This study will investigate how the social space of the city, with all its risks and inequalities, is shaped and reproduced through practices of urban mobility. As a case study, this study will focus on the knowledge and practices that taxicab drivers and their passengers make use of in travelling through Mexico City, particularly the ways they represent dangerous space, and construct their own responses to it. Mexico City, as an almost archetypically large and complex urban space, has an especially established local discourse on the difficulties and hazards of urban space, on the dangerous spaces of the city, and on the resourcefulness of its residents in finding their ways safely around. The taxicab sector is an ideal site for such a study because the driving profession involves an explicitly articulated socio-spatial body of knowledge developed in large part for the purpose of avoiding and responding to danger. Through participant observation and interviews the researcher will outline the knowledge and strategies taxidrivers and passengers draw on to navigate urban space successfully, particularly how they avoid or manage danger, whether perceived or real. The informants' livelihood context will be examined to understand their structural constraints and motivations. With GPS loggers and video, recordings will be created of taxidrivers' daily trips and of their driving narratives, to capture the fleeting ways in which personal, interpersonal, and social spaces are constructed in relation to each other, in the course of the drivers' work, and in their retellings of it. Thus, this study will investigate how these knowledges and practices situate their practitioners as competent and knowing subjects in relation to the social space of the city.
This research will contribute to the emerging field of mobility studies, by operationalizing the philosophical underpinnings of mobility theory in the course of an ethnographic study. Many studies of mobility have drawn on top-down forms of knowledge, such as surveillance data, to obtain representations of mobile subjects and practices. This study, by investigating ways of knowing formed in the context of spatial labor, will be one of the relatively few so far to draw on the practical, bottom-up understandings of urban space which exemplifies the true promise of the mobilities approach. This research will problematize, in novel ways, the relation between the discourse on urban danger and the practical strategies used to avoid danger, by focusing on a kind of situation in which the interrelated effects of class, labor, and communicative technologies can be elucidated. This study will also help to bring the perspectives of urban spatial workers, specifically taxicab drivers, into the scholarly discourse on the city and its mobilities
