More-than-human entanglements of walking on a pedestrian bridge

Abstract

Urban infrastructures enable mobilities that entangle humans and nonhumans. Infrastructures that afford 'slower’ mobility, such as a pedestrian bridge, offer particular spaces for sensing, feeling, and moving through urban or city areas in a particular way. Bridges are composed of materials that expand and contract with alterations to the weight, airflow, and temperature, while absorbing movements from a variety of human and nonhuman users. The bridge structure oscillates and sways with the exertion of walking movements, and in doing so, becomes a site of encounter in which individual movements are subsumed into larger entanglements of more-than-human mobility. Although these sensations may be subtle, it can be seen as an opportunity to explore human scale in relation to the nature-culture entanglements of the Anthropocene. In this paper I explore an inner-city pedestrian bridge in Brisbane, Australia, as a site where we momentarily become aware of nature-cultures, that is, an ecology of more-than-human movements. Using an autoethnographic approach, I contemplate moments that entangle and make accessible the resonances and mobilities in the site. I negotiate the Anthropocene as a more-than-human mode of relating and understanding the mobilities that urban infrastructures enable.