Transitioning comforts: Bodily evaluations of urban mobilities

Abstract

This chapter argues that within research on mobilities, comfort is often treated as a predictable effect of different technologies of transit. It shows how comfort and discomfort are bodily evaluations of experience that change over time, often in subtle ways, in relation to changing circumstances. The chapter demonstrates how these bodily evaluations give rise to different tactics that aim to maximise people’s powers of acting. It illustrates not only how aggregate accounts of comfort can be problematic, but that aggregate accounts also overlook the transitional way that events and encounters are registered by bodies and evaluated as being comfortable or uncomfortable, changing them in the ..