ABSTRACT
Publics also negotiate tensions around commercial and public use values in transitional nodes, such as railway concourses, which are increasingly multi-functional places: destinations for business, leisure and consumption, as well as transiting. While calculative rationalities render complex volumetric spaces legible as sites of governmental intervention allowing various forms of expertise and bio-political regulation to be deployed, habits are also imbricated in much wider socio-material environments that make these spaces ‘vessels of collective life and sociality’. As agents of vertical mobility, escalators could be said to both enable and constrain human movement as part of their technical performance. They afford vertical mobility without exertion through a delegation of effortful movement to infrastructure that involves an enfolding of the sedentary passenger into a human-technology assemblage. An example involves escalator governance in the London Underground and a shift to ‘choice architectures’ designed to change the long-standing habit of walking up on the left in order to address infrastructural overload.
