neglected - emotions can flourish or be appeased, prompted by the risk of being exposed to bad weather, but also to aggressions, on site or on the way. They are also complex performance sites, as illustrated by negotiations to access the bus at peak times. Studied by Rink (2016) in Cape Town, these negotiations mobilize social codes which are related, quite expectedly, to the proximity to the bus door, but also to the social position of each rider, in terms of power relationships of gender, age, race or disability.

Bus stops are part of a broader set of transportation-related places that can be described as traffic sites, corresponding to all thoroughfares or transportation routes. They are part of another overcoming of transportation places, a dimensional change "from point to line" (Lombard and Steck 2004) - the importance of which is both material and symbolic. Consider, for example, the zero point from which road distances are calculated. They reflect as much the centrality of the chosen location in the road network as the political recognition of its position in the urban order and the geography of power, as shown by Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the top of Capitoline Hill in Rome or the Plaza de Armas in Santiago de Chile.

Traffic sites are a form of planning, regulation and uses of places that facilitates their overcoming, the passage from place to place. Roads have typically been the focus of academic enquiry. This preponderance stems from the dominance of the system of infrastructure, practices and values that define automobility (Beckmann 2001; Flonneau 2008), while it can also be partly explained by the use of roads for other forms of land transportation, particularly active mobilities (walking, cycling, etc.). The study by Baldasseroni and Charansonney (2018) on the information intended for motorists in Paris and Lyon since the interwar period, for example, shows well how the accumulation of information devices over time changes the places traveled through and the relationship...