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How is the width of the pavement shaping the urban experience? How is the material design of transport infrastructure and mobile technology affording social interaction in everyday life spaces? How are people inhabiting these spaces with their bodies and in accordance to social and cultural norms? These are some of the questions that this book raises in order to explore how the design of mobile sites and situations affect people's everyday life. The book takes point of departure in the author's book 'Staging Mobilities' (Routledge, 2013) in which it is argued that mobility is much more than simple movements of people, goods, and information 'from A to B'. Accordingly, the way people, goods, and information moves shapes the way we understand our built environment, other consociates, and ourselves. The book contributes with a new and critical-creative gaze on what might seem to be trivial and mundane acts of moving in the city. 'Designing Mobilities' is based on more than a decade of academic research by Professor of Urban Theory, Ole B. Jensen and a must-read for students and scholars with an interest in urban studies, urban design, architecture, urban planning, transport planning and geography, urban geography, anthropology, design studies, interaction design, and urban sociology

In recent years, the social sciences have taken a 'mobilities turn'. There has been a developing realisation that mobilities do not 'just happen'. Mobilities are carefully and meticulously designed, planned and staged (from above). However, they are equally importantly acted out, performed and lived as people are 'staging themselves' (from below). Staging mobilities is a dynamic process between 'being staged' (for example, being stopped at traffic lights) and the 'mobile staging' of interacting individuals (negotiating a passage on the pavement). Staging Mobilities is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It explores how the movement of people, goods, information, and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment. Moving towards a new understanding of the relationship between movement, interaction and environments, the book asks: what are the physical, social, technical, and cultural conditions to the staging of contemporary urban mobilities? Jensen argues that we need to understand the contemporary city as an assemblage of circulating people, goods, information and signs in relational networks creating the 'meaning of movement'. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, urban studies, mobility studies, architecture and cultural studies.

The challenges facing global ecologies and lifeforms (human and non-human) are cascading at present. There are various intersecting forms of crisis, from biodiversity over climate change to massive refugee patterns, inequities, and pandemics. Even though there is only 'one world' in the sense of one globe with 'no outside', living species have probably never found themselves in more segregated ecologies within the Earth's 'critical zone' before. From new 'geo-social classes' over stranded migrant populations to voluntary isolation by the super-rich, planetary co-existence seem in peril. And yet, it is all intertwined, albeit in complex and multi-scalar ways. In this paper the mobilities of matter, humans, goods, and information will be understood on the background of the techno-Anthropocene. This is then seen as the designed, mediatized, technologically framed artificial ontologies of planetary existence. The contemporary global condition is thus defined by the 'made', designed, artificial, and technological to an extend that may qualify the diagnosis of the Anthropocene with the prefix 'techno'. Acts of 'world making' and mobilities design renders new lines of demarcation between those who move and those who do not, as well as between those who move on a voluntary basis versus those living lives of forced mobility. The paper addresses the ways in which we might re-think and re-design such troubled materialities of world-making and mobilities seeing 'mobility justice' and planetary co-existence as key goals. This means to engage in a critical-creative reimagining of scales, territories, mobilities, and inviting to techno-utopian and democratized visions of different futures.

This paper address the phenomenon of drones and their potential relationship with the city from the point of view of the so-called "mobilities turn". This is done in such a way that turns attention to a recent re-development of the "turn" towards design; so the emerging perspective of "mobilities design" will be used as a background perspective to reflect upon the future of drones in cities. The other perspective used to frame the phenomenon is the emerging discourse of the "smart city". A city of proliferating digital information and data communication may be termed a smart city as shorthand for a new urban condition where cities are networked and connected (as well as disconnected) from the local block to global digital spheres. In the midst of many of the well-known data-creating devices (e.g. Bluetooth, radio-frequency identification (RFID), GPS, smartphone applications) there is a "new kid on the block" that will potentially be a game-changer for urban governance, economics and everyday life. Here we are thinking of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone as the popular term has it. Therefore, the paper asks how life in "drone city" may play out. Drones may alter the notion of surveillance by means of being mobile, as well as profoundly altering the process and perspective of data collection and feedback to governments, businesses and citizens.

This paper uses the metaphor of 'boomerangs' articulated by Michel Foucault to discuss the potential for drones to become the 'next layer' of urban surveillance in our cities. Like earlier Western technologies and techniques of government that were 'tested out' in foreign warzones and then 'brought back' to urban centres (the helicopter and its utilization in Vietnam and its return to urban police forces is a clear illustration hereof), contemporary unmanned aerial vehicles hold the potential to act as proverbial 'Foucauldian boomerangs' and return from warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to Western cities. The paper explores how a nexus of Surveillance Studies and mobilities research may be a fruitful way into comprehending this new phenomenon. En route the practical applications of drones as well as the historical importance of aerial power are connected to a situational understanding of mobilities. The paper points at a number of challenges for the future and should be understood as a first tentative attempt to set this on the research agenda.

This paper address the phenomenon of drones and their potential relationship with the city from the point of view of the so-called "mobilities turn". This is done in such a way that turns attention to a recent redevelopment of the "turn" towards design; so the emerging perspective of "mobilities design" will be used as a background perspective to reflect upon the future of drones in cities. The other perspective used to frame the phenomenon is the emerging discourse of the "smart city". A city of proliferating digital information and data communication may be termed a smart city as shorthand for a new urban condition where cities are networked and connected (as well as disconnected) from the local block to global digital spheres. In the midst of many of the well-known data-creating devices (e.g. Bluetooth, radio-frequency identification (RFID), GPS, smartphone applications) there is a "new kid on the block" that will potentially be a game-changer for urban governance, economics and everyday life. Here we are thinking of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone as the popular term has it. Therefore, the paper asks how life in "drone city" may play out. Drones may alter the notion of surveillance by means of being mobile, as well as profoundly altering the process and perspective of data collection and feedback to governments, businesses and citizens.

This paper address the phenomenon of drones and their potential relationship with the city from the point of view of the so-called "mobilities turn". This is done in such a way that turns attention to a recent re-development of the "turn" towards design; so the emerging perspective of "mobilities design" will be used as a background perspective to reflect upon the future of drones in cities. The other perspective used to frame the phenomenon is the emerging discourse of the "smart city". A city of proliferating digital information and data communication may be termed a smart city as shorthand for a new urban condition where cities are networked and connected (as well as disconnected) from the local block to global digital spheres. In the midst of many of the well-known data-creating devices (e.g. Bluetooth, radio-frequency identification (RFID), GPS, smartphone applications) there is a "new kid on the block" that will potentially be a game-changer for urban governance, economics and everyday life. Here we are thinking of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone as the popular term has it. Therefore, the paper asks how life in "drone city" may play out. Drones may alter the notion of surveillance by means of being mobile, as well as profoundly altering the process and perspective of data collection and feedback to governments, businesses and citizens.

This article argues for an understanding of public transit spaces as sites of multiple dynamic interactions. Much inspired by the approach of Erving Goffman, the article explore a "mobilized" understanding of some of his central concepts. The theoretical underpinning is the development of concepts related to interaction, mobility, and transit that focus on notions of the "mobile with," "negotiation in motion," "mobile sense making," and "temporary congregations." The theoretical approach aims at seeing public transit spaces as sites where cars, pedestrians, mopeds, and bikes on a regular basis "negotiate" not only routes in and across the space but also express dynamic flows of interaction in motion. The claim is that what seems like ordinary urban movement patterns are more than this. By moving in the city among buildings, objects, and people, one interacts with the "environment," making sense of it and ultimately producing culture and identity. Empirically, Nytorv square in Aalborg, Denmark, is mapped and analyzed through recurrent field studies. The article aims at unpacking the geography of mobility at the site of Nytorv by applying the two perspectives of the "river" and the "ballet" to the mobile practices of the site.

Physical mobility has an important cultural dimension to contemporary life. The movement of objects, signs, and people constitutes material sites of networked relationships. However, as an increasing number of mobility practices are making up our everyday life experiences the movement is much more than a travel from point A to point B. The mobile experiences of the contemporary society are practices that are meaningful and normatively embedded. That is to say, mobility is seen as a cultural phenomenon shaping notions of self and other as well as the relationship to sites and places. Furthermore, an increasing number of such mobile practices are mediated by technologies of tangible and less tangible sorts. Thus by focusing on the complex relationship between material and virtual technologies within the sphere of mobility it is shown that we need to move beyond dichotomies of; global or local, nomad or sedentary, digital or material. The paper investigates the meaning of mobility and the potential in mediation and technologies to enhance the experiences and interaction in relation to urban transit spaces. In understanding the importance of mediation, global-local interactions, networks, and the distributions of meaning and mediated discourses this way of thinking about mobilities points to the importance of understanding pervasive computing and situated technologies. In particular a critical awareness to how such technologies shape the foreground/background attention of social agents seems crucial. By studying embedded technologies and 'ambient environments' we increase our knowledge about the over layering of the material environment with digital technologies. The presences of GPS, mediated surfaces, mobile agents (robots), RFID and other technologies that all relate to contemporary mobility practices add a new dimension to the notion of movement and constitutes new arenas and tools for identity construction and social interaction (as well as of course commercial exploitation and state control). In the creation and design of new interaction spaces applying urban technology there is a potential for conceptual critique but also for discussing these mediated sites of interaction as venues for new meaningful social interaction and relationships ultimately shaping new ways of thinking about the political. It is argued that the design and experimentation with ' performative urban environments ' constitutes a field of explorations into broader issues of democracy, multiple publics, and new mobile (electronic and material) agoras pointing towards a critical re-interpretation of contemporary politics of space and mobility.

This article argues for a narrative approach to the study of urban branding and planning and presents an analytical framework for understanding narratives and place. The notion of the `representational logics of urban intervention' captures this idea that urban branding interventions are guided by certain representations and embedded in certain norms and values. The analytical framework is applied to a case study of cultural urban branding, the harbour front in Aalborg, Denmark, where a number of flagship architecture projects and cultural institutions are planned. It illustrates the competing stories told by proponents and opponents of the interventions, and also shows how the relation to place in the stories differs radically according to their allegiances. The article aims to throwing light on the complex relationship between story and place.

Ole B. Jensen: The city: power and network. A new urban sociology's reading of the representational logic of urban interventions

This article presents an analytical framework for revitalising the field of urban sociology. It draws on two forms of discussion within sociology. On the one hand, there is the contemporary discussion among sociologists such as Sassen and Castells. On the other hand, the framework involves an understanding of social practices as spatial and material, as well as being embedded in cultural and normative contexts of meaning. Thus by applying a general frame for understanding social action as both spatial and symbolic practices, the article suggests that we can gain a better understanding of how particular interventions in urban space are embedded in a network of representations, institutions and agents, as well as how they reflect a particular power and rationality configuration. The analytical framework is tentatively applied on the empirical case of the urban harbour front development in Aalborg, Denmark.

This case study of a dispute over a project to construct a road through green space in a small Canadian city brings together two hitherto separate theoretical approaches to mobility disputes: "culture stories" and "regimes of engagement". The stories opponents tell, in interviews and documents, concern their mobilization against the project, the value of environmental preservation, and the costs of expanded automobility, culminating in contrasting visions of urban development. The culture stories approach examines how stories varied on a narrative dimension of informational formats, temporal structures, causal mechanisms, and plot institutionalization, and a place dimension of relational geography and physical attributes. The pragmatic conditions of the different narratives of contestation, and of the challenges faced by opponents are analysed in terms of the relation between regimes of engagement: a regime of familiarity based in slow mobilities, a regime of planned action based in automobility, and the clash of industrial and green orders of worth in a regime of justification