Urban public space on the move
Public space is neither static nor immobile. Public transportation in the form of buses, trains and communal taxis, amongst other shared mobility platforms, exemplifies urban public space on the move. Public conveyances are capsules of mobile publics (Sheller, 2004) that operate within the ambient space of the public realm. In spite of a well-developed body of scholarship on shared spaces of mobility and the experience of passengering as an experience of togetherness, negotiation and communitas (Bissell, 2010, 2016, 2018; Butcher, 2011; Koefoed et al, 2017; Pirie, 2015; Rink, 2016; Wilson, 2011, 2017; Xiao, 2019), few studies explicitly address the mediation of urban public spaces on the move in relationship to the city and the ambient public spaces they traverse. Thus, building on interest in public space from urban scholars (Bodnar, 2015), this paper brings public conveyance into debates over moving public spaces. Such environments are not public spaces in the sense that ‘… all citizens have a right of access’ (Blomley, 2009: 602). Rather, the mobile spaces of public transport conveyances are mediated by economic and geographical accessibility in addition to gender, class and race, amongst others. Public transport space is fraught with exclusions (Pirie, 2015; Wilson, 2011), yet filled with possibilities for encounter (Bissell, 2010, 2016, 2018; Koefoed et al, 2017; Wilson, 2011, 2017; Xiao, 2019) beyond the simple binary of inclusion and exclusion (Qian, 2020). Through an examination of the Conditions of Carriage that govern Golden Arrow Bus Services (GABS) in Cape Town, South Africa, augmented by ethnographic observations, the aim of this paper is to highlight the myriad ways that urban public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled through rules of conduct that differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus. This aim is accomplished in two ways: First, the paper mobilises Qian’s (2020) framework to empirically move beyond dualistic construction of inclusion and exclusion in public space. Empirical evidence from the Conditions of Carriage and the lived experience of the same through autoethnographic reflections demonstrate how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors on the bus within a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion; and second, the paper builds upon the work of public space scholarship (Fyfe et al., 2006; Phillips and Smith, 2006) to demonstrate the mediation of (in)civility in mobile public space through the deployment of a specific array of social norms as contextualised in the culture(s) of the buses’ operational environment and legal frameworks of the Conditions of Carriage. As a mundane part of the infrastructure and social life of the city and its inhabitants, public transportation mobilities are constituted by micro-communities whose publics are in a constant state of flux and negotiation (Jensen, 2010). I argue that the complexities of moving in and with the bus in an assemblage of passengers and the materiality of the bus itself require mediation and control of embodied movements, actions and behaviours that do not receive the same attention or scrutiny in public spaces outside of the bus. The findings below will demonstrate how the Conditions of Carriage are situated and lived within a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion where negotiation of laws, policies and societal codes helps to shape urban public space.
The Conditions help to situate mobile public space somewhere between the State’s responsibility for the ‘public good’ and the bus company that represents the private sector’s focus on the market. The Conditions seek to establish a sense of orderliness in the mobile public space of the bus, and thus highlight how the public order is mediated. As a public space, the environment of transportation services such as public buses is maintained by an ordered set of rules and conditions that manage movement and civility (Fyfe et al., 2006; Phillips and Smith, 2006) in mobile public space. Given the size and containment of public conveyances, I argue that the management of movement, stillness and civility is more pronounced than in other forms of public space. In the South African case, as elsewhere, such rules and conditions are prescribed by law as well as in generally-accepted norms and codes of social behaviour within public space. Negotiation of the spaces of public transportation are thus governed by specific rules related to, amongst others: the rights and responsibilities of the conveyance operator and passengers; fares and payment of such fares as the means of access to the fleeting community of the conveyance; observance of rules and regulations for boarding and alighting, sitting and standing; the carriage of goods, animals and other objects along with passengers; and general behaviour and relationships between bodies of fellow passengers. Mobilising Qian’s (2020) theorisation of public space as situated and lived, as assemblage, and as a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion, this paper applies these ‘flexible, processual, performative and ambivalent’ (Qian, 2020: 78) views of public space to the context of the public conveyance of a bus. I place my analysis of the Conditions of Carriage in conversation with ethnographic reflections collected on a public bus service. In doing so, I consider the ‘publicness’ of public transport within the public sphere that mediates between society and state (Blomley, 2009). Results demonstrate how the combination of legal statute, company conditions, and societal codes of behaviour mediate the publicness of public transportation, and therefore act to shape cities and citizenship. Together they provide the parameters within which the public is expected to negotiate mobility, stillness, relationships and behaviour within the mobile assemblage of a public conveyance.
The remainder of this paper is structured into four sections. First, I review literatures that frame the publicness of public transportation, their publics, propinquity and politics. This includes the particular social and historical context of urban mobilities in the South African case. The legacies of an unequal and racialised urban landscape cannot be underestimated in the contemporary experience of public – or otherwise. Next, I present a brief methodological overview of my analysis of the Conditions of Carriage using a mixed methods approach. Following that I dissect the Conditions of Carriage, placing the results of quantitative content analysis in conversation with ethnographic data from fieldwork while a passenger and observer on Golden Arrow buses (hereafter GABS) in Cape Town. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the mediating role of law, policy and societal norms in the governing of movement and stillness of mobile publics. Findings illustrate how the Conditions of Carriage situate the lived experience of public space, how they govern a heterogeneous mobile assemblage and mediate the public space of the bus as a liminal zone beyond the binary of inclusion and exclusion.
Publics, propinquity and politics
This paper is framed by a triad of literatures that interrogate the spaces of public transportation by their publics, propinquity, and politics. Together they help to question the social norms and legal frameworks within which the public is expected to negotiate mobility, stillness, encounter, and relationship in the environment of a public conveyance. I situate these debates on urban public space within the mobilities literature where scholars across a range of disciplines debate the ‘publicness’ of public transport (Pirie, 2015) as well as de facto hurdles such as cost and mobility deprivations brought on by insurmountable distances from public transportation services. The context of this study where publics, propinquity and politics are concerned must be acknowledged. Public space generally and public transportation specifically in South Africa have a history of unequal access and counter-public spatiality. The legacies of the racialised landscapes of South African cities have been persistent (Turok, 2001), and like other forms of publicness, the spaces of public transportation have historically been inaccessible to all citizens on account of barriers including brutal de jure impediments defined principally by race (Pirie, 1992). The South African setting of this study complicates the issue of the ‘public’ in public transportation – while not exceptionalising it. The racialised history of mobility in South Africa serves as a stark example of the de facto counter-public nature of public transportation in a highly-unequal society where automobility through the private car is ‘a shield, used as a defensive mobility practice’ (Pirie, 2015: 49). In the context of contemporary South Africa, race continues to define one’s access to – and normative use of – mobility practices (Rink, 2016). While bus travel serves as a normalised mobility practice in other regions of the world, normative discourses of mobility remain firmly race-based in South Africa (Rink, 2016).
At the same time, inequality and exclusion are characteristics of the urban form and experience beyond South Africa. The public aspect of public transport assumes that the space belongs to all citizens equally, but such spaces are in fact mediated between society and the state. Adding to the unequal access to public transport is the spatial proximity and encounter with others that moving together with others engenders. This propinquity (Wilson, 2011) is the necessary state of embodied mobility that is put into play within the confined mobile space of a public conveyance. The final element in this framework is the politics of the spaces of public transport. The politics refer to the negotiation of space and the mediation of mobility that results from diverse constellations of mobile bodies moving together through space. Together these three strands of literature help to explore the spaces of public transportation in the case of GABS in Cape Town, while contributing to an understanding of mobile public space in cities more broadly.
Public space
Public space is more complex than the commons and public squares that formed the genesis of many cities. As Blomley (2009) notes, ‘[t]o speak of public space is necessarily to speak of the public sphere, the realm of collective opinion and action that mediates between society and state’ (2009: 602). The setting of public space as an urban commons can easily be a site for conflict between competing interests and is thus tightly controlled through law and regulation (Blomley, 2007). Such mediations are echoed more recently by Qian (2020), who pushes epistemologies of public space beyond the limits of presence, accessibility and visibility that characterise romantic notions of publicness in the agora. Qian argues for a threefold understanding of public space: as situated and lived; as an assemblage; and as a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion. For Qian, public space:
refers to physical urban spaces that are relatively accessible and open, while publicness refers to the textures and habitus of collective socialities, meanings and cultures that the participation in, and appropriation of, public space have invoked. (2020: 93)
The mobile nature of public transportation complicates views of public space as essentially fixed in space. The relative accessibility of the mobile public space of the bus is primarily maintained through the collection of fares. As Sanders (2006: 10) argues, ‘… the bus is a vehicle not of the country but of the city. Anyone may step aboard … As long as one pays the fare, one may ride. One person’s money is as good as that of another.’ Therefore, the public space of a moving conveyance is a liminal zone of publicness where all are not necessarily afforded access, and where encounter happens in close proximity with ‘others’ who are strangers (Wilson, 2011, 2017).
Public space is the site of encounter which, as Ahmed (2000) argues, is the product of spatial proximity, and by extension the mobility of embodied others. Therefore, public transportation is a powerful impetus for encounter, and thus potential conflict (Schuermans, 2016). If mobility induces encounter and spatial proximity, then it follows that the desire to maintain public peace, civility (Phillips and Smith, 2006) and social order drives contempt for embodied difference outside of acceptable norms and thus the need to govern mobile publics (Sheller, 2004). In the face of increasingly privatised public spaces such as shopping malls, city improvement districts (Rink and Gamedze, 2016) and other exclusive – and exclusionary – urban enclaves (Rink, 2020), a more complex regard for public space helps to interrogate its mediations, negotiations and politics.
Propinquity, assemblage and (in)civility in mobile public space
For those who do have access, public transportation requires individuals to share enclosed spaces that impose situations of physical adjacency that Wilson (2011) refers to as ‘propinquity’. This state of physical proximity may expose aspects of embodied difference at best (Doughty and Murray, 2016; Wilson, 2017) or lead to conflict at worst. As Phillips and Smith (2006: 884) note, ‘Competition for movement spaces, divergent speeds and urgencies, encumbered movement and crowded spaces are all possible generators of incivil, embodied collisions …’. The spatial proximity of individuals and their temporary assemblage (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011) in a public conveyance focuses attention on bodies and embodied behaviour. The assemblage of human and non-human actors (Turdalieva and Weicker, 2019) that shape the environment and experience of shared mobility is important to recognise in addition to the macro- and micro-political elements of mobility (Bissell, 2016, 2018; Rink, 2016) that come to the fore in the context of public transportation. The contact between strangers (Watson, 2006) is what matters in public space. Therefore, mobile public spaces in the city are intense sites of encounter, density and proximity (Bissell, 2010). These sites are also shaped by acts of incivility and negative encounter (Fyfe et al., 2006; Phillips and Smith, 2006), and thus are subject to efforts to control and mediate behaviour. Although public space is a site of fleeting and perhaps anonymous encounters, those that happen in public transportation may be repeated through the rhythmic temporalities of daily use of buses (Rink, 2016; Wilson, 2011).
Propinquity in public transportation in South Africa is fraught with the politics of proximity and touch across race. As Schuermans (2016) adds, strategies to avoid touch have implications for mobility strategies in the everyday. Using his example from white middle-class residents in Cape Town, he points out that,
While strategies to avoid touch are developed at the intimate scale of the body, they have far-reaching consequences at other spatial scales … [since] the popularity of automobility among middle class white South Africans is not only motivated by the freedom and flexibility provided by cars in a rapidly sprawling city, but also by the lack of personal space that buses, trains and train stations allow, and the fact that public transport is mostly used by black South Africans who cannot afford a car. (Schuermans, 2016: 105)
Thus, the politics of public space come to the fore in public transportation as they do elsewhere.
Politics and power in mobile public space
Adey (2010), Bissell (2016) and Cresswell (2011) have lent considerable weight to discussions of the political elements of mobility. In both extraordinary as well as mundane experiences of movement and stasis, mobile subjects are constrained and/or enabled by unequal power relationships. The differentiated outcomes of power inequalities are stark in the context of mobilities, where some bodies move easily, and others do not move at all. While this may seem an opposing relationship, Cresswell (2011) argues that one person’s speed is actually dependent on another’s slowness. Reflecting on the growing interest in ‘the political’ within mobilities research, Bissell (2016) contends that much of the focus to date evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility from a subject-centred approach. Bissell thus advocates an approach to politics in mobility that is immanent and the product of actual events and encounters within the encapsulated public spaces of shared mobility. On a larger urban scale, the politics of public transportation – affected by the routes taken, the connections afforded, or the opportunities for encountering others – have an impact on segregation and the resulting opportunities for interaction in public spaces (Rokem and Vaughan, 2018, 2019). It is within the mobile public spaces of transportation where mixing and encounter happen, by virtue of the conveyance itself. Whether or not public transportation helps to divide or diversify urban public space, encounters in the spatially-proximate micro-community of a public conveyance can tell us a great deal about how the public is constantly being mediated, negotiated and experienced in public transportation.
In South Africa’s apartheid past as well as its legacies in the present, race and mobility are firmly entangled (Pirie, 2015). Pirie (1988, 1990, 1992, 2015) amongst others (Rink, 2016) helps to extend the investigation of bus passengering in South Africa beyond quantitative, rationalised approaches. These qualitative approaches are critical to understanding the everyday lived experience of bus passengering on account of the political nature of mobility (Cresswell, 2011) and further contribute to the decolonisation of mobile subjects in transport research (Schwanen, 2020).
Method
This paper takes a mixed-methods approach to interrogating the governance and mediation of mobile public space in Cape Town. The findings draw upon empirical data from GABS’s Conditions of Carriage, in addition to public realm ethnography (Jones, 2021) through participant observation of the embodied passenger experience (Schwanen, 2020). The mixed-method approach draws firstly on a quantitative content analysis of the Conditions of Carriage using NVivo 12.0. Text was first extracted from a portable document format (PDF) version of the Conditions of Carriage made available on the GABS website (https://www.gabs.co.za/contact-us/legal/) then examined using NVivo 12.0 for Mac with the goal of providing analysis of word frequency, overall weighting, and similarity/adjacency to other terms in the Conditions. This initial quantitative analysis of the Conditions was used to pinpoint frequently used words in the text, and to identify salient themes for further investigation and enfolding with the ethnographic data. A summary of results from the word frequency query is provided in Table 1. Those results are further coded using thematic content analysis to identify the ‘story grammars’ (Franzosi, 2004, 2011) in the text of the Conditions. The story grammars describe important discursive and semantic elements in the text, including those identified via interrogatives: who, what, where, when, and why/how (Franzosi, 2004: 187). Coding the text of the Conditions using story grammars thus helps to identify actors, actions and outcomes in both time and space (Franzosi, 2011: 23). Actors were further characterised as human or object-based actors, and according to their individual and/or institutional role. Only those words with frequency weighted percentages of 0.85% and above and those with relevance to actors (human/non-human and individual/institutional), actions and outcomes were sampled. The word frequency query also excluded less significant words such as conjunctions and prepositions.
Building on the quantitative data and analysis, this mixed-method approach included ethnographic data collected over five years of fieldwork as a passenger on various Golden Arrow Bus routes in Cape Town (see Rink, 2016). Those data reflect on more than 300 hours of passenger travel on the Mowbray–Bellville bus route operated by GABS, where the identity of the researcher as a white, middle-class academic positioned him as a stranger in a public conveyance, limited by normative discourses of mobility that restricts use of the bus to working-class individuals. The alienating gaze of fellow passengers and the novelty of being seen as out-of-place have shaped the encounters with others in the bus, as discussed below. The route travelled in the course of the fieldwork takes passengers from a transport interchange in Cape Town’s southern suburbs along a busy arterial route through the Cape Flats, and onward to Bellville in the city’s northern suburbs. Autoethnographic fieldnotes taken as a self-appointed member of the bus-riding public yield detailed observations and insights on the mediations that govern the mobile publics and their encounters on the bus. The inclusion of ethnographic methods responds to Jones (2021: 427) in his call to ‘… pay attention, ethnographically, to such [public space] settings – ones characterised not by familiarity but by social distance’. As a passenger subject to the Conditions of Carriage, and in observation of others governed under the same, the results of this mixed-method approach enable drawing conclusions as a participant and observer in the public realm (Jones, 2021).
Mediating mobile public space in the Conditions of Carriage
The Conditions of Carriage constitute a legal agreement between the passenger and GABS, referred to in the document as ‘the company’ (Golden Arrow Bus Services, 1992: np). The Conditions of Carriage were developed in the wake of bus desegregation in 1990 (Pirie, 2015), and thus before the dawn of democracy when the new political dispensation sought to provide unfettered access to public space for all South Africans. The document serves as the primary governing tool for the mobile public space of the bus. The State, in the form of the South African government, also features as a powerful force in mediating the movement, stillness and behaviours of passengers. Although the role of the State as a key actor is not evident in the quantitative analysis of the Conditions, even a cursory reading of the text reveals the importance of national laws in governing the public space of the bus through issues ranging from movement to tobacco use. National statutes are embedded as part of the Conditions, thus adding another layer of governance to the mediation of mobile public space. Condition 1, ‘Legal Provisions’, lays out the legislative underpinnings which underscore the role of the State as an actor in mobile public space. Legal provisions in the Conditions cite the Road Traffic Act (Act No 93 of 1996) and its applicable regulations, the National Land Transport Act (Act No 5 of 2009), and the Tobacco Products Control Act (No 83 of 1993). While the details of these Acts are not provided, the consequences of transgressing them are ominously provided, citing penalties of up to 100,000 South African Rand
1
and/or imprisonment of up to six years. The crimes deserving such penalties are left unsaid, yet all passengers are subject to them. The Conditions themselves act as an institutional mooring (Hannam et al., 2006) in the way that they give the company, its employees and its vehicles something to push-off from. Like other legal texts, the Conditions have evolved over time, with the current version dating from 1992 – a date that aligns with a drivers’ strike prompted by concerns over occupational safety in the 1980s and early 1990s (Houston, 2014). Drivers, passengers, the company and the State are not the only actors involved in the Conditions, however. Non-human actors also play a role in shaping the mobile spaces of public transportation, as Turdalieva and Weicker (2019) have argued. In the case of GABS, such non-human actors include the bus and its bounded space as a vehicle for mobility; tickets, both in paper and electronic card-based format; non-human animals, such as livestock and pets; and mundane objects such as parcels or personal goods that passengers carry along their journey. All are constituents of the assemblage of bus mobilities and are addressed in the Conditions of Carriage that are conspicuously displayed across the fleet of Golden Arrow buses at the front of the vehicle, facing passengers. As important as the Conditions of Carriage may be, they are sometimes obscured by advertisements from traditional healers offering to bring back lost lovers or relieve debt, and those selling building materials for makeshift dwellings.
The Conditions are provided in all official South African regional languages in the Western Cape province: English, Afrikaans, and isiXhosa. The Conditions of Carriage contain 13 such conditions, each with a particular focus on elements of bus passengering, including those that attend to: tickets, fares and means of payment as the procedural gatekeeper for entry into the mobile public space of the bus; the signalling and performance of boarding and alighting; behaviour while in-motion, including the occupation of seats; carrying of goods and animals; and general behaviour and the consequences for transgression. Quantitative analysis of the Conditions (see Table 1) identified the most frequently used words in the text of the 13 conditions, revealing the central concerns of the Conditions. The two actors taking centre stage in the Conditions are passengers (with 27 instances in the text); and GABS, referred to as ‘the company’ (with 19 instances in the text). These two actors are positioned opposite each other in the text: The ‘Company’ is presented as the speaker of the instructions, while the passenger is the reader or recipient of the imagined communication that mediates the public space that these two actors share. The company is also represented in two other high-frequency words: ‘officials’ and ‘driver’ with 14 and 12 mentions respectively. ‘Officials’ refers to an employee of the company including ‘inspector, driver or other company official’ (GABS, 1992: np). Inspectors are those company officials who randomly board buses in order to inspect tickets, passenger and driver behaviour, or any other aspects of the journey that are governed by the Conditions of Carriage. Drivers are those in charge of the bus. Other company officials, meanwhile, include ticket sellers, terminus managers and other company employees.
In the analysis I focus particularly on the various actors, their actions and outcomes in mediating the public space of the bus. I interpret my findings by mobilising Qian’s (2020) theorisation of public space, revealing how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors in mobile public space. Unpacking these themes using the 13 conditions of the Conditions of Carriage and ethnographic reflections, I will highlight some of their more significant impacts on the bus-travelling public and the spaces they inhabit temporarily during the journey.
The liminal zone of mobile public space
Turner (1974) was amongst the first scholars to explore the meaning and role of liminality in social life. His theorisation of liminality focuses on interrelatedness, or what he calls communitas (p. 76) where humans are conditioned to play certain ‘roles, statuses, classes, cultural sexes, conventional age divisions, ethnic affiliations, and so on’ (p. 77). Turner further differentiates communitas into spontaneous, ideological, and normative forms. Each has a specific relationship to liminoid phenomena (p. 79). Of these three forms, spontaneous communitas is a defining feature not only of cities but also of the fleeting micro-community of the bus (Rink, 2016), in which actors become ‘totally absorbed into a single, synchronized, fluid event’ (Turner, 1974: 79).
The experience of liminality implies transition from one state to another, and in the case of the mobile public space of the bus, the transition is between the ambient public spaces of the city and the enclosed mobile public space of the bus. This transition is mediated by imposition of fares and by the procedural actions of boarding and alighting. Quantitative analysis evidences the importance of the ‘object’ of tickets and ticketing, the ‘action’ of paying fares, and the ‘outcomes’ that may result from non-payment. Conditions 2 through 5 deal with the matter of fares, tickets, payment and refunds. Membership in the spontaneous communitas of the bus must be dealt with in a clearly-defined financial transaction between the company and the passenger. This focus on fares as a passage point between public spheres pre-dated the 1992 Conditions, as van Wyk Louw (2006a, 2006b) demonstrates in his observations on the bus in Cape Town during the 1940s. In his ‘In die bus afgeluister’ [Overheard on the bus], he witnesses a Black man – who he refers to as a ‘native’– being questioned by the conductor about his presence on the bus, to which the man responds ‘Ek wil Seepunt toe gaan, en ek betaal’ [‘I want to go to Sea Point. And I’m paying’]. Analysis of the Conditions of Carriage in the present reveals that the triangular relationship between passengers, the company, and their tickets is still a central concern, as it ranks the highest in terms of length, count and weighted percentage of occurrence. While the Conditions mention cash or the now-defunct paper ‘clipcard’ (the latter has been replaced by a more sophisticated electronic ‘Gold Card’ where trips can be loaded and used over a period of 21 days). Returning to Qian’s (2020) notion of the ‘publicness’ of public space, the content of the Conditions highlights that the moving public conveyance is a liminal zone of publicness where all are not afforded access due to barriers of cost.
Once the mediating factor of cost is surmounted, Conditions 6 and 7 address boarding and alighting respectively, and the occupation of seats. These conditions highlight the importance of the infrastructural and institutional ‘mooring’ (Hannam et al., 2006) of a bus stop in bus passengering. Such moorings constitute the immobile (fixed) infrastructure and institutions that make mobilities possible (Hannam et al., 2006: 3) and represent a tethering of mobile public space to the fixed locales of bus stops and termini. Condition 6 thus tethers a passenger across fixed and mobile public spaces, dictating that they:
… may not get on or off the bus when it is moving or at any place other than recognised bus stops, except under the direction of an inspector, driver or other company official. (Golden Arrow Bus Services, 1992: np)
If a passenger satisfies the first six conditions, then the matter of sitting (or standing) must be dealt with, since the Conditions require that:
Passengers must take a seat immediately after getting on the bus and buying their tickets or having their clipcards clipped. If all the seats have been taken, passengers may stand in the standing room allocated to the bus in the aisles between the seats. (Golden Arrow Bus Services, 1992, np)
Ethnographic observations complicate the simplicity of ‘immediately taking a seat’. The act of choosing and settling-in to a seat is performative and processual. As I reflected in a fieldnote:
First look for an empty row, preferably on the 2-seat side of the bus. That choice is subject to temporal aspects: time of day, where is the sun positioned during your journey, if you want the sun to keep warm or you are avoiding it on a hot summer day … Cool clear morning: sit on the right at the window heading toward Bellville. Hot sunny day: choose on the left side from Bellville to Mowbray … Scan the bus as you enter. Look for eye contact with potential seatmates. Are they subtly shifting their body as you approach? To make room? Or perhaps to move their bag closer to the open seat to make it less appealing. Are they willing to share? You can’t take two seats. Or can you? What do the Conditions of Carriage say about that? (Fieldnote ‘Choosing a seat’, 19 March 2015)
As the reflection above suggests, to be part of the spontaneous communitas of the bus requires the passenger to be part of a moving assemblage of other actors, their actions and outcomes which are ephemeral and always in a state of flux. Public transport spaces are defined by constant collection, mixing and depositing of ‘publicness’ as the vehicle moves through the city. These negotiations of mobile space require moments of touch – between individuals and the materiality of the bus – but are also mediated by race, gender and other aspects of identity, as evidenced in a fieldnote from 21 April 2015 as it relates to an elderly female passenger who boards the bus:
She sits next to me and proceeds to chat, touching my arm, laughing. She quickly breaks the usual and unspoken rules: not speaking too much to passengers; touching deliberately and often; being somewhat loud (although in a very jovial way) … [The passenger] reads me as a foreigner – her comments suggest that my appearance as a white man, dressed looking professional (affluent? academic?) today in my cardigan and denims equates to being foreign. It must be that riding the bus is something that a South African of my profile (white, male, professional) would not do. (Fieldnote, 21 April 2015)
Propriety is expected of passengers according to the Conditions posted prominently in front of me and my fellow passenger, while propinquity is often a necessary condition due to the small seats and often crowded buses. Being part of the moving assemblage of public space requires negotiations of space, identity and movement/stillness with other passengers as well as with the materiality of the vehicle and its operation (Rink, 2016).
Moving with the bus is an act of negotiating bodies (one’s own, that of others, and the bus itself), as I relate through a fieldnote from 14 May 2015. In it I reflect on stillness and the challenges of moving with the bus from my conversations with a fellow passenger whom I see often:
[The passenger] often complains that the older buses have slippery seats, covered in a shiny vinyl that while easy to clean can pose a challenge to passengers in the front seat (where she always sits) who have nothing to hold on to when the bus lurches and brakes as they often do. The materiality of the bus in this case makes it difficult to remain still, as you as the immobile passenger must actively participate in your stillness in response to the bus movements. (Fieldnote, 14 May 2015)
Assemblage in mobile public space
The mobile public space of the omnibus is by its very nature a constellation of moving actors and the objects that are carried and/or associated with them. Condition 8 recognises the multiplicity and assemblage of our everyday mobilities, as the carriage of ‘Goods and Animals’ is clearly laid out:
The company reserves the right to refuse (or accept) to carry the personal effects, parcels, luggage, goods or animals of passengers. The carriage of inflammable liquids such as petrol and benzene is not allowed under any circumstances. When, at the discretion of the company’s officials, it is decided to carry passengers’ goods or animals because they are not too big or bulky or undesirable, and can be carried in a suitable place and manner in the bus, they may be carried free of charge or at an applicable authorised fare. Such goods or animals will be carried entirely at the owners’ risk. (Golden Arrow Bus Services, 1992: np)
The publicness of the bus requires management of personal space and personal goods, all of which are part of the revolving constellation of human and non-human actors within the environment of the bus. The public space of the bus is shared space, as I note below:
Unlike driving in a car, on the bus your stuff sits with you. No boot, no cubby. Just you and your lap. The floor? Never. Too uncertain. Things might go missing from underneath. Passengers are warned in the Conditions of Carriage about goods and parcels. Our ‘stuff’ should remain at a minimum. There is an appropriate economy of stuff on the bus. I feel awkward when I’ve got a bag full of essays or tests to mark. It’s an extra parcel. More stuff to manage though the door and down the narrow aisle. (Fieldnote ‘Materiality’, 23 April 2015)
Carrying goods onboard can be awkward and unwelcome by others. There is unease in taking more than your allocated space in the bus:
While on the 15:30 service to Mowbray with a new driver and a large duffle bag over my shoulder, I am testing the limits of ‘Condition 8: Goods and Animals’. My bag takes up an entire seat, and I am fully aware (self-conscious?). The bus is nearly empty, three passengers onboard when it arrives at the bus stop where I wait, few others boarding elsewhere. I feel myself relaxing and spreading out. (Fieldnote ‘Relationship’, 11 June 2015)
In spite of being awkward and generally unwelcome, my transgression of Condition 8 is not challenged by fellow passengers. Although the reason remains unclear, I wonder if the ease with which I flout rules is not related to the unspoken privilege of race and class that I carry. In a fieldnote from 5 May 2015, I question why I sit in a prime seat in the front of the bus, yet no one sits next to me as the bus fills to capacity. Prior to settling in my seat I recall that:
The boarding ritual happens again. Men defer to women in the queue, holding back as they board. As the women (all students) in front of me board I can feel the male students waiting for me to proceed up the stairs to have my clipcard punched. I board, the queue of men fall in behind me. (Fieldnote, 5 May 2015)
Just like public spaces that are not in-motion, the mobile public space of the bus is shaped not only by ‘human agency and social mobilisation but concurrently of the non-human, the material and the embodied’ (Qian, 2020: 92). Thus the moving assemblage of the bus exhibits the complexity of other public spaces, but adds to it a constantly shifting and spontaneous communitas comprised of myriad human and non-human actors. As the composition of the bus and its route changes, so too does the mix of language and race amongst its passengers. In one instance near the settlement of ‘Freedom Farm’ in Bishop Lavis, two ladies flag us down. The bus driver takes notice as we are passing the stop, and pulls over well beyond where the ladies stand. As such they take some time to reach the open door – too long for the driver’s liking. He gives a series of three short hoots, as if to say ‘move it’. The lady in front retorts with ‘Haibo!’ [no!] in reply. Tit for tat. She gives a polite ‘Dankie’ [thank you] once her ticket is issued – in a language common neither to her nor the driver (Fieldnote, 4 June 2015). This serves as yet another example of the constantly shifting and spontaneous communitas of the public space of the bus.
Mobile public space: Situated and lived
The mobile public space of the bus is not static, and requires a multitude of actions on the part of its actors. Adherence to the Conditions of Carriage is not simply a legal requirement, but it may also be seen as a form of ‘good citizenship’ (Butcher, 2011). The Conditions of Carriage not only mediate mobile public space, but also help to enforce culturally-contextualised codes of conduct while imposing a discourse of civility. As one of Butcher’s (2011) participants notes, adhering to the ‘correct use of [public] space’ is part of being a ‘good citizen’ (Butcher, 2011: 246). Those actions and outcomes are situated in the context of the public space of the bus and the ambient public space through which it moves. They are also situated in the cultures and identities of the actor(s) involved, and in their lived experiences. Passengers are the actors within the community of the bus whose actions are under scrutiny and control through the Conditions. Conditions 10 and 11 provide the most direct sense of the transgressive in the public conveyance of the bus. Condition 10 addresses subjective transgressions in behaviour, including obscenity, indecency, offensiveness and curiously ‘contamination’ amongst others. These transgressions and the desire to manage them are the product of encounters with embodied ‘otherness’ (Ahmed, 2000) and propinquity (Wilson, 2011). The desire to mediate behaviour on the bus through the Conditions is justified by findings from Phillips and Smith (2006: 898), whose study showed that incivilities take a variety of forms, involving the body or language, and take place in consumption spaces and transport nodes. While Condition 11 focuses specifically on smoking in a public conveyance, Condition 10 cites particular, embodied anti-social behaviours that must be avoided. As the Conditions state,
Passengers must not:
a) be obscene, indecent, offensive, quarrelsome, obstructive, destructive, intoxicated, rowdy, disorderly, filthy, contaminated, dangerous or disturbing to the public peace in manner, actions or appearance;
b) interfere in any way with the comfort of other passengers;
c) obstruct or get in the way of the driver, conductor or other company official in the performance of their duties;
d) damage, injure or tamper with, or interfere with, or threaten to damage, injure or tamper with the vehicle or any person on it;
e) spit within or from the vehicle;
f) ring the bell on the bus unless they want the driver to know they want to get off. In such a case they may ring the bell once.
(Golden Arrow Bus Services, 1992: np)
Application of and compliance with the Conditions of Carriage, however, are situated and lived. The Conditions provide the code, but other actors including the driver, inspectors, and other passengers interpret actions and perform their mobility according to the situation. I reflected in one fieldnote how passengers’ obstruction of the driver led him to stop the bus, and refuse to carry the offending passengers further, in keeping with Condition 10, paragraph ‘c’:
On the 06:45 service to Bellville, a man sits on the engine cover next to the driver’s cage. The driver instructs him and the standing passengers around him to move back. They don’t. And thus, the driver stopped the bus, refusing to carry on if the passengers don’t heed his request. They quarrel some more. We stand still on the side of the road. The driver holds his ground. He controls our mobility and is protected by the material framework of a metal cage and the legal framework of the ‘Conditions of Carriage’. (Fieldnote, 15 April 2015)
Given the ephemeral nature of the public space of the bus, actors signal their presence in different ways. Some passengers, such as the self-appointed and anonymous ‘Under Cover Crew’, leave only traces of their presence within the public space, as I observed in the following fieldnote:
The seatbacks in front of me are covered in graffiti. One former passenger announces ‘Andile [with a star dotting the ‘i’] was here’. ‘Rizqah’ seemingly joined him too … were they passengers on different journeys, only the traces of their mobility intersecting on the plywood seatback? Other passengers provide mobile numbers, as an invitation to contact … Some graffiti is scrawled in correcting fluid, others are carved into … the dense and uneven medium of plywood. (Fieldnote, 3 June 2015)
Like the obstruction of the driver, defacing the interior of the bus is not allowed under the Conditions. Did the passengers above knowingly disobey, or is it that they have never seen them because the print is so small? As is the case with many legally-binding terms and conditions, the text of the Conditions of Carriage is unnaturally small, and difficult to read. Nevertheless, passengers are bound to its provisions each time they enter the vehicle, pay their fare, and take their seat (or stand). Once a passenger is a member of this moving micro-public, the Conditions intervene to mediate belonging and adjacency; to police bodies and their behaviour; and to define acceptable versus transgressive mobility. There are layers of control and varying spheres of influence in this example of bus passengering, including laws from the State, the Conditions themselves, which emanate from a company in the private sector, and more complex codes of generally accepted behaviour that emerge and are in a state of becoming within society and the public at-large.
Conclusion: Mediating mobile publics
The Conditions of Carriage recognise the potential for conflict through mobility and encounter, while attempting to mediate both. The Conditions are not exceptional, since formalised public transportation services are by definition guided by laws, policies and societal norms. Yet the public space within the bus is distinct from the environment outside it. The mobile public space of the bus involves moving in and with the bus in an assemblage of passengers and non-human actors, thus requiring mediation and control of embodied movements, actions and behaviours that do not receive the same attention or scrutiny in public spaces outside of the bus. Using a combination of quantitative content analysis of the Conditions of Carriage in combination with ethnographic reflections of the lived experience of the mobile public space of the bus, the findings highlight the myriad ways that public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled. The rules of conduct as evidenced in the Conditions of Carriage help to differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus, allowing the findings to move beyond dualistic construction of inclusion and exclusion in public space. Empirical evidence from the Conditions of Carriage and their lived experience demonstrate how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors on the bus within a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion. At the same time, the findings evidence the mediation of (in)civility in mobile public space through the deployment of a specific array of social norms as contextualised in the culture(s) of the bus’s operational environment. The Conditions of Carriage presented here draw upon laws from the State, policies from the private sector, and codes of conduct from societal expectations to manage movement and stillness on the bodily scale. This combination of statute, company policy, and societal codes problematises publicness and public transportation in the form of the omnibus that by its very nature is meant to serve all. The findings above illustrate the mediating influence of (public) law, (private, company) policies and societal norms in the governing of movement and stillness of mobile publics through the city. At the same time, the findings demonstrate the importance of positionality and power with respect to how the Conditions of Carriage are lived and experienced, which has implications for future research on mobile public space. Findings also highlight the need for further public realm ethnographic studies (Jones, 2021) in the form of mobile diaries and/or story-telling from the perspective of other passengers – with other positionalities and experiences of mobile public space(s).
To inhabit the spontaneous communitas of the bus requires actors to perform an ordered set of rules that enable passage between realms of public space – from ambient public space to the encapsulated public space of the bus. The Conditions maintain processual control over passengers’ journeys and their performance of mobility. Following Qian (2020), the Conditions of Carriage situate the lived experience of public space. They govern a heterogeneous mobile assemblage while they mediate the quasi-public space of the bus as a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion.
The Conditions seek to control the ‘publicness’ of public transportation in order to establish a sense of orderliness in the mobile public space of the bus. As Staeheli (2010: 71) argues, ‘… the orderliness laws are supposed to maintain is also argued to be a precondition that provides a measure of safety as people who may otherwise be marginal within a society enter publicly accessible spaces.’ In this view, the Conditions provide an orderly conduit between ambient public spaces via the mobile platform of the bus. My focus on the public space of the bus as a conduit between public spaces also highlights the importance of public transportation as an urban public space in its own right. In the same way that Phillips and Smith (2006) identify transport nodes and spaces as sites of incivility, my analysis of the Conditions of Carriage focuses attention on its mediations. Both recognise the publicness of transit spaces in their role as connective public spaces with the potential for unwanted encounter.
The Conditions of Carriage recognise the potential for conflict through mobility and encounter, while attempting to mediate both. They also act unevenly on bodies and their embodiment in the mobile public space of the bus. Using the Conditions as measure of the ‘publicness’ of public transportation results in questioning the omnibus (that by its very nature is meant to serve all) as a public space. In spite of the fact that ‘passengers’ are situated at the heart of the provisions, the Conditions of Carriage in effect both care for and control of members of the passengering public. The ‘publics’ of public transportation are manifested by an ever-changing array of individuals and institutions who are in a perpetual state of mediation through the legal framework of the Conditions of Carriage. Those mediations are operationalised in tandem with relationships amongst passengers and the vehicle itself, with fellow passengers, and the environments through which they operate (Schuermans, 2017).
The dominant focus on fares in the Conditions and the act of payment as entitlement to ‘belonging’ as a member of the moving public in the bus suggests that the space of public transport on the bus is not very public at all. To pay is to belong. To remain in motion is to abide by a situated and lived set of behavioural norms that are unevenly enforced and further mediated by race. While the operation of a public bus service may be governed formally, the findings above show how the Conditions of Carriage are situated and lived within a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion where negotiation of laws, policies and societal codes helps to shape urban public space. Through the examination of the Conditions of Carriage we may begin to understand the complexities of mobile public space, and thus the ways that moving in – and through – the urban environment help to shape cities and citizenship.
