Name
Urbanity in motion: confluences of mobility, encounters, and queer space-making
Date & Time
Thursday, May 22, 2025, 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Description
This paper explores urbanity as a confluence – a meeting point where mobility lines intersect, producing encounters, disruptions, and negotiations of difference. Through a one-year ethnographic study, including in-depth interviews and participant observations in Slovenia, it examines how urbanity is enacted through mobility practices and fleeting encounters with strangers in spaces such as train stations, ride-shares, and pedestrian zones. Engaging with queer phenomenology, mobility theory, and public space scholarship, the study rethinks urbanity as a product of movement rather than fixed geography. The research reveals that urban spaces emerge when mobility environments – places where mobility flows interconnect – create opportunities for hospitality, contestation, and re-orientation. This perspective challenges static understandings of the urban-rural binary by demonstrating how mobilities shape perceptions of space, identity, and belonging. The paper argues that queer mobilities, often defined by the absence of a fixed destination, reconfigure spatial experiences and social interactions, generating new confluences of meaning and possibility. By foregrounding mobility as both a material and affective force, this work contributes to debates on the relational production of urbanity, the politics of movement, and the spatialities of queerness.
Location Name
Canal (CB) 2400
Session Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract ID
282
Speaker Name
Tilen Kolar
Speaker Organization
University of Leeds, School of Geography
Session Name
CS147 Emotional and Affective Geographies