This dossier aims to discuss the sociocultural role of transit in the configuration of social subjects, political actors, symbolic places, collective actions and, in general, the social order to which we ascribe ourselves through the daily practice of moving between different points of the geographical space.

Without a doubt there is something fascinating in the constant flows of human bodies through different roads. The sum of these routes seen from the sky closely resembles the marvelous flows seen in nature: blood, water or migratory species, for example. However, there is a big difference: the phenomena of human transit are cultural and, therefore, require a complex exercise of reflection to understand their effects on our lives.

Various authors have approached the transient phenomenon as an eminently urban sociocultural entity (Joseph, 1988; García, Castellanos, Rosas, 1996; Aguilar, 2006; Delgado, 2007; Lindón, 2014), but their contributions have not yet finished positioning this practice as protagonist of the urban order. Despite the fact that it is increasingly common to speak of transit in cultural terms, even greater analytical value is given to the practice of inhabiting cities. The pre-eminence of the gaze over inhabiting to explain urban life has been, to a great extent, responsible for the fact that part of social studies takes transit as a fleeting, fleeting, anonymous activity, lacking in structural sense and identity virtues characteristics of inhabiting.

The interest in the role that transit plays in the cultural configuration of the subjects who practice the city should not be assimilated as conjunctural to the current era. This condition has been there since cities were formed (Careri, 2009). The difference is that today the transient condition has become more relevant to understand the configuration of urban identities, practices and imaginaries due to the recrudescence in capitalist forms of production and the effects of segregation, emotional, cultural, environmental and even wear and tear. generated among the population of cities.

The transit as the dance that invokes the urban

The practice of moving through urban space is the engine of urban life. Some authors have chosen to recognize public space as the main characteristic of cities, but seem to forget that this space does not inherently obtain its characteristics, but rather from the fact that people leave their places of residence, intimate and private, to expose themselves and interact with others through daily traffic. Public space exists and is configured in relation to transit and thanks to the existence of passers-by. To show this, it is enough to distinguish that the complexity of urban culture increases hand in hand with the appearance of new forms and technologies to move around. Traffic technologies introduce variables that modify the dynamics of time and space that order the lives of people and the urban territory.

In this quality of the transit as an enabling practice of the encounter lies the importance of its study in relation to the social configuration of the passerby. With what has been said so far, it will be seen that, in cities, traffic represents more than the physical action of moving between two points on the earth plane. What makes the beings that live in the city urban is the cultural configuration that they acquire due to the need they have to move along a changing territory, with which: 1) they perceive buildings, vehicles and diverse bodies; 2) interact with crowds of anonymous people; 3) they assume norms that sustain forms of situational order; 4) they internalize symbols and meanings that give meaning to their practices in public; and 5) they acquire properties that distinguish them between the various groups. To be in the city is to travel in it.

Dance or dance is an analogy that serves to understand the way in which the daily transit of people through the city operates on culture and vice versa. Manuel Delgado (2007) uses this metaphor by specifying that, in public spaces, streets and sidewalks of cities, people guide our behaviors based on cultural codes written and read during our trajectories. It is about predispositions, externalizations or warnings emitted by our bodies as a choreography. A type of language of multiplied reciprocities that the image of dance expresses perfectly:

The body-energy-time of the dancer [passerby] expresses all its possibilities in a daily activity, in urban settings where words tend to be of relatively little value, in the relationship between absolute or partial strangers and in which everything seems to depend on superficial eloquence , not in the sense of trivial but as acts that take place on the surface, that work by landslides (Delgado, 2007: 136).

This type of landslide provides an order that is built and rebuilt on a daily basis by the residents of the city. Although it is an order based on common and institutionalized codes, it also has a highly volatile component that gives it uncertainty. The passerby is waiting for the choreography to change at any moment.

As we travel through the city, we are a kind of sleepwalker who can wake up suddenly. Around this idea, Delgado (idem) adds that “sidewalks, as urban spaces par excellence, must therefore be considered the ground for a dynamic and unstable culture, constantly elaborated and re-elaborated by the practices and discourses of its users”.

In terms of this type of manifestation, Henri Lefebvre distinguished between the city and the urban as two elements that build on each other. The city understood as a site or parcel that contains a set of infrastructure where a large population lives; the urban seen as the set of practices that run through it: “the perpetual work of the inhabitants, in turn mobile and mobilized by and for that work” (Lefebvre, 1972: 70-71).

Transit as an alternative methodological path

Authors such as Sheller and Urry (2006) argue that the social sciences have not only ignored the role of movement in the study of social order, but have also trivialized it. Despite the fact that there has been an increase in the spatial analysis of social phenomena, evident in the rise of perspectives that analyze the landscape or the territory, a sedentary paradigm for the analysis of reality continues to predominate in them. Faced with such a situation, they propose a paradigm of mobility that should be applied not only to issues of globalization or deterritorialization of nation-states, identities and belongings, as has been intended, but to question which are the appropriate subjects and objects for the interest of social research. This means that we are facing the process of recognition of political-cultural subjects that are in front of us but that we blur because we consider them of little social relevance, or because our own research techniques make them invisible.

Regarding research techniques, Büscher and Urry (2009) distinguish between those that have as their object the analysis of movement and those in which the researcher is in movement. Among the former, for example, are the semi-structured interview, discussion group, life history, documentary sources, and description of places, while the latter include drift, participant observation, mobile ethnography, and the interview in motion.¹

The transient paradigm implies the development not only of new research questions, but also of alternative theorizations and methodologies that adapt to the problematization of traffic and the recognition of agencies that are gestated from it. In this context, the studies that are part of this dossier They become relevant as a means for understanding certain mobile phenomena and urban expressions. We need to adapt our analytical views to the logic of traveling and we urgently need to feed our curiosity with the experiences, problems, techniques and conclusions of those who have learned to observe the permanence and transformation of societies. in and since the transit.

The transit as a political-cultural act

If the vehicle and the journey are considered as political and structuring expressions of urban life, in which various institutionalizing civic and moral forms operate that model the subjects as actors belonging to different communities, and not only as a transfer device, it will be understood that the tragic emphasis of the positions that assume the transit as a destructuring phenomenon is wrong. It is true that modern cities are structured around complex road networks and that, in many cases, contemporary urban planning has a tendency to connect people rather than find them, but ethnographic experience shows that traffic does not cancel out the I find, rather it reconfigures it.

In the act of traveling, certain manifestations can be identified in which power, norms and their coercive correlates act on those who travel through cities. Day by day we assume a series of stereotypical ways of acting, thinking and feeling throughout our trips, whether for safety, tradition, pleasure or regulations; According to Wright (2014), "the notion of culture and of social fact must be accompanied by that of citizenship, since we consider that in each road gesture, no matter how minimal, we are performatively enacting our state of citizenship."

Passersby do things, they are not inert pieces transported on the avenues as if it were a production band. Passersby feel, imagine, name, remember, challenge; they associate, conflict, defend, complain and admire. This means, in short, that passersby are agents of urban life and, therefore, political actors in it.

Hand in hand with conceptualizations such as those of Michel de Certeau (2010), today the passerby can be spoken of as a category of users who practice or use manufactured urban space (materially, socially and symbolically), where previously the category of inhabitant predominated. Although it is not possible to sustain that one category cancels or replaces the other, it is necessary to analyze the way in which both interact and the ways of being in the city that originate from the predominance of the passerby status as a user of public space. It is worth clarifying that none of the cultural traits of the transit arises in the transit itself. I mean that traveling is articulated with living, with consuming, with communicating. Traveling is not a primal source of sociability, but is part of a constellation of urban sociability that is reinforced and constituted in daily life.

Four shifts towards the transient paradigm

The works presented in this issue correspond to the interest in locating the perspective from and on the traffic from different study phenomena. In the four cases, these are efforts to problematize the role that displacements play in the conception and ordering of urban life, considering its political-cultural edges and presenting methodologies articulated to mobile logic, from the audiovisual to the (auto) ethnographic and discursive.

The first article starts from sensory studies (Howes, 2014) to problematize the role of the senses in the social configuration of the street and the psychosocial experience of traffic. For this, Miguel Ángel Aguilar presents a methodological strategy that involves ethnographic work guided by tours and in-depth interviews with a blind person in Mexico City. In this way, the author shows us the construction of the sensory order that prioritizes certain stimuli to generate orientation and interaction strategies in the city, which in turn are central in the configuration of the to be urban.

The second work adheres to what Pablo Wright calls “road anthropology”; It is a theoretical-conceptual proposal for the understanding of the transit that, in the author's words, links the approaches of the performance, proxemics, phenomenology and the political economy of culture to understand the genesis of our bodies as “road bodies”. To nurture his reflections, Wright starts from an autoethnographic exercise, comparing various experiences in what he recognizes as “road cultures” in England, the United States, Uruguay and Argentina, as well as the links that their respective cultures and state orders tend between bodies, streets and sidewalks to sustain a social order.

The third proposal arises from an audiovisual exercise carried out by Lirba Cano and Héctor Robledo, members of the Caracol Urbano collective. It is an analysis of the role of the audiovisual research methodology around the articulation of collaborative relationships between actors involved in the struggle for the construction of a decent public transport service for the metropolitan area of Guadalajara. Cano y Robledo's text presents the peculiarity of being only one of the faces of his proposal; therefore, it is accompanied by its other side: the documentary El Hombre-Camión (Caracol Urbano, 2013). The audiovisual material describes the complex political, economic and cultural framework that sustains the model of the public transport service in Guadalajara, while the text is a memory of what gave meaning to its elaboration and the way in which the audiovisual material was interwoven with the struggle of public transport operators and users to improve the service. It is advisable to review this work in its two facets for a more complete understanding of its proposal.

Finally, there is the proposal by Christian O. Grimaldo-Rodríguez, focused on the study of the moral geography of the metropolitan area of Guadalajara based on the analysis of the advertising strategies available to public transport users in their daily journeys. This is a work that takes advantage of the aforementioned mobile methodologies and the methodologies applied to observation in transit to problematize the socially structuring role of market communication strategies and their translation into landscapes and moralized bodies.

These four efforts are added to those of other specialists who have adopted a critical view of the traffic to understand all those aspects that have been veiled up to now by starting from the premise that it is a banal phenomenon and even harmful to sustainability. of cultures. Their glances show us that, in the apparent irrelevance of daily journeys, there is a cultural universe that, however, moves.

Bibliography

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