Accomplishing Road-Running: Negotiating Space, Mobile Politics and Order on the Street

This paper is concerned with the experience of road-runners’ mobility. A mobile form that has eluded sustained or widespread study since the onset of the mobilities turn (Bale, 2004), I aim shed light onto the practice through a focus on one significant yet mundane and commonplace aspect of road-running; that of negotiating space. Thus, I wish to examine in this paper how road-runners manage to negotiate space whilst on-the-move through one essential aspect of embodying/accomplishing/doing running: transient propinquities or passing pedestrians – how movement, people, things and place interact and embrace dynamism to establish order. Drawing on innovative ethnographic and mobile methods, I will discuss the three different philosophies runners adopt towards how ephemeral and spontaneous meetings should be managed before demonstrating how such situations are successfully performed through the use of three common spatial strategies: choosing a side, stepping down and slaloming. Throughout the paper, notions of mobile politics will be confronted as it is recognised that there are no rules, no conventions and no codes of conduct for negotiating the space of the street (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2007; 2013). Solutions for co-habiting space are still improvised ad hoc, in situ and extemporaneously and thus raise intriguing questions around a right to the street, a right of way and of deviancy; that once more demands the interrogation of how mobile order on the street is achieved.