IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v59y2022i7p1353-1371.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations

Author

Listed:
  • Romit Chowdhury

    (Erasmus University College, the Netherlands)

  • Colin McFarlane

    (Durham University, UK)

Abstract

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.

Suggested Citation

  • Romit Chowdhury & Colin McFarlane, 2022. "The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(7), pages 1353-1371, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:7:p:1353-1371
    DOI: 10.1177/00420980211007841
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980211007841
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/00420980211007841?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Doreen Lee, 2015. "Absolute Traffic: Infrastructural Aptitude in Urban Indonesia," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(2), pages 234-250, March.
    2. David Wachsmuth & Daniel Aldana Cohen & Hillary Angelo, 2016. "Expand the frontiers of urban sustainability," Nature, Nature, vol. 536(7617), pages 391-393, August.
    3. Arve Hansen, 2017. "Hanoi on wheels: emerging automobility in the land of the motorbike," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(5), pages 628-645, September.
    4. Romit Chowdhury, 2021. "The social life of transport infrastructures: Masculinities and everyday mobilities in Kolkata," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(1), pages 73-89, January.
    5. Abdellatif Qamhaieh & Surajit Chakravarty, 2017. "Global Cities, Public Transportation, and Social Exclusion: A Study of the Bus System in Abu Dhabi," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(3), pages 462-478, May.
    6. Govind Gopakumar, 2015. "Who will Decongest Bengaluru? Politics, Infrastructures & Scapes," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(2), pages 304-325, April.
    7. Yağmur Nuhrat, 2020. "Moralities in mobility: negotiating moral subjectivities in Istanbul’s traffic," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(3), pages 325-340, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hung-Ying Chen & Colin McFarlane & Priyam Tripathy, 2024. "Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(8), pages 1526-1544, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ming Meng & Lixue Wang & Qu Chen, 2018. "Quota Allocation for Carbon Emissions in China’s Electric Power Industry Based Upon the Fairness Principle," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(9), pages 1-16, August.
    2. Marit Rosol & Vincent Béal & Samuel Mössner, 2017. "Greenest cities? The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(8), pages 1710-1718, August.
    3. Zhong, Zhangqi & Jiang, Lei & Zhou, Peng, 2018. "Transnational transfer of carbon emissions embodied in trade: Characteristics and determinants from a spatial perspective," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 858-875.
    4. Muhammad Adil Rauf & Olaf Weber, 2021. "Urban infrastructure finance and its relationship to land markets, land development, and sustainability: a case study of the city of Islamabad, Pakistan," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 5016-5034, April.
    5. Hefeng Wang & Yishao Shi & Anbing Zhang & Yuan Cao & Haixin Liu, 2017. "Does Suburbanization Cause Ecological Deterioration? An Empirical Analysis of Shanghai, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-17, January.
    6. Minh Hieu Nguyen & Dorina Pojani, 2023. "Why are Hanoi students giving up on bus ridership?," Transportation, Springer, vol. 50(3), pages 811-835, June.
    7. Vecchio, Giovanni, 2020. "Microstories of everyday mobilities and opportunities in Bogotá: A tool for bringing capabilities into urban mobility planning," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    8. Jinvo Nam & Nicola Dempsey, 2018. "Community Food Growing in Parks? Assessing the Acceptability and Feasibility in Sheffield, UK," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-21, August.
    9. Margarida Rodrigues & Mário Franco, 2022. "Bibliometric review about eco-cites and urban sustainable development: trend topics," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 24(12), pages 13683-13704, December.
    10. Iqbal Yulizar Mukti & Yudha Prambudia, 2018. "Challenges in Governing the Digital Transportation Ecosystem in Jakarta: A Research Direction in Smart City Frameworks," Challenges, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-10, March.
    11. Min Song & Can Hu, 2018. "A Coupling Relationship between the Eco-Environment Carrying Capacity and New-Type Urbanization: A Case Study of the Wuhan Metropolitan Area in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(12), pages 1-19, December.
    12. Francesco Fuso Nerini & Adriaan Slob & Rebecka Ericsdotter Engström & Evelina Trutnevyte, 2019. "A Research and Innovation Agenda for Zero-Emission European Cities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(6), pages 1-13, March.
    13. Neil Brenner & Swarnabh Ghosh, 2022. "Between the colossal and the catastrophic: Planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(5), pages 867-910, August.
    14. Zhangqi Zhong & Xu Zhang & Wei Shao, 2019. "Measuring global energy-related sulfur oxides emissions embodied in trade: a multi-regional and multi-sectoral analysis," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 95(1), pages 401-418, January.
    15. Chen, Hao & Qi, Shaozhou & Zhang, Jihong, 2022. "Towards carbon neutrality with Chinese characteristics: From an integrated perspective of economic growth-equity-environment," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 324(C).
    16. Nguyen, Minh Hieu & Pojani, Dorina & Nguyen, Thanh Chuong & Ha, Thanh Tung, 2021. "The impact of Covid-19 on children's active travel to school in Vietnam," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    17. John E. Fernández & Marcela Angel, 2020. "Ecological City-States in an Era of Environmental Disaster: Security, Climate Change and Biodiversity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(14), pages 1-21, July.
    18. Michele Acuto & Daniel Pejic & Jessie Briggs, 2021. "Taking City Rankings Seriously: Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 363-377, March.
    19. Johansson, Tim & Olofsson, Thomas & Mangold, Mikael, 2017. "Development of an energy atlas for renovation of the multifamily building stock in Sweden," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 203(C), pages 723-736.
    20. Roger Keil, 2020. "An urban political ecology for a world of cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(11), pages 2357-2370, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:7:p:1353-1371. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.