Changing Together

I ask my students to share the first image that comes to mind when they think about “commuting.” Most of them describe their annoyance at the physical inevitability of others. The stubborn humanity of our fellow travellers forces us to reflect on all the permutations of living socially. When I remark that most of their images tend to be negative, my students recall other stories. One is of a group of people stuck in a subway tunnel during a power outage. They are helping a passenger suffering from claustrophobic anxiety to overcome a panic attack by telling stories of their own past experiences with enclosed spaces. For a moment they become a community. When power is restored and the train moves again, they retreat into their own lives and the magical moment of connection seems almost unreal. Another student tells us that she closes her eyes and connects with her God. She is meditating, unaware of others, transcending the space and time of her commute.

Rare moments of togetherness and more frequent moments of isolation dominate these stories. Both conditions have been central to urban studies. Cogently reflecting on the new “S.U.V. model of citizenship” for example, cultural geographer Don Mitchell argues that we are increasingly privileging our “right to be left alone” and think of public spaces as allowing free and unobstructed passage to citizens who just float on, captured in their individual bubbles of privacy. This “floating bubble” view of citizenship denies the shared character of urban and natural environments by precluding unscripted interactions and limiting our modes of social engagement. Yet, ideally, “[c]ity spaces are those spaces where the public comes together in its diversity, and where, presumably, the interaction of difference helps create the possibility for democratic transformation.”11Don Mitchell, “The S.U.V. Model of Citizenship: Floating Bubbles, Buffer Zones, and the Rise of the ‘Purely Atomic’ Individual,” Political Geography 24 (2005): 86.

Already in 1903, in his famous essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” German sociologist Georg Simmel addressed this inevitable and often tense negotiation between “the individual aspects of life and those which transcend the existence of single individuals” in the city.22Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 11. As a mode of self-preservation, we develop “a protective organ” of egoism, showing indifference to other people’s specificity and a general sense that the world is populated by calculable quantities rather than emotional beings. Diversity and difference, so crucial to urban life, are thus flattened into a manageable series of types and patterns so that we become effectively indifferent towards distinctions between things.33Ibid., 14. Nature, which supports our urban existence, is also erased from view and becomes a product of social practices rather than a site of radical difference in its own right.

If a commute is a journey, usually to and from one’s place of work or study, we end up focusing on its destination. Everything along the way is a potential obstacle, a distraction, a nuisance. We have no time or energy for the journey’s unfolding because that journey is itself a tunnel between our starting and end points. We swing between these two points like a pendulum, so well captured in the German word for “commute”—Pendelfahrt. According to the urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre, commuters, and drivers in particular, are concerned with steering themselves to their destination, seeing only what they need to see for that purpose.44Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 313. They privilege an abstract, linear, and predominantly visual relation to their surroundings. Spaces they inhabit or move through become “instrumental spaces,” subordinated to a single strategic aim. This results in “the removal of every obstacle in the way of the total elimination of what is different.”55Ibid., 371.

If the rational calculations of our commuting necessitate a constant reduction of difference into sameness, I am compelled to think about the way obstacles on our commute, and our reactions to them, reveal who we are and what else we might become. Because of the unexpected disruption of our set trajectory—a delayed train, a broken power line, a lane closure, a snow storm, a pedestrian or a cyclist (who themselves might be commuters!)—the seemingly transparent world around us turns opaque again. We strain to relate it back to what we have planned. But the break in our urban patterns reveals most accurately the city we are in: the contours of its humanity, its norms and regulations, its centres and margins—and, in the end, the unforeseen possibilities of our alternative perceptions and interactions. The commute might become, for instance, an occasion to welcome, rather than dread, the presence of strangers in our life, remaining open to their difference, realizing again and again that we owe them the same respect they owe us. The urban reciprocity.

Commuting is a strange word with an etymological story of its own. It comes from the Latin commūtāre: com meaning “together” and mūtāre, to change. This signals that the commute, most often described as a vaguely annoying encounter with unfamiliar others on our way to somewhere else, holds the possibility of our changing together along the way. Instead of being the festival of anti-social disrespect for our physical and social environment and an occasion to reject all those others who might threaten or irritate us with their difference (and sometimes even their mere existence), the commute is an opportunity to think socially about shared spaces, shared responsibilities, and shared trajectories in the city. Our responsibility extends to the wellbeing of other people we do not know or even approve of, but it also involves the environment itself. Marginalized spaces, from abused natural environments to derelict urban spaces, also demand our attention and remind us of the dangers of our environmental indifference as we consider only the efficiency of our trajectory. Yet our lives depend on the deeply interwoven character of all environmental existence—urban and natural. We tend to remember this mostly because of the disruptions and restrictions in our path. These allow us to see more clearly the shortcomings of the world we are making and therefore all the ways we could make it better.

I am thinking, in the end, of my student’s story about the subway train momentarily suspended in a dark tunnel waiting for the power to return, and a group of commuters telling stories to help her overcome her fear of enclosed spaces. The disruption of linear progress and the emotional turmoil it triggers draws out people’s capacity to care for one another. In another context, Tennessee Williams expressed this best: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” To commute well, one has to recognize that kind stranger and become one in turn, respectfully engaged in the process of changing together. Our awareness of the shared and fundamentally social nature of living space makes it not only possible but also necessary that we assume responsibility for others—and for otherness itself—at all times, and not only during visible crises. This is also the spirit of commuting, which in its parallel etymology, means to ease or alleviate. If much of urban experience feels to us like a sentence, condemning us to isolation from our social and natural environments and even from ourselves, we might then seek to commute it by considering alternative forms of connection with both the human and non-human worlds we inhabit. These alternatives would have to privilege the quality of the journey itself, rather than its destination.