The Phenomenology of Traffic

The book delves into the affective, embodied, and sensory dimensions of traffic and urban mobility. It brings together key phenomenological and post-phenomenological readings to challenge taken for granted assumptions of urban traffic.

Through the experiences of traffic users in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the book provides fascinating pathways into structures and processes that make up phenomenal traffic worlds. It explores the nature of the traffic experience, modalities of existence within it, and the wide spectrum of awarenesses involved in making sense from non-sense. The book offers rich theoretical insights on how we feel our way through our affect-laden worlds. Through empirical examples from the urban traffic in Ho Chi Minh City, the book explores this fluid, constantly changing complex collective of ongoing negotiations we call ‘traffic,’ often emotional, involving and producing all kinds of entities. It develops a range of philosophical concepts in order to better understand the complex relationships between humans and non-humans in everyday settings.

Offering innovative insights into the structures, authorities, materialities and forms of power that shape our experiences of traffic, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners interested in philosophy, cultural geography, mobilities, transport studies, cultural studies, and urban studies.