Re the taxi industry and the geographical sensibilities of taxi drivers, I concur with Maureen Hickey re the need for research on taxi drivers in the “Global South” (GS) to enhance the study of dynamic knowledge and value generation through movement. Taxi drivers in the GS often have a different role re access to the city, the relationship between rural/urban migration and employment, access within the city (in the absence of maps or infrastructure), the creation, thus conceptualization, of pathways, and so forth. I refer particularly to “other” forms of transportation such as okadas (as below), tuk-tuks, even donkey carts. This then affects geographical sensibility, which I understand to be an intentionally and artfully all-inclusive word at this stage.

 

Okadas (motorbike taxis) are the predominant form of commercialized transportation in Nigeria (popn. 150 million). There have been a few smaller studies on them but in terms of their impact on Nigerian cities comparatively little in-depth research has been undertaken and I have come across no geographical studies.

 

Okada drivers have been recently banned from many city centres in the interests of safety. Given their role in facilitating city access, this has provoked a great deal of debate. In areas such as Lagos – with a population upwards of 10 million – they offer a route through the city’s notorious traffic jams and crumbling infrastructure, a function replicated in other Nigerian cities. Moreover, as in much of the GS, taxi driving offers employment to many people, from former rural workers to unemployed graduates, and they effectively allow the poor and those living on city peripheries to access the city, augmenting the services of a weak mass transit system.

 

There is certainly an argument regarding safety: a great number are untrained and unlicensed – indeed some cannot read road signs (not that many exist!) – carry multiple passengers and goods, and have no equipment to protect against injury. There are also reports of involvement in vote-rigging, violent crime, and gang beatings at accident sites.

 

Recently okada drivers demonstrated against a new Federal Road Safety Commission regulation introducing prohibitively expensive motorbike helmets, wearing gourds, paint buckets and cans on their heads, even while being photographed in one instance with a motorbike helmet strapped to the front of the bike. This protest through irony is one I have been following in my work on satire and city access. It effectively brought the plight of okada drivers to the national media and then, internationally to the Nigerian diaspora, to the Web. The campaign has had some effect, albeit limited, with the provision of free helmets, and some easing of the outright ban in certain cities.

 

Back to topic: given this weight of role, the concept of “geographical sensibilities” may be much distorted by the burden of this greater politicization, these enhanced social function(s) and an entirely different form of social interaction. So perhaps it might be worth looking up the scant studies on okadas (or tuk-tuks) to expand on a typically “Western” approach.  

 

Hope this helps! And good luck – great topic.

 

Carole Enahoro

UCL Department of Geography

[log in to unmask]

 

The issue with taxi drivers is not a question of whether they 'know the city better than others' (a rather banal issue and who's to judge?) but the relationship between their mobility as practiced and the forms of spatial knowledge that both inform and are produced in their movements.

Taxi drivers are concerned with an 'A to B mobility', they are transporting (to use Ingold's terms), they apply their knowledge in taking direct routes (if they're honest) or circuitous routes if they're not. As such, the generation of knowledge of the city (in a spatial sense) is not born of movement but rather of routes, maps, and street layouts. And this is far less of an interesting analytical relationship between knowing and going than that of mobile professionals whose knowledge is produced on the move; professionals and practitioners who are wayfarers (Ingold again).

Outreach workers, for example, are essentially mobile too but their mobility is directly linked to both the knowledge they have and to producing the knowledge they need. If ever teleportation was invented taxi drivers would be out of a job, outreach workers wouldn't be!  

Rather than simply asking whether taxi drivers know a lot about a city (of course, they do, but so do tour guides, the homeless, police officers, ethnographers, street-sweepers......) the interesting angle with taxi drivers is the process through which they learn 'the knowledge' (as it's called in London) which, I'm pretty sure, hasn't been studied thus making it more than something that can be dismissed as a 'trendy' focus on some people that are mobile in an urban context.  

Bests

Rob

Dr R.J. Smith
Researcher
Wales Institute of Social Economic Research Data and method (WISERD)
Cardiff University
02920 870330  
http://www.wiserd.ac.uk/about-us/staff/academic-staff/dr-robin-smith/