Mobility in History Blog

By Robin Kellermann, Technische Universität Berlin

Robin Kellermann is a PhD student, research associate and lecturer at Technische Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the cultural history of mobility and transportation as well as digitalization effects in using and experiencing public transportation. The blog post outlines his on-going PhD project about the cultural history of waiting, which is intended both to expose a forgotten mobility aspect and to bridge the gaps between transport history and cultural studies. robin.kellermann@tu-berlin.de

Standing on a platform, waiting for the train to come. Sitting in a departure hall, coping with another delay due to volcanic clouds in the atmosphere. All journeys start with a wait and suddenly, passengers are given time without actually wanting it.

Waiting truly belongs to the greatly overlooked practices of everyday life. Among the many sectors enforcing waiting times, transportation certainly accounts for a most prominent generator. As hardly any other sphere, the timetable-based logics of transportation systems inherently produce spatial, temporal and organizational constraints that cause passengers to be stilled temporarily in situations of waiting before boarding planes or trains.

Despite the phenomenon’s centrality for the transit experience, explicit research on waiting in the transport and mobility context has remained a surprisingly unchallenged and trivialized subject. Instead, particularly transport history – driven by a traditional passion for high-speed technologies or transport artifacts as desired objects of investigation – most often disregarded the complex social, perceptual and spatial spheres underlying temporary stillness, pause or immobility. Concealed by a predominant attention for moving or active subjects, waiting phenomena have rather been treated implicitly in terms of a tacit enemy, regarded as imperative to be defeated by all means.

In short, waiting was (and often is) conceived as a ‘stepchild of mobility’. As a result, we still know remarkably little about the evolution of passengers’ in-transit experiences such as waiting in pre-trip situations at stops or stations, waiting rooms, departure gates or platforms. Though the subjects of waiting and immobility have recently seen increasing attention in fields of human geography (Bissell 2007, Fuller 2014), ethnography (Vannini 2011), literary studies (Gräff 2014, Benz 2013) or, more long-standing, psychology (Yates 1987, Pruyn and Smidts 1998, Taylor 1994), systematic historical examinations of transport-related waiting phenomena rest surprisingly absent (Vozyanov 2014). Consequently, waiting, as Harold Schweizer summarizes, remains a “temporal region hardly mapped and badly documented” (Schweizer 2008, 1).

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By Rosa E. Ficek, Research Associate, University of Puerto Rico in Cayey

Rosa Ficek is an associate researcher at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. As a cultural anthropologist, her research focuses on the intersections of mobility, culture and the environment. This post is part of a wider project on the history and politics of the Pan American Highway. For more information on Dr. Ficek's work, visit her website, rosaficek.wordpress.com.

They drive for months at a time, seeking refuge from the soul-crushing grind of late capitalist civilization. The marvelous vehicle-homes that take them into unknown lands are equipped to withstand the harshest off-road conditions, yet also offer interior space inventively fitted for sleeping, cooking, and generally living. Cocooned in these mobile shelters they embark on lengthy expeditions across the continents of North and South America, leaving a digital trail in blogs and Facebook pages that hint at the meaning, purpose, and outcome of their travels: beaches, mountains, pyramids, dealing with border crossings, looking for a place to park for the night, improvising repairs to the vehicle, hiking through natural parks, hot springs, museums, sidewalk cafes, drinking whiskey by the campfire.

I have been reading and thinking about the narratives that mostly white, English-speaking U.S. Americans publish online with a few questions in mind: Why do they do this and how do they make sense of their experiences? What happens when driving practices informed by one national tradition cross international borders? How do these twenty-first century road trips uphold or transform the ideas about hemispheric unity that were built into the Pan American Highway in other times?

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By Ivan Small, Central Connecticut State University (USA)

Dr. Small is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia. Research for this post comes from his book manuscript: Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (under contract, Cornell University Press). For more information about Dr. Small's work, visit his faculty page.

The catalyst for capitalist growth in Vietnam—often dubbed Asia’s next Tiger economy—is frequently ascribed to market reforms starting in 1986. But a significant part of Vietnam’s economic growth is also supported by diasporic capital sent from abroad. Many of Vietnam’s so called “overseas Vietnamese” left as refugees and migrants after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. International remittances to Vietnam are estimated at around 12.3 billion U.S. dollars annually[1], making it one of the top ten destinations in the world for money sent by diaspora populations back to home communities in the Global South. About 7-8 percent of households in Vietnam receive remittances from abroad.[2] International remittance flows are higher than overseas development assistance to Vietnam, of which Vietnam is also a top recipient.

This post looks at developments in Vietnam’s remittance sector, including how they are being framed and embedded by new monetary policies, technologies, banking and finance trends, and consumer patterns that both enhance and complicate cross border mobility. The material is drawn from my book manuscript entitled Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (under contract, Cornell University Press).

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By C.R. van Tilburg, Universiteit Leiden (The Netherlands)

Dr. Van Tilburg is the author of Traffic and Congestion in the Roman Empire (London/New York: Routledge, 2007, repr. 2012). He began participating with T2M since 2014 and has presented papers at the annual conferences in Philadelphia, Caserta (Italy), and Mexico City. For more information about his scholarship on mobility in Antiquity visit his faculty profile page.

As a schoolboy, I used to play with toy trains: Märklin and Dinky Toys. In those pristine times, my fascination for traffic was born. Later, my interest in Graeco-Roman Antiquity arose but my enthusiasm for traffic was still there. The theme of my graduation thesis at secondary school was dedicated to the Dutch underground systems of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In those days, I often travelled by underground in Rotterdam and I was curious about the history, planning and construction of that system – older, more extensive and more fascinating than the underground in Amsterdam.

In 2003, there was a turning point in my life. I was driving eastbound in my car on the A12 highway, between The Hague and its suburb Zoetermeer. Traffic congestion took place and I was forced to drive slowly with many stops in between. The highway contained 2 x 3 lanes. Looking to the left, there was the light-rail line between The Hague and Zoetermeer (double track); to the right, the railway line between The Hague and Utrecht (also double track). There was also a bicycle path. But all this infrastructure was insufficient; there was still traffic congestion. Standing in the middle of this congestion, I was thinking – with nostalgia – about ancient traffic in the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago: a quiet and silent society, no agglomerations, no highways, no motorway intersections and, most of all, no traffic congestion.

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By Javier Vidal Olivares

Universidad de Alicante (Spain)

Since the end of the Second World War, commercial aviation was under the control of national monopolies and the international oligopoly of airline operators. Based on commercial rules agreed upon by IATA, as well as ICAO’s technical aspects for security, meant that this market remained practically unchanged until liberalization in 1977. From that point forward, the way was opened for a total or partial privatization of airlines. This change precipitated an international trend for new investment, especially pronounced among European and Latin American airlines.

The process of deregulating the aviation market in Latin America developed slowly and was subject to regional integration. Regulations had been relaxed, but at the same time, there remained other obstacles between countries or groups of countries in Latin America. The persistence of obstacles and the lack of full execution of the process to totally dismantle air travel restrictions was due to governmental turnover and unstable policies enacted by different governments. The reliance on political considerations concerning the aviation industry, combined with economic and electoral compromises, stagnated any advances or setbacks in the application of “open skies” policies in Latin American commercial air travel.

Fiscal insolvency and financial distress caused by acute rises in public debt during the 1980s led to the adoption of privatization programs across the region. In the political framework of privatization, the case of Argentina stands out as one of the most significant. Whereas much of the rest of Latin America had fully or partially sold off public assets in a short span of time, in this country, the process developed over the course of more than a decade. Between 1983 and 2001, Argentina launched a series of privatizations that began with public services, like telephones, and ended with airlines and airports. It included the sale of large public assets, such as the petroleum company YPF.

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By Melina Piglia

INHUS-UNMdP/CONICET (Argentina)

This post is adapted from the conference paper and presentation that the author developed for the 2016 meeting of T2M in Mexico City. Melina is a professor at Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina, and a researcher at National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET), focused on the study of the history of mobility, transport and tourism in Argentina during the twentieth century. For more information on Melina’s work, visit her Academia.edu page, https://mdp.academia.edu/MelinaPiglia 

The rapid transformation of aviation as a form of transport presented a series of challenges and opportunities to nation-states. In the new setting that emerged at the end of World War II, with the United States as the new hegemonic—and aerial—power, the survival of local airlines against devastating North American competition depended on protectionist measures that national governments offered. This protection would become possible, curiously, in the new institutions (based on democratic principles) designed at the beginning of the 1940s (in the context of the fight against fascism) for the creation of a postwar global order under U.S. leadership.

In the process of establishing the International Association for Civil Aviation (ICAO), U.S. pressure in favor of “open skies” encountered strong and effective resistance. Early on, this resistance was led by the outgoing global power, Great Britain, which opposed U.S. claims at a 1944 meeting in Chicago; instead, the UK proposed regulating the use of air routes. Without a multilateral agreement that governed aviation, member countries agreed to five “freedoms of the air.”

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