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Public transport is a contested political terrain and an arena of micro-political struggle: it is always kinopolitical. This reflection on the articles gathered in the special issue on Public Transport as Public Space discusses their connections to prior work in the field and what we can learn from these new studies of public transport as a public space, as a public sphere and as an atmospheric public constellation. It shows how the concept of mobile publics opened up new avenues for exploring the relation between public space and public spheres within the moving spaces of encounter of public transportation systems and their diverse passengers. Qualitative methodologies for the study of the flexible and contingent socialities of the mobile public realm have become especially relevant for the study of public transportation as a public space in which cosmopolitan or collective identities are in tension with alienation and atomisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing this special issue on public transport as public space, we discuss challenges in approaching public transport as public space and outline how incorporating approaches from different disciplines associated with urban studies is essential for this ambition. We offer an account of the multi-dimensional aspects of public transport as public space, including concepts of public space, questions of encounters and conviviality, linkages between micro- and macro-practices, regulations, discrepancies, conflicts and associated negative encounters, historicised experiences and political perspectives. We stress the need to expand existing perspectives on public space by embracing mobile spaces such as public transport. This entails scrutinising spaces inside public transport vehicles and stations as well as analysing the various ways across the sometimes physical and sometimes invisible barriers defined in written rules, separating public transport space from the remainder of the city's public spaces, notably that of the street. Thus, the special issue: explores questions about the spatiality of publicness; attends to public space as a normative ideal; considers critical aspects of passengering as related to conviviality and contested encounters; and, addresses how the publicness of public transport is affected by modernisation, post-colonialism and urban politics. As we strongly feel that these questions require learning from across disciplines, the special issue includes contributions from diverse fields across the realm of urban studies and humanities alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lacuna in our understanding of how publicness of public transit is being constituted is the primary point of departure for this paper. In recent times, publicness has been articulated through two parallel readings – one, a political economic reading that sees publicness through static macrostructural constraints; and two, micro-sociality aboard public transit manifests an in situ and spontaneous public space. Moving beyond the static and the spontaneous, we articulate a dynamic co-constituted notion of publicness. Building upon recent work that examines the entangling of micro- and macropolitics onboard public transit and relying upon a mobile ethnographic approach revolving around situated observation and interviewing surrounding buses located in the Indian metropolis of Bengaluru, this paper offers publicness as a contingent entity that is constituted through the process of transiting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the example of the metro in Brussels, we examine public transport as a public space. We uncover how the conception of the metro and its fare system reflects an idealisation of public transport that conflicts with the daily experiences and structural inequalities among its users, manifested, in part, in fare evasion. We explore this practice through qualitative interviews, observational studies and analysis of online evader platforms. In contrast with existing research, we recognise fare evasion as a complex practice that challenges and shapes the publicness of public transport through knowledge exchange, solidarity building, social encounters and a redefinition of social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a public space, the environment of public transportation services is maintained by an ordered set of rules and conditions. Such rules and conditions are prescribed by law as they are in generally-accepted norms of social behaviour within public space. Through the examination of the Conditions of Carriage that govern bus transportation in Cape Town, South Africa, using Golden Arrow Bus Services, this paper seeks 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. Understood as a mundane part of the social life of the city and its inhabitants, mobility in the form of public transportation is constituted by micro-communities whose publics are in a constant state of flux and negotiation. Using analysis of the Conditions of Carriage and an ethnographic case study of bus passengering, this paper demonstrates how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors in mobile public space that is a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]