Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically. Although it was carefully reviewed, it may still contain errors and may not correspond exactly to the recorded audio track. Time stamps are indicative and may not correspond to the edited audio-video recording provided.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (00:03)
Hello and welcome back. Today we are going to talk about the temporalities of the everyday life and more specifically the rhythms that compose the urban life. The ways we live, walk, move, interact with each other express rhythms. This is also true when we participate to the collective, take care of each other or resource ourselves. Our daily life is composed by patterns of activities, routines and habits that are reproduced day after day and that organize the temporalities of our lives. Some of these rhythms are complementary, others are antagonistic. Urban life is thus composed by intertwined fluxes and processes that express and determine how people experience space and time in the city. At the scale of the everyday, envisioning social and environmental transitions implies to renegotiate how such rhythms relate to each other. It questions which rhythms should be privileged and which ones are marginalized. Transitions are also opportunities to reinforce emerging rhythms that characterize innovative or alternative ways of living. Because the reorganization of everyday rhythms involves actors with different institutions and agendas, such as policymakers, private sectors, citizens, challenging everyday rhythms also raises critical questions about who has the power to influence the pace and tempo that organize and transform cities and how power dynamics expressed through conflicting rhythms may be negotiated. In that context, enriching your temporal imaginations requires one to question how to study and valorize rhythms that are experienced as empowering because they impact the quality of our everyday reality. To discuss such critical matter, we have the privilege to welcome today Bronwen Morgan and Zarina Patel. Bronwen is a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, a social legal scholar with longstanding expertise in regulation and governance, and a particular focus, ever since becoming a parent, on interdisciplinary ways to reimagine how economy and environment work together. She has found it most rewarding to help build networks and organizations that bring together academic research, activism, and advocacy. In this capacity, she has helped co-found the Transition Towns chapter of Montpelier in Bristol, UK, the New Economy Network of Australia Cooperative, the Collaborative Research Network on Utopian Legality, Prefigurative Politics, and Radical Governance, and most recently, Regen Sydney,a network of organizations and individuals exploring regenerative future for the city. Bronwen, thank you very much for being with us today.
Bronwen Morgan (02:56)
Thank you.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (02:58)
Our second guest is Zarina Patel. Zarina is an Associate Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Dean for Research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Cape Town. Her scholarship includes engaged research and teaching practices that seek alternate ways of knowing and responding to complex urban issues in Southern contexts. With a background in both the sciences and social sciences and with a deep curiosity with how cities can transition to become more sustainable and just, her inquiries straddle science and policy and theory and practice. Her approach to engaging the scalar and temporal dimensions of just urban transitions recognizes the need for multiple knowledge and viewpoints and is, therefore, explicitly collaborative. Zarina is President of the Society of South African Geographers and Chair of the South African Committee of the International Geographers Union. Zarina, it's a pleasure to welcome you today. Thank you for being with us.
Zarina Patel (03:59)
Thank you Michel and thank you Keri.
Keri Facer (04:02)
Nice to have you.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (04:02)
So, before diving into today's topic, could you both tell us first a bit about the origins of your interest in the study of time in your respective fields and when and how did you realize you wanted to work on time and rhythms?
Zarina Patel (04:18)
Thank you, Michel. So, as you've said, I'm an urban geographer and I'm interested in how cities transition towards more sustainable and just futures. And as a geographer, the default is really to look at the spatial distribution of resources. Who has access to what and where? Who is included and who's excluded in discussions around these distributions? And what are the interesting collaborations and contestations that work to bring about these spatial distributions? These questions are particularly poignant in Africa, where colonial planning systems have deeply shaped spatial distribution, and specifically in South Africa, where the raison d'etre of apartheid planning was specifically to keep communities apart, with black communities systematically excluded from the distribution of resources. So, the more I engaged with questions of space and spatial distribution and scale, looking at the differences between local and global, I became increasingly aware of the different tempos or rhythms, if you like, that shape change disproportionately across society. My special curiosity then about the distribution of resources went hand in hand with observations that it's the poor who are made to wait for safe electricity connections, functioning sanitation for houses, for wastewater treatment, for water connections and for the bus. Similarly, my work on policy change to support urban change is marked by processes of continuity and discontinuity, where certain policy areas are prioritized whilst others are marginalized. I've become increasingly interested in what drives these prioritizations and at the cost of which other policy areas. Who wins and who loses is a result of this policy prioritization. To understand what it takes to achieve just and sustainable transitions in our cities, I've come to realize that the role of time and timing is critical in shaping who has access to what, where and when, and that the temporalities of policy making, implementation and lived experiences are rarely examined in the core focus in terms of research on urban transitions. So, yes, the spatial and the temporal are two sides to me of the same coin when it comes to urban transitions.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (06:43)
Thank you, Zarina. You're already diving deep into the connection between rhythm, space and time. That's great. Bronwen, what about you?
Bronwen Morgan (06:51)
I, in many ways, just took time for granted in a lot of my research until really quite recently. But I was thinking about the texture of a sensitivity to time that got me really excited at a certain juncture and pushed me into the work I'm doing now. So, I typically worked on very much government regulation and large scale regulation of large corporations. And after sort of half a career of working on that, I got a bit disillusioned or stuck. And then I came across these patterns of activity at the grassroots, basically much smaller entities and people collaborating at the grassroots to form either patterns of activism or actually projects and initiatives and even enterprises to respond to the kinds of challenges that I've been interested in, many of which were environmental. when I think about it, it was actually the rhythm involved in this new focus that got me energized. I've always been a musician and I had shifted at some point from playing classical to jazz. And I was enchanted by the improvisation of jazz rhythms. This is a metaphorical answer in a way, but I feel like the rhythm of activism and enterprise got me excited to start that as a focus of study. And after that, it was just the happenstance of my becoming involved in a specifically time-focused research program with all of you that trained my mind on it more consciously.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (08:24)
Excellent. Thank you, Bronwen. So, this podcast is about temporal imagination. And one of our aims is to highlight the diversity and richness of temporalities and rhythms that compose our lives on earth. And, so, you have already mentioned a few examples. I'd like to dive more into how you perceive in your work such a richness, such diversity of temporalities that shape our lives and our activities. How does it manifest itself culturally and socially speaking? Do you have any example that illustrate the diversity of temporalities and rhythms that characterize the phenomena you are interested in?
Bronwen Morgan (09:11)
I actually wanted to say just a short bit about the temporalities that I took for granted in the sphere of law. Because in many ways, as Zarina said, geography is centrally about space. And in many ways, law is quite centrally about time. But no one talked about that overtly. It makes me think we were always working across three quite different temporalities within the legal sphere. I mean, there are probably more, but even within quite standard Western law, you've got the classic vision of law as looking to the past and pulling precedent from the past. And you, in fact, can't really legitimate, at least in the courts, anything if it's not written down in a statute. It has to come from the past. And, so, you're drawing that thread through from the past and making it always seem coherent. So it tends to be quite linear because the story is told as if it was an inevitable result of the past. But then, of course, you have legislation and statutes and politicians bargaining and fighting around what kinds of laws are going to pass. And those are very future-oriented. We're trying to pass a bill at the moment in Australia to take account of the interests of future generations. And it's a private member's bill. The two main parties are outraged because they say, "Our entire job is about future generations. That's all we do all day. We pass laws in order to create futures." But that's not very interrogated. But the temporality is future-looking. But then the third strand is the most intriguing to me because it's the way that courts and legislatures deal with custom. And there's all sorts of technical ways that they take it into account. But custom is actually quite open textured in a way. It can sometimes look like frozen tradition, but often courts will extract a kind of a story out of partly the past, but in a sense, trying to mould that story so it can prefigure some new way forward. And the Australian courts did that in a fantastic case on land rights that I was lucky enough to work on. So, that's the richness of legal temporalities for me.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (11:23)
Thank you, Brownwen. Zarina, what about you?
Zarina Patel (11:27)
Super, thanks Michel. So, in thinking about the diversity and richness of temporalities and rhythms, I really want to sort of ground my discussion in Africa and in looking at urban transitions in Africa. And the first set of comments to make is that Africa's urban transition is one that has been delayed. So, there's already a temporal aspect to that. So, if we look at, for example, in contrast with Europe and other places in the global north, they've reached 50 % urbanization ages ago and they stabilized. Whereas in Africa, we're yet to reach 50 % urbanized. That will only happen in 2050... around then. And yet we have more people living in cities in Africa combined than the whole of Europe, and in a context where this urbanization trend is one that is much delayed compared to the rest of the world. So, I think that that's quite important in terms of thinking about interventions. Can we all have the same kinds of interventions, given that we're in different stages of urbanization and different stages of trajectories? And then the second point that I want to make is in thinking about the notion of a sustainable city and just transitions. This is really a notion, a concept that is infused with questions of temporalities and pace. And specifically the issue around efficiency is one that really drives debates around sustainability, many of the debates that we're looking at. Efficiency and getting there fast, making quick decisions, et cetera, is a real focus. What I've come to learn and what I've really come to realize is that there's a politics to this temporal leaning towards efficiency that really sets some communities as being slow, whereas others being faster. And I think that there's a hierarchy that gets set up, which I think that we need to really be quite careful and mindful of. There's often a stereotype of Africa that we kind of lack time discipline. Africans are always late. And there's the expression of being, you know, oh, it'll happen in African time. So, there are these expressions and ways of talking about time in African contexts that have a very different temporality to that temporality of efficiency. So, if we think about in Swahili, the term "pole pole", which is "slowly, slowly" is very much a reflection of a much more leisurely clock. In South Africa, we use terms in our everyday speech such as just now, now now, which could mean anything between right now or much later. If you say, "I'm on my way," that could mean "I'll be there in three minutes," or it could mean "I'll be there in 30 days." The precision around how we talk about time is very open. And that has a lot to do with these questions of uncertainty in African contexts. In Nigeria, for example, there's an art to arriving. It's considered impolite to arrive first at an important function. And what is more significant than your arrival is your presence and participation. So, punctuality is not what is being prioritized and valued. So, in terms of how we talk about time, there's also a different set of languages, which is very imprecise, which might be quite hard for someone from a different context to kind of get your head around. And then the last set of observations I just want to make about the richness of temporalities and rhythms and cultures in an African context is that often our universal trajectories around time are on thinking about the past, the present and the future. Whereas in my readings about African time, past time, ancestral time is what is really important. So, in thinking about how you engage presently, the ancestors in the past have a lot to do with that. So, Mbiti, J.S., an author who wrote a seminal article in 1969 called African Religions and Philosophy, he says that actually there are different frames of time that are specific to African time, which is about actual time in the form of experienced events and potential time, so, events that are certain to occur in some rhythmic or natural phenomena, like the seasons, etc. But the view on the future is one that is not predominant in thinking about time in African contexts. It's the relationships and the events, the seasonality of when certain animals get culled, when certain vegetables get harvested, et cetera. Those are the temporal markers that people talk about, even in urban contexts, to describe temporalities rather than the linear clock. So, there's a really nice quote from someone called Phillips. He says, "It's not the clock that rules the day, but the relationship." Thank you.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (16:22)
That's great. Thanks, Keri? You want to step in?
Keri Facer (16:26)
Yeah, I just noticed something that I find fascinating in both of your contributions. And it's not something I've thought about before. But Bronwen, you're talking about legal precedent, like the history. And this is effectively standing on the shoulders of the judges who have gone before and bringing that into the present. And Zarina, you're talking about ancestral time and the kind of knowledge and expertise of ancestors as visible in the present. And I wondered if it's something also to do with the technology of writing that shifts our relationship with what has gone before. So, Bronwen, with legal precedent, I'm assuming it has to be written down, does it? Whereas Zarina, are you talking about ancestral time or wisdom as kind of always relational, always held in oral encounters?
Bronwen Morgan (17:18)
At least in the case of precedent, the written is crucial, although in the European continental tradition, there is no formal precedent and it's what the code says. And, so, that code is very stark and basic principles. But the judges in the cases where they're looking for the precedent will sort of expound at some length about something. And then the following judge will tear apart the words and give them a different spin to turn the precedent in a different direction. But that depends on obsessing over the words, whereas my not very knowledgeable concept of ancestral and oral time is a very different, almost ontology of where the meaning resides.
Zarina Patel (18:02)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it is a different ontology. It's a different logic, which I think, Keri, you're encapsulating as oral time, but I think it even can go beyond that. I think it's more about the tacit knowledge that yes, gets carried down orally, but also just through practices, practices that happen through generations that just get replicated, that are not necessarily even spoken about. I think there's an epistemic politics here around how we engage with what we think is the norm. There are so many different ways in which people engage with this question of time, or with different kinds of knowledges, not necessarily through writing, but through other forms of communication, that relationality, etc. So, I think that the tacit knowledge and how ideas and practices are passed down through generations, it's almost encoded. So, yeah.
Keri Facer (19:05)
I love that. So, if we're thinking about the everyday practices in our cities today, already what I get from you both is this real sense of layers, this real sense of the entanglement of past, present and futures and their encoding either formally or in bodies or in language. So, we've got this real rich sense of the present rhythms, not just being the present rhythms, but being the rhythms that are entangled with what's gone before. Thank you.
Zarina Patel (19:14)
Yes. If I could just add one more thing, I mean, I think, yes, they entangle and they coexist. And whilst I speak about, you know, pole pole and going slowly, slowly, et cetera, at the same time, Africa's pretty speeded up and there's a lot of innovation and there's a lot of really good ideas and we are global players. So, there are these different logics that are coexisting, but within those different coexisting logics, I think that tensions do emerge. And I think understanding the origins of those tensions is what I'm trying to surface. Yeah.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (20:09)
Well, we can piggy-tail on that because my next question was to move on more specifically on what you're working on in your research. So, maybe we can piggy-tail Zarina with you on what you're interested in. So, as a geographer, you're particularly interested in the study of everyday mobility. And, so, I was wondering if you could explain to us how decisions made regarding everyday modes of transportation connect to both the experience of time and social justice?
Zarina Patel (20:39)
I should have said right at the beginning, I'm not a time scholar. I've become a time scholar through this endeavor. And equally, the question of mobility is a new area for me because I think it's one that is quite easily seen in terms of this question of time. I used the example earlier about waiting for the bus. I think that it's one of the infrastructures that we engage in where questions of efficiency and time are very illustrative. So, this is a new area for me and I'm finding it really exciting to think about time in looking at questions of mobility. So, I think the first point to make about mobility in African cities is that it is messy. It's messy. There are intersections between the formal and the informal. People very seldom catch one form of transport. You get multiple forms of transport and there are intersections between them, and those decisions and choices between which modes of transport one catches or engages with, it's also something that is temporarily based. Women that work in my building, for example here at the University of Cape Town, administrators. They will come to work really early in the morning by public transport, by bus, and they will leave earlier in the day because they have childcare responsibilities. There's a transport temporal time budget that people engage with in South African cities. Because South African cities spatially are very sprawling, people have very long distances to travel to get to work. And Cape Town, as a city, is one of the most congested cities in the world. So, actually, if we look at time budgets, it's not about the distance that you've traveled. It's actually about the time you've spent. So, when someone asks, how far is it from home to work? You'll answer in terms of time, your time and your mode of transport. So, there are different contingencies that impact on the decisions that you make and your travel time. Also different infrastructures intersect with one another. So, we also have what is called load shedding in Cape Town or in South Africa where electricity is interrupted. And when electricity is interrupted, the intersections, et cetera, all become quite jammed up. And that plays havoc with what happens in terms of transport travel times. We can't just talk about transport and efficiency around transport in isolation of looking at other infrastructures. Changing a transport regime requires thinking about these intersections between the formal and the informal, but also between different kinds of infrastructures. And I think that this idea, you know, as espoused in the SDGs, for example, SDG 11.2, which is advocating for public transport with a fixed route and fixed service... This is really a panacea. It's an aspiration. It's not something that we could easily get to in a Cape Town context. I heard a really interesting quote the other day actually, from a minister of parliament, who claims that being on time in Cape Town is actually a sign of privilege, which I think it is really interesting given the contingencies that people have to negotiate. I'm not really sure where I stand on that. But I think it's an interesting hook to discuss further.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (23:54)
Thank you. I mean, that really encapsulates pretty strongly actually what we're discussing today about the connection between everyday rhythm and the experience of power dynamics. So, thanks for those first examples. Bronwen, I'd like to turn to you now. You're a Professor of Law, so, for you, I guess the phenomenon you're interested in are bit different, but I'm sure connected. So, could you explain how what feels like everyday mundane choice is often shaped by background structures of low finance or risk and liability that express power dynamics? How do you understand those connections?
Bronwen Morgan (24:37)
I like the way that you frame the question and it speaks very much to my interest, but I also think it's interesting that you didn't see the background structures of law, human rights, accountability. It's marrying the law with finance, risk and liability is one particular picture of law's power. And I think it is really a very dominant one and it's relatively invisible in the mundane choices. You've got a whole background structure of contact law enforceable by courts in operation all the time and all this business of unequal power between who sets the terms of service and on what terms they're accepted. In a way it's become more visible because we do it so much, but we still don't read the terms of service. So, you click on the line and you accept these vast numbers of terms of service, which should something go wrong, will shape everything that flows from that. And I actually had an interesting experience just the other day where the app slowed down that experience. And I'm very conscious of it, and I'm conscious of the power inequalities, and it drives me mad in one sense, but you have to sort of keep clicking and accepting that, along with its background infrastructure of law, in order to just get through the day. But I downloaded an app, which I was asked to do for a work partnership, and before I actually finished installing it, it said, "Are you aware that this app was designed in the United States and the terms of service for data privacy in the United States do not meet European standards?" Now this is in Australia, but I was downloading it. And once I had to click yes, I am aware and I accept this and any implications, I felt much more agitated, really thought about not downloading it. So, that's when the legal sort of invisibility suddenly pops into the foreground. But I thought it might be also worth just mentioning cultural differences as well. When I first moved to the States to study, I found a real cultural clash around borrowing cars from friends. I eventually found out that it was the background structure of insurance law and the propensity to litigate even between friends, where if you had a crash amongst friends, you'd sort it out through relationships back where I was from. an actual boyfriend tell me once that he couldn't lend me his car because his parents had deep pockets and he was a target for litigation. I found that very culturally jarring.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (26:58)
I was wondering if you have any example of stories that highlight how such modalities of exchange involve specific rhythms, specific temporalities. How do you connect the activity of sharing and the economy that goes with it and the way it is structured, organized nowadays with issues related to time and rhythms?
Bronwen Morgan (27:21)
The car sharing flows naturally because the actual initiatives of car sharing was one of the ones I studied, which was neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing. So, it was what I described between friends formalized into an actual economic enterprise, which then facilitated that, but not with anonymous rental car type things. You were literally borrowing people's cars who lived in your neighborhood. I often initially thought of it as spatial, that it sort of rooted you in the neighborhood. So, the practice of doing this had you walking from one place to another to get the car. So, it disrupts the rhythm of convenience of having the car either in your driveway or right outside, or, you know, depending on your parking capacity, but undoubtedly less conveniently located than having your own car. And I was astonished when participating this, and also observing other people's remarks about whether they would or wouldn't do this, as to the prominence of that broken rhythm, the idea that you couldn't run out of your house with your keys. You had to look on your phone, see where the nearest car was. And at the time that we started doing this, I was studying them, but also kind of participating in these rhythms. And I had two children under five and I was lugging a car seat under one arm and people just thought... they were actually quite angry with me sometimes and I think it was about the rhythm of convenience or even safety being broken or something like that. There was one instance when one of the children was bitten by a redback, which isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, I should, it can be but it was fine but we did still want to get to the hospital and we had to knock on the neighbor's door. And that was another sort of normative rhythm that upset people, that this access to convenience and safety is somehow built into what's expected around private transport. And I think, for me, there are other rhythms that are invisible about, partly about what you might have to do to adjust your working life, to afford one or two cars, depending on who you are, for example, or even just the bureaucratic rhythms of paperwork involved in owning a car, which are burdensome in themselves, but nobody sees as an inconvenience. So, there's this kind of cultural codification of what is desirable convenience and undesirable convenience. I mean, that's part of what I think goes on in the car sharing. And then there's other things about what some people experience as social friction, in terms of actually interacting with other humans who own those cars and other people, and this would include myself, felt like it was a way to build relationships around transport. And in the end, half of our street joined the company because they were so uncomfortable about the first set of inconveniences that I described that they, I think, almost unconsciously bound together to mitigate our inconvenience and build relationships in the process.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (30:13)
Well, as we're on the field of mobility, Zarina, how does that connect with your own experience with mobility in South Africa?
Zarina Patel (30:22)
Super thanks for that question, Michel and Bronwen's given me a whole lot of entry points actually that I want to pick up on from what she's spoken about. I was interested intrigued by your story about the app and one of the things that has come through in the research that I've been doing on mobility, which really talks to this relational aspect of time, is that actually apps are not what people use but they use WhatsApp groups. So, WhatsApp groups even for the train service... There are like over 500 people on a WhatsApp group who will alert one to whether there's a delay or whether there's been a cancellation, etc. I'm thinking about this question about the coexistence of informal and formal. One of my other interviews was with someone who could quite easily catch a public transport bus service from where she lives to where she works. But instead she catches an informal taxi. And when I asked her why she catches the taxi, she says, "Well, the taxi picks me up where I am. If I had to catch the bus, I have to walk to a bus stop, that I'm often running late, etc. So it's much easier to catch to just be picked up where I am." And then she says also, "I can pay in cash. For a bus, I've got to get a preloaded card, the points at which the vendors from which I can preload my card are very far away and they're not convenient. The buses also mean that I have to be there by a particular time." So, they are determining her rhythm. Whereas she can walk out of her house and catch a taxi as it passes by. "The taxi will wait until it's full and then we'll leave." But she says, "Actually, it's part of my social life. All the taxi are from my neighborhood. So, they're people that I know." So, it's part of catching up with people in her community. Understanding that relationality behind these choices around informality makes us think differently about efficiency, and about whether something is slow or fast or behind or ahead, because there are other dimensions that are brought to bear in the choices that people are making. Informal taxis in South Africa and across the continent, these are solutions to a problem of getting people from one place to another in colonially planned cities or apartheid planned cities that make it very difficult for people to traverse the city. So, these are solutions that are different to the one person, one car model, which is not sustainable. There are many more people in a vehicle. So, they are taking the gap as it were. Minibus taxis often have a bad rap for being bad drivers. They're fast. They're taking the gap. But actually, metaphorically, they are taking the gap in providing a solution for hundreds of thousands of people every day who don't have any other public transport solution. Equally, if you think about the motorbikes in Uganda, the boda bodas, again, because these are such congested cities, the motorbike shared rides, you can call up a shared ride like an Uber, but a motorbike, and you jump onto the motorbike and you get your lift to wherever you're going. There are safety concerns, et cetera, et cetera. But the question of efficiency of being able to weave through the traffic, being able to take the back roads, it becomes something that is very convenient for people. So, I think that these are different logics really that are informing the kinds of choices that people make. I think that people also make different choices depending on where they are in the month. So, how much money you still have because different modes of transport costs vastly different amounts. So, there's a temporality that is determined socioeconomically, but also time of day. Women will choose different transport types depending on the time of day and the season. So, in winter, it's dark early and you're not gonna catch the train by yourself at night. I had a student last year who did a study on looking at transport traces of students at the University of Cape Town, and she was looking at some of the criteria that sit in the SDG 11.2, which is on transport, which is looking at questions of safety, affordability, accessibility and sustainability. And interestingly, what was found was that sustainability was the least important criteria for choosing. Efficiency, not so much, but safety in cities that are dangerous. It's not about the safety of the vehicle, but it's your personal safety. Your personal safety, and that of course has a gendered dimension, affordability and accessibility, how easy it is to access that mode of transport, were the three top issues that really influenced the kinds of decisions people make about mobility and those all have a temporal dimension.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (35:10)
Fascinating. I really appreciate the way you intertwine those different components between the rhythm of the day and the rhythm of the month, the physical environment and the social environment that define the level of safety, the financial environment that define the level of resources available. And, so, it's very fascinating to hear you connecting all that. Bronwen, I'm wondering, listening to Zarina's example, how do you connect that with a more kind of macro perspective that's the one that inform your research from a legal perspective? How easy or difficult do you think it is for people to change their everyday practices and establish rhythms that are convenient, safe, good for them from the perspective of legal studies? When and where does it start?
Bronwen Morgan (36:05)
Thanks. When you say, where does it start? I can't help thinking there's so much of an assumption within a law school that the change will start with the law, that the law will direct X and Y to do something and then they'll do it. I should perhaps clarify that my interest in the sharing economy came about out of an excitement about what it could do for those multiple goals that Zarina was talking about, including sustainability. But I think as it develops, people will change perhaps more for the convenience and efficiency than for the sustainability. So, ride sharing has exploded and people have changed their habits, subject to some of those limitations of safety and affordability and so on that Zarina was emphasizing, but none of this is driven by law and policy. There's some sort of important catalyst, whether it's a pain point and, you know, if a new mobility solves a pain point that people were experiencing before, or if there's, you know, these breaks in life, like where you have children or you move countries or something like that that provides an opportunity to experiment with changing these practices. So, there's some kind of completely cultural, socially powerful catalyst that's really important. But I do think that the macro level is really important for sustaining any attempt to change, number one. And number two, for spreading shared changes in practices to a wider community. So, there'll always be a minority who are interested or curious or impassioned to change whether they're resisting something or inspired by a new way of living. But to actually make that stick and go mainstream, you need that macro changes. And I think that often the law legitimates what's going on by sort of saying it is OK. I will provide insurance if you're borrowing your neighbor's car. And because I'll provide that, I'll verify that the background insurance will apply despite that. I think I'm generally a believer that the temporality of law and social change starts with society and not with the law. That's the broad answer.
Keri Facer (38:11)
Can I jump in there? I mean, this conversation is really fascinating to me. So first, there's the temporal logic of relationality, how to maintain relationships, temporal logic of proximity, of efficiency, of cost, also urgency, safety and then this long-term sustainability. And then I'm listening to what you're saying Bronwen about the legal infrastructures that might respond to that and your work on looking at the kind of freedoms and the possibilities enabled by sharing. And it strikes me that a kind of legal perspective that explicitly articulates rights or possibilities to inhabit these different temporal logics and doesn't impose a singular one because that's where we get into trouble, isn't it, with the SDGs? They impose a singular logic of formality understood as a particular sort of efficiency. So, thinking about what the legal processes or structures that might undergird our cities are that would allow these different temporal logics to surface and to become visible.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (39:16)
Thanks, Keri for this. Maybe in connection with that and to wrap up this conversation about the informal means of mobility, Zarina, in your work, how do you perceive the impact of local or national policies on people's everyday experience of time?
Zarina Patel (39:33)
Thanks, Michel. So, I'm to take it to another scale and look at the global starting with the SDGs and specifically looking at SDG 11, which is about affordable and sustainable transport systems. There is a cascade from the global to the national to the local. And when the global sets a particular tone around. and a particular set of assumptions around time and how we should be engaging with time, these trickle down into national and local policies. And there's a disconnect between people's experiences of how they are navigating time and navigating their own mobilities, and that of what's being expressed in policy. So, policy is talking about the fixed ride, fixed schedule, public transport, but in fact, there are such a wide range of different kinds of transport options that SDG 11.2 is blind to. and because of that, the decisions that national and local governments are making also become blind to those options, despite the fact that there's such a prevalent mode in which people engage with the city in African cities. there are many factors that lock in those particular logics, including this dominance around best practices. The World Bank and the IMF and various other funding organizations perpetuate these ideas that we can cut and paste things from one context into another context. And, of course, city governments, national governments need funding. So, these become opportune ways in which policies get shaped that are inappropriate for the actual realities of what's happening on the ground. So, there's a broader landscape that's shaping what happens in terms of policy at a national and local level in different African contexts, which have to do with these questions of resourcing and funding and capacity, et cetera. One of the other trickle downs of that is in order for us to come up with good policy and to make good decisions, we also need good data. And the SDGs are very much driving a data revolution. There's the question of justice that infuses this because it's particular kinds of data that are being collected. The city of Cape Town is very much committed to achieving the SDGs. And they are collecting data on various aspects of sustainable development within cities. But if it's shaped purely by the way in which the SDGs are defined, we're going to miss the real problems which are sitting at those intersections between the formal and the informal. Cape Town actually was involved in the piloting of SDG 11 in 2015 before the SDGs were ratified. And they raised a number of questions around informality, et cetera. some of those things we won, but not all of them. The UN and these big global processes are very, very stuck. A lot of what happens at the local level in terms of policy is actually locked in by logics that are being formulated elsewhere out of context. So, I think that in terms of turning that around, and it really resonates with some things that Bronwyn was saying, is that actually we really need to close this gap between policy and practice, and between policy and the everyday, and gathering more data about what is happening in our cities, using our own citizens to generate that data, co-producing data, co-producing knowledge about cities. I think that these are really, really important in order to generate evidence-based policy. I think that there are temporalities around policy as well. Some policies get fast-tracked and then others sort of they drag their feet. And how these prioritizations happen, I think is a really important question because it does mean that it has implications for whose needs get addressed and whose don't. And that, of course, is a question of justice.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (43:24)
Well, that's full of insight. Thank you very much, Zarina. In a way, what you said kind of bringing the responsibility we share also as researchers to try to inform our understanding of those connections and those relations between formal and informal aspect of the everyday life, policy, how policies are implemented, and the reality of the everyday experience that people live. We met, the four of us, through this program funded by the British Academy, The Times of a Just Transition, which is a research program. And in a way, through this program, we share a concern for the transformation of the world we are living in, taking into consideration the individual and collective rhythms that shape processes of transformation. So, what do you perceive as critical when you consider individual and collective agency? What does it require for people to feel empowered in the rhythms of their everyday life? What margins do you think people have to empower themselves when it comes to sustainable modes of transportation?
Zarina Patel (44:29)
I think choice and options are absolutely critical. Right now, I think people are very locked into particular ways in which they get across cities. So, I think having choices, having flexibility, these are all really important elements. And I think that also this deeper understanding of the rhythms of people and what they need to do. Because I think that, you know, the COVID has brought about a very different era across the world in terms of how we work and where we operate from. If we improve our digital accessibility, the need to be spatially together can reduce, which has an impact on transport. So, I think that looking at agility around where people work, where they need to be, at what times, what is necessary, what isn't necessary, those are really important questions. There's a social and relational elements to life that we need to maintain. So, how we get the balance right, I think are a set of really important questions. Climate change has a big impact from livelihoods to what people eat, to where people live, to the security of people's homes in terms of flooding, et cetera. There are a whole lot of questions that are going to shape what happens in terms of Africa's future. We have to come together in ways that find opportunities to shape different kinds of urban transitions.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (45:49)
Thanks, thanks, Zarina. Bronwen, in your work on sharing economy, how do you understand the type of engagement that is required for people to transform their everyday life toward more sustainable habits and ways of living?
Bronwen Morgan (46:04)
As you mentioned earlier, Zarina, that sustainability drags along with people's driving piece. It's the sort of slow coach on the motivations for adapting these new behaviors. And, so, for it to actually become a driving force. I mean, this is a sort of post-growth sensibility. I think some sense of a future that's infused by at least a debate about that is actually really important for engaging with the possibilities that sharing offer. And it's particularly relevant to time, I think, and temporalities because you have these movements like Slow Food and Slow Cities and so on. Zarina is often describing these long distances are able to cluster the different things that they need to get done in a day much more efficiently in a way, but it also enhances neighborhood relationships and so on. Policy needs to be driven by an engagement with this collective shared engagement with other forms of sort of post-growth futures. That was one thing I was thinking directly in relation to your question, Michel. But I did want to sort of express an enthusiasm, I suppose, for the infrastructure that would make that work in a way that's sensitive to the plural temporalities that Keri was talking about... If you design both a policy framework and actually a shared vision that is itself very open to different pockets of cities doing things in different ways. Digital technology ought to be able to make these kinds of distributed pluralism more possible than they might have been. But because of the background economic forces of concentrated corporate power essentially, and, you know, one platform rules the city, that kind of image which is attractive to cities that maybe you want to just take one partner for investment. It becomes much more difficult to do. But I think really holding onto that and trying to design legal and policy infrastructures that allow that, I'm very much with Zarina on that. I wanted to slightly push back on that. I appreciated the co-production of data multiple spaces and multiple textures so that you've got evidence for plurality in a sense. But I wouldn't want to let go also of the tacit knowledge and the unspoken practices that you started with at the beginning, because there's something about linking those to data that then dissolves the tacitness of it and really feeling empowered to change. People, I think, need to be brought along in a set of communicative sequences that feeds their sense of tacit knowledge about community and the point of living, I suppose, to be dramatic. So we can't data-fy that, I suppose.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (48:41)
One thing I hear in both of your responses is the importance of, whether it's through the facilitation of research or maybe other means, but the importance of having a space and a time for people to able to voice what they do informally, what they experience so that it's acknowledged, recognized, eventually can be used in a way, publicly, in a way that can be formalized later. Where do you perceive that space for exchanges? I mean, research is one thing that you suggested, Zarina, earlier. But, in terms of public space, for example, how do you envision the space and the time where people can collectively reflect on their experiences and the rhythms and the temporalities involved in their everyday life?
Zarina Patel (49:31)
Ok, thanks, Michel. So, I think that's quite a big question. And I think that, you know, my work in knowledge co-production really makes me think about alternative knowledge products, you know, away from our traditional kind of, you know, journal articles and books, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that really thinking creatively about other forms of expression, you know, photo voice exhibitions about people's experiences of, I'm using mobility as an example here, but of people's experiences of mobility, which is much more accessible to a cross section of people. If people are getting notices about train services, et cetera, through WhatsApp, they could equally easily take photographs of what they're doing. So, I think that that's another kind of evidence base that could result in an exhibition. Theatre, I think, having different ways of performing what happens in terms of one's everyday lives. I think that there are a range of different ways, designs, etc. So, other knowledge products that are produced with and by communities, I think are really the directions that we need to be going in and not be looking at our traditional forms of communication, because then those expressions can be seen. I think different forms of knowledge, moving away from datafying, I think that's a really important point, Bronwen, how do we hang on to that tacit knowledge and find ways of expression of that tacit knowledge? I think these are part of creative challenges that face the policy world.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (51:02)
Thank you, Zarina. Bronwen, any insight?
Bronwen Morgan (51:06)
Sydney recently ran a series of citizen juries in developing its sustainable 2030 policy. It wasn't to formulate the policy. It was to reflect on how it's going. And similarly, Taiwan is actually one example that gives me great positive inspiration for using the internet in a distributed and democratic and critically reflective way.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (51:29)
Can you tell us a bit more about that? Just so that we understand...
Bronwen Morgan (51:32)
Well, there were a number of layers, but one layer actually was to create overtly alternative websites for different agencies in the city that delivered different services, including transport. And to make it very clear that they weren't pretending to be the agency, but they were an alternative, citizen generated, and it was very technically proficient. And then it proposed different policies and showed you sort of more or less how they could work to the extent that they were able to do it with their own skills and resources. They implemented certain things in small areas. And this was very open. It wasn't done as a covert thing. And that built public interest in that. And then they ran a very extensive digital participation process for actually working out formal policy proposals for change, which had multiple layers. I think they had 200,000 people input into the platform and then they whittled it down to 1,000 and then 450, which is apparently some significant number for representative samples, and then groups of 9 or 10. And at each of these stages, they recorded the input and sort of made it cohere. Yeah, that's as much as I know. There's a book called Plurality, about this process in a sort of wiki form that they're encouraging anyone to contribute to.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (52:58)
Thanks for raising attention to that initiative. So, as we're getting toward the end of the episode, a question that relates obviously to the everyday life and how you connect personally to it. So, I was wondering if you could tell us if there is a daily activity whose rhythms make you feel good or even empowered, and how do you find a way to sustain it over time?
Bronwen Morgan (53:23)
I don't actually manage it every day but try to swim in the ocean which is relatively close and it's increasingly sort of feels like it has to be the ocean because there's something about the salt water that is part of the empowering feeling for some reason. but how do I manage to sustain it? I mean, part of the answer is that I just started doing it all year through the winter. And that was hard the first year and semi-hard the second year and easy after that. But I also feel that, and this is about the embodied nature of rhythms, is that after a while there's almost a molecular pull to doing it. And, so, if I can't sustain it because I haven't had the time that morning or whatever, I end up driving or cycling past and just jumping in in my clothes in order to sustain it. I think there's an obsessive quality, but it's very regenerative.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (54:19)
Thank you. I appreciate you bringing back the element of nature and water as a way to relate to our inner rhythms also. And thank you for sharing that experience. Zarina?
Zarina Patel (54:33)
Well, this is a snap moment because mine is also swimming. For me, definitely, swimming is the thing that keeps my sanity. I swim both in a pool and in the ocean. And I think there's a rhythmicalness to swimming. Particularly, I do a lot of very long open water swims. And I mean, all you got to think about is you got to stretch, you got to pull, you got to breathe, you got to blow, you got to kick. Like, you know, there's a rhythm to that, that is just, you hear your arm hit the water and you don't hear much else because you're underwater. I think there's something so empowering about cutting off all those other senses and really focusing in. I think there's something very meditative about swimming, the soundlessness, the weightlessness. And I think that the courage that it takes to swim open water, long distances, is also very empowering. For many, it's quite scary. I've swum with seals, with dolphins, with jellyfish. Thank goodness not with great white sharks yet. Hopefully never. We never know, they might be deep underneath and I haven't seen them. But I think there's a lot of courage that goes with it, which I think that in a world that demands so much of us, to do something for oneself and feed oneself before the day begins, I think is a really, for me, an important practice. And I think that, you know, when I'm out in the ocean and in the middle of nowhere and you see the mountains, et cetera, there's a sense of your own insignificance. But at the same time, there's a sense of power that an individual can have to get from A to B to be in this vastness and yet still be able to make sense of it. So, I think that there's a lot in swimming that is just also very soulful for me.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (56:27)
Thank you. Appreciate that. What you say also, I mean, highlight the fact that we're also connecting to water because we are made of water. And, so, it's something my wife tend to repeat often as she work on movement and water and the fact that we can connect with the environment through the way we experience within ourselves also what constitutes ourselves. So, I appreciate that we are ending this conversation, reconnecting our inner rhythms with the outer rhythms of the elements we are confronted to and how we can kind of find ways to be at peace and in coherence with them. So, thank you for sharing those two information. Keri, I don't know if you want to step in...
Keri Facer (57:09)
No, other than that I also love a swim. So, there we go. That will also connect to another podcast that we're recording on time and water and something about the deep embodied nature of the rhythms of water and the plurality of water rhythms connects really to this question of the plurality of timings in cities. So, many weaving and woven connections across these podcasts. Thank you both for your time.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (57:36)
Yes, indeed. Thank you. Thank you both for taking time to have this conversation with us. Bronwen Morgan from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Zarina Patel from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Zarina Patel (57:52)
Thank you, Michel and Keri and Bronwen. Thank you.
Bronwen Morgan (57:55)
Thank you very much. That was very stimulating.
