Daily Travels on the 290 Bus Line: Exploring the Spaces of a Multitude Through Minor Trajectories, Spatialities and Cartographies

This study, which is the first phase of my doctoral research, is articulated in discussions of social architecture through a critique of the concept of “society”. Based on my daily travels on the 290 bus line between Karşıyaka and Dokuz Eylül University Tınaztepe Campus in İzmir, I aim to decipher “spaces of a multitude” by proposing the concept of “multitude” instead of the concept of “society”. I explore spaces of a multitude not in the public-private dichotomy, but in spaces where the body is related and pluralized with other bodies. I argue that by instrumentalizing daily trajectories of bodies, the subjective, embodied and situated spatial knowledge of individualities that constitute a multitude can be revealed, and this spatial knowledge can indicate (possible) spaces of socialization. I discuss the arguments of my research with a feminist perspective and an autoethnographic field experiment through my own body and the bus route I use. In my fieldwork, conducted in April and May in 2022, I define practices of gathering and pluralization of individualities that constitute a multitude as “minor practices”. I conceptualize spaces where minor practices take place, which are the direct subject and field of architecture, as “minor spatialities”; subjective trajectories where I reveal minor spatialities as “minor trajectories”; and spatial networks I obtain by mapping the knowledge of minor spatialities as “minor cartographies”. I present a conceptual, epistemological and methodological approach for feminist studies in the field of social architecture.