Month: October 2023

As this blog centres around the theme of encounters, it makes sense for me to kick things off with a lighter, more personal perspective –– my recent experience with urban encounters during the national railway strike on September 1st.

Anticipating the railway strike for that day, I bought a bus ticket from Hammersmith to Southampton in advance. Well – I thought I had it all figured out, and I even made it to the bus stop around 14:30, a solid half-hour before the scheduled departure time. Little did I know, this marked the beginning of an intriguing episode in the world of urban encounters.

That bus never showed up! Amusingly enough, I found myself in the company of fellow travellers who were also going to Southampton. As time went by, we gradually identified each other as the ones left waiting in vain. We were united by our shared misfortune—our bus never arrived. It took us nearly two hours, until approximately 16:30, to realise that our bus might never make an appearance. A few of us had been tracking our bus using a real-time app and discovered that it had ‘departed’ from our stop without a pause. A peculiar and ghostly moment was when we collectively realised that our bus wasn’t merely delayed; it had chosen to abandon us altogether.

Amongst us were a Geordie family (with big suitcases), a hipster-looking woman, a musician, a man in suit, a middle-aged gentleman, myself and perhaps one or two people but I cannot remember them (because they did join the journey). In this moment of crisis, all of us looked quite hopeless – especially me because my old iPhone didn’t even have any tracking apps installed and was low on battery. Two people decided to ring the National Express about our bus – guess what – it took the gentleman 30 mins to actually speak to someone from the NE. The NE told the gentleman that our bus was “oversubscribed” at Victoria Station therefore it didn’t stop at Hammersmith and they can only arrange for a new bus at noon the next day. I was sure my face was frozen when I heard the gentleman repeating “did you just say there will be no bus until the next day” on the phone.

Anyway, under some pressure from the gentleman, the guy from NE said we can take another bus from Victoria Station to the Heathrow airport terminal and from there to Southampton. Oh what lovely news! What followed is a lengthy process of getting everyone’s individual ticket transferred to the new one over the gentleman’s phone. I thanked the gentleman for lending his phone to everyone and slowly moved to Victoria Station. Then, on the waiting line for the new bus, I found my ‘stranger fellows’ there. I started to have a conversation with a man in suit and realised that he was just finishing off his PhD in physics in Edinburg and has a Finnish girlfriend from Helsinki (where I just left from my three-year’s post-doc research)! What were the chances! I was surprised to find out that I had the energy and the mood to explain to him what the difference between human geography and sociology is and what my new project in Southampton is. All of this occurred in a rather ordinary setting of the Victoria Bus Station, amid chaotic circumstances rife with sweat, crowds, noise, and blaring announcements.

We eventually arrived at Heathrow Airport Terminal 3, where we faced a two-hour wait for our bus. During this time, I encountered more helpless people —an elderly white woman and a young Scottish woman. They approached me, inquiring about how to read the electronic display to locate their buses. While I was not able to tell them what they wanted, we started to share each other’s terrible day. A sense of collective empathy emerged among us as we grappled with our anger toward National Express. The Scottish woman made me laugh when she said the NE should be renamed as National Distress. In parting, we exchanged wishes of good luck in arriving at each destination.

By the time I arrived at Southampton Central Station, it was well past midnight. Despite the whirlwind of indignation, shock, and confusion that had swept over me in the past few hours, I couldn’t help but find it oddly heartening that these feelings became more manageable when shared collectively with other strangers. In that shared experience, actions were taken and support was offered across racial and gender differences. It reminded me of Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘throwntogetherness,’ – heterogeneous things and people came together in a non-linear way – which can emerge from moments like these – when infrastructures falter and break down.

While we did band together in response to the crisis, our actions were not ‘revolutionary’ in the traditional sense; we didn’t organise a protest in front of National Express’s headquarters, for example. It did cross my mind that, if we were bold, we could write a collective complaint letter to National Express, demanding compensation for having been left stranded. I think we will probably do this individually, judging by the conversation that I’ve had with the gentlemen. (Unfortunately, I must confess that I haven’t yet written a letter, given all the adjustments required for my new life in Southampton).

What fascinates me is that, as I reflect on my previous experiences living in big cities, I can’t recall a time when I engaged in conversations with so many strangers and did things with them (relatively together) – all in a single day. All in all, what I want to convey through this oddly exceptional experience is that there is something about encounters which makes them able to foster collective emotions and actions, whether big or small. Encounters, in this sense, are the fundamental conditions where we cross paths with ourselves and others – a topic that has fascinated urban scholars for ages. I hope that such productive and intriguing encounters continue to thrive, morphing into new forms in the digital space. This is precisely what my new project seeks to figure out