Material Pragmatist readings of dark design and mobility injustice in the city

This paper presents the outline of an ontological positioning of Mobilities research we may term ‘material pragmatism’. It does so with reference to empirical cases of ‘dark design’ (i.e. social exclusion of homeless people by means of leaning benches, spikes, sprinklers, barbed wire etc). Such interventions creates zones of ‘go and no-go areas’ in the city, and thereby facilitate complex mobility patterns of socially vulnerable groups. Dark design is contributing to an ‘atmosphere of rejection’, as well as it works physically on vulnerable human bodies. In order to understand this, the paper proposes an ontological position sensitive to the material assemblages of human and non-human entities and a pragmatic interest in the movements and actions afforded (or prevented) by such interventions. The paper combines Mobilities theory with insights from classic pragmatism, new materialism, and post-phenomenology creating a position for thinking through how dark design contributes to creating specific atmospheres, affordances, and distributed agencies within the urban fabric.