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ARTICLE
Autonomous vehicles, human agency and the
potential of urban life
Si Jie Ivin Yeo | Weiqiang Lin
Department of Geography, National
University of Singapore, Singapore
Correspondence
Si Jie Ivin Yeo, Department of Geography,
National University of Singapore, AS2, 1 Arts
Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore.
Email: yeoivin@u.nus.edu
Abstract
Research on autonomous vehicles has hitherto been largely
concerned with its technological infrastructure, and with
the management of smart transport systems in urban space.
While there is a growing body of work on the sociological
perspectives of autonomous vehicles, it has tended to
remain technocentric, focusing on how self-driving innova-
tions have an effect on cities and urban lives. By thinking
through the notions of sensation, action, and encounter,
this paper advances a reconceptualisation of autonomous
vehicles that better accounts for human agency and sen-
tience in an increasingly automated urban world. More
broadly, this paper seeks to illuminate the emergent and
creative potential of urban life to unsettle and complicate
the taken-for-granted power of smart and autonomous
technologies in enacting urban transformations.
KEYWORDS
action, agency, autonomous vehicles, encounter, sensation,
technology–society relations, urban space
1|INTRODUCTION
Automation is increasingly embraced by cities around the world as a technological fix to the challenges of 21st cen-
tury urban development. Urban experiments with autonomous vehicles (AVs) are one such effort. The city of Pitts-
burgh, for instance, has been supporting Uber with the legal environment to commercially test their AVs on the city
streets since 2016. Similarly, Beijing issued out self-driving car license plates in 2017 for road testing as part of the
central government's vision to have half of all new cars on the country's road to be (semi-)autonomous by the year
2020. These efforts reveal that government and corporate authorities around the world are actively courting and
investing in a future where urban mobility is organised by AVs (Curtis, Stone, Legacy, & Ashmore, 2019; Macrorie,
Marvin, & While, forthcoming). Indeed, AV technology promises a more efficient transportation future, and urban
Received: 29 August 2019 Revised: 12 May 2020 Accepted: 19 May 2020
DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12531
Geography Compass. 2020;e12531. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gec3 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1of12
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12531
managers, policy makers, academics, and industry players have all been fervently advancing and variously contribut-
ing to this discourse. Specifically, they have been equating the development and deployment of autonomous tech-
nologies with the ability to better manage and control urban access, movement, flows, and behaviours (Dodge &
Kitchin, 2007; Krivý, 2018), constructing a dominant sense of technological causality and determinism in narratives
surrounding AVs.
Within academic scholarship, research has hitherto been largely concerned with the technical aspects of AVs
and with the management of smart transport systems in urban space as well (Duarte & Ratti, 2018; Tan & Huang,
2006). These studies broadly cluster around an impetus to render urban mobility more efficient by improving the
infrastructure of AVs. While the literature has recently broadened to consider the social aspects of AVs (Armstrong,
2014), the majority of such engagement continues to be preoccupied with the pragmatics of living and moving in the
city. Issues of concern have ranged from the licensing of AVs (Fagnant & Kockelman, 2015) to liability and decision-
making (Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2016; Greene, 2016). Yet, these contributions have generally remained
technocentric, consolidating around the impacts of AVs on cities and urban dwellers such as pedestrian behaviours
(Millard-Ball, 2018) and urban planning (Milakis, van Arem, & van Wee, 2017; Stead & Vaddabi, 2019). In turn, this
literature has tended to neglect the fact that humans are sentient beings, capable of interacting with and negotiating
AVs in and through their own ways.
This paper offers a reconceptualisation of preponderant interpretations by foregrounding how sentient
individuals experience AVs. Specifically, we ask, what are the different angles through which one can concep-
tualise the interactions between people and AVs in urban environments? Focusing on these relations restores
humans' agential capacity without necessarily downplaying that of technology; it also shifts the focus of AV
research from outcomes and impacts to processes and practices. More significantly, if the automation of urban
mobilities is about the displacement of human agency for control, regulation, efficiency, and structured ways
of circulation, then focusing on human–machine interactions would have implications for how we disrupt the
causal powers attributed to technological innovations and, concomitantly, open up the potentials of human
agency in the face of automation. In other words, the contemporary city has not become automative solely
because of technology (Crang & Graham, 2007; Thrift & French, 2002), but its spatialities are marked by bod-
ies inhabiting and feeling machines, and this approach offers a way to capture those embodied agencies and
experiences. We argue that there are three ways to think about these intersections: (a) the sensations that
might be afforded by human-technology interactions, (b) the actions that might ensue from technological
mediations, and (c) the changing encounters with landscapes. The next section briefly reviews the scholarship
on AVs. We then offer a framework in Section 3 around the notions of sensation, action, and encounter to
address the aims of this paper. This is followed by a discussion in Section 4 on the applicability of this concep-
tual apparatus to the ways in which urban dwellers might relate to AVs. The paper concludes by considering
the significance of this proposed conceptualisation for how we understand the folding of cities, automation,
and urban lives.
2|AUTOMATING URBAN FLOWS
In the literature, the term ‘AVs’generally refers to vehicles that are capable of navigating around urban environments
without human assistance (Thrun, 2010). Compared to the instruction-based computing of existing transport auto-
mation such as autopilot mode in aircraft and on trains (Mindell, 2015), AVs operate through data-driven computing
enabled by artificial intelligence and robotic technology (Bissell, Birtchnell, Elliott, & Hsu, 2020). What this means is
that in theory AVs can sense and process codified information from their surroundings to render urban mobilities
efficient, for example, by skirting around traffic delays and accidents in city streets. In this regard, extant research
has approached the effects of AVs on urban flows from two different but interrelated angles—one being urban circu-
lation, and the other on the ethics, safety and conduct of urban driving.
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Concerned with the logic of efficiency, the first strand of literature focuses on the prospect of AVs in reshaping
urban movement. Although a spectrum of issues such as road capacity (Liu, Kockelman, Boesch, & Ciari, 2013;
Shladover, Su, & Lu, 2012), travel demand (Fagnant & Kockelman, 2015, 2018; Milakis et al., 2017), and urban acces-
sibility (Childress, Nichols, & Coe, 2015) has been examined, these studies share a similar predilection: they tend to
celebrate the possibilities afforded by technology to move people around more efficiently. In a review paper by
Hoogendoorn, van Arem, and Hoogendoorn (2014), autonomous driving is said to have the potential to substantially
abate traffic congestion and in the process increase road capacity and facilitate more intense movement of urban
dwellers. Other scholars likewise contend that the mobilisation of AVs, particularly when the ownership mode is
shared, could in a causal fashion reduce the number of vehicles on the road, thereby ameliorating congestion in cities
(Kellerman, 2018). By framing AVs as a panacea to the malaises of the current automobile society, such examinations
naturalise the capacity of automation in ‘repairing’inefficient urban flow. The role of technology in influencing cir-
cuits of urban movement is thus taken-for-granted and seen as deterministic. As a corollary, extant research tends to
place a premium on exploring the econometric and spatial outcomes of AVs on transport networks, without much
consideration of the processes and practices therein.
Moreover, there is an implicit sense in this scholarship that the use of AVs would influence where and how we
move in cities, imposing algorithmic order to the flow and routes of urban movement. These studies generally hold
that automation could regulate and govern urban movement more intimately and productively (Bagloee, Tavana,
Asadi, & Oliver, 2016; Geurs & van Wee, 2004). For example, scholars have asserted that AVs might preclude users
from driving in certain places and/or determining their travel route (Boeglin, 2015; Zakharenko, 2016). This is in part
because AVs are programmed with algorithms and codes (Dodge & Kitchin, 2011), which are capable of instructing
the vehicle to move through a series of checkpoints that together form an optimal–efficient route of travel (Fu,
Yazici, & Ozguner, 2008). In other words, the deployment of AVs, as these ruminations suggest, could standardise
travel routes. Here, it is the process of automation that curtails and structures the range and rhythms of urban mobil-
ities in exchange for a more controlled and ‘efficient’transportation system. This approach, however, tends to be
overly simplistic in its account of urban circulation; it fails to consider the complex urban politics and processes in
concert with technology at work in constituting mobilities (Cugurullo, Acheampong, Gueriau, & Dusparic, forthcom-
ing). In addition to their reductionist tendencies, these studies seem to pronounce the obliteration of human agency
and autonomy in deference to structures that preside over the logic of efficiency.
Beyond debates on urban circulation, scholars have forayed into the connections between AVs and ethics
(Fagnant & Kockelman, 2015), safety (Gong, Shen, & Du, 2016; Young & Shanton, 2007), and the conduct of urban
driving (Cyganski, Fraedrich, & Lenz, 2015). This body of work, in comparison to the former, pays closer attention to
the implications of AV mobilisation on human lives. Bagloee et al. (2016), for example, highlight that in transferring
the task of driving to machines, AVs can potentially reduce up to 90% of human-induceddriving accidents in cities
by, inter alia, eliminating the possibility of mishaps caused by road rage and emotions. In a similar vein, other scholars
have asserted that AVs may potentially improve accessibility and reinstate mobility for non-drivers who may, for
instance, be elderly, disabled or young individuals (Harper, Hendrickson, Mangones, & Samaras, 2016). Yet, insofar as
individual urban dwellers are considered in these analyses, it has tended to be superficial, relegating humans to the
position of inanimate recipients of the effects of AVs. From the examples above, it is clear that although this
approach attempts to bring social life into view, it has generally done so in a way that downplays the capacity of
urban dwellers and inflates the power of automation technology, especially where AVs are taken as a technology
that is independent of human control.
These two bodies of work coalesce around the belief that urban mobilities can be governed and ordered through
automation technology. While research on urban circulation concerns the potential restructuring effects of AV
deployment on systems of movement, the scholarship around ethics, safety and the conduct of urban driving focuses
on how one might be affected by AVs in terms of her/his movement. On the whole, these explorations variously pro-
pound the transformations that AVs could impose on social life, if they are introduced and deployed citywide. It is,
however, precisely this hyperbolic focus on technology within the literature that we contend is problematic. By over
YEO AND LIN 3of12
attributing technology with the capacity to organise urban flows, present scholarship suffers from a blinkered perspec-
tive that underestimates, and to some extent forecloses, the role of humans in shaping how AVs are used. To be sure,
this appraisal is not to discard earlier contributions, for they still illuminate the promises of AV deployment in the city.
However, there simultaneously exists a need for scholars to be cautious of technologically deterministic claims that
uncritically attribute automation technology with the power to effect change (Bissell, 2018). Here, we argue that the
scholarship can benefit if we were to attend to the experiences and micro-processes of AV use by people on the gro-
und, and by being open to the possibility that urban dwellers can negotiate technological transformations. To that end,
a relational approach could be helpful to analyse those interactions between humans and AVs, and as a corollary locate
spaces where human agency could manifest vis-à-vis the structural conditions established by automation technology.
3|AVS AND HUMAN AGENCIES
A relational perspective in automative changes in cities is instructive because it “reveals how new technologies
become enrolled into complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts”(Graham,
1998, p. 167). This approach enables us to unseat the reductionist, deterministic, and over-simplistic conceptions of
autonomous technologies in the current literature on the one hand, and avoid falling back into purely humanistic
accounts of the sovereign subject on the other hand. In this reading, agency can be conceptualised as a relational
process; that is “the constitutive intertwining and reciprocal interdefinition of human and material agency”
(Pickering, 1995, p. 26). As Thrift (1996, p. 1468) explains:
no technology is ever found working in splendid isolation as though it is the central node in the social
universe. It is linked—by the social purposes to which it is put—to humans and other technologies of
different kinds.
Developing from this line of thought, scholars have further theorised human–machine interactions through, for
example, the idea of the cyborg (Gandy, 2005; see also Haraway, 1991), the sentient city (Graham & Marvin, 2001;
Thrift, 2014), and the posthuman (Hayles, 1999; Rose, 2017). This section draws on the rich body of work on
technology–society relations to formulate a framework around the notions of sensation, action, and encounter to
rethink the impacts of AVs in cities.
Sensation is, at its simplest, a feeling or perception that manifests when the body comes into contact with some-
thing. In the contemporary moment, these micro-bodily sensations are often mediated by technology: “technology
plays an instrumental role in arranging and organising the sensations that come upon us and which we make sense
of by placing them in space and time”(Ieven, 2013, p. 79). Here, the space of the human body comes into sharp
focus as the medium through which sensations are felt and registered. More critically, sensations have political
potentials in that they are capable of disrupting common sense and preconceived understandings of space and inter-
action (Dickinson, 2017; Panagia, 2010). As such, examining sensation is not only about an effort to foreground the
body in human–machine relations, but that it could also open up ways to challenge taken-for-granted conceptions of
space and of those interactions therein.
Next, we consider the notion of action. As Rose (2017, p. 784) powerfully describes of technological mediations,
“many will generate unremarkable everyday practices, affects, meanings, values, and perceptions. Many mediations,
though, will repeat or combine things in slightly more unusual forms, or even in new ways”. Regardless whether they
are routinised and unreflexive or new and creative, these actions reflect to varying extent the ways in which humans
process, relate to and negotiate the technological and its agency. Put differently, these actions can be seen as a func-
tion of human and non-human agencies, where neither are given a priori but are temporally and spatially emergent in
practice. Focusing on actions will, therefore, illuminate how people make sense of their interactions with technology
as well as how agencies intertwine in space and across time.
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Last but not least, these bodily sensations and their corresponding actions may accrue and gather force that
transforms encounters with landscapes. Edensor (2011, p. 239, emphasis in original), for example, notes that the
properties of a substance, thing or landscape may “melt away because it is catalysed by other agencies from within
and outside the assemblage”. Although Edensor (2011) was mainly writing about non-human agencies, he also
acknowledges that the “non-human marks are combined with the traces of innumerable human institutional, techno-
logical, commercial and political agencies”(p. 250). Extending from this epistemological intervention, studying peo-
ple's encounters with landscape, vis-à-vis technology, can thus highlight the emergence of new sensibilities of the
city, denoting a process of change mediated by artefacts such as AVs (Wilson, 2016).
Collectively, we suggest that sensation, action, and encounter are productive because they point us towards the
unfolding relations between technology and society, spaces where human agency may be found despite the struc-
tural grammar set by automation. They also allow analytical space to consider the embodied experiences of autono-
mous technologies which are not only under-explored in work on AVs, but also central to how we make sense of the
urban space around us. In this way, we submit that these conceptual tools are most helpful to the project of unfixing
the dominant technodeterministic way of thinking surrounding prevailing narratives of AVs.
4|SPACES OF HUMAN-AV INTERACTION
Thinking about how urban worlds are constituted by dynamic interactions between technology and human sentience
can emancipate and open up existing conceptualisations of AVs from their reductionist and technocentric tendencies
to account for human agency vis-a-vis automation. We submit that a fine-grained view of experiences and sensa-
tions is especially helpful here to shore up the emergent relations between humans and technology, and to attune
conceptual attention to the spaces where more obvious qualities of human agency might effervesce. Informed by
the framework outlined in the previous section, the proposed conceptualisation will unfold in three parts: (a) the role
of human agency in micro-bodily sensations of/in AVs, (b) the role of human agency in actions, and (c) the role of
human agency in encountering AV landscapes.
4.1 |The role of human agency in micro-bodily sensations of/in AVs
A promising space where urban dwellers might register their agency more emphatically in relation to AVs is through
micro-bodily sensations. Bissell et al. (2020), for example, posit that with the driver released from driving in AVs, the
repertoire of movements one can more comfortably and actively perform in a vehicle could increase substantially:
from stretching and sleeping to sitting and eating. Accordingly, it is the shift from being a driver to a passenger that
would provide one with opportunities for expanded movements and sensations, and this switch troubles the com-
mon view that passengering is a weak or secondary form of mobile subjectivity (Adey, Bissell, McCormack, &
Merriman, 2012; Bissell, 2010). Indeed, one of the participants—the driver/passenger—in an AV study conducted by
Lindgren, Fors, Pink, and Osz (forthcoming) is described as “very relaxed …took his hands off the wheel at a comfort-
able speed in standing queue in the left lane”(p. 11).
Passengers might also over time develop and learn to execute—both consciously and unconsciously—certain
physical movements, such as shifting the weight of one's body from one leg to another or by leaning onto structures
in the vehicle, in relation to the motions, sensations, affects, and sounds of automated cruising (Sheller, 2004). Espe-
cially in fully shared automated vehicles, our bodies might gradually become familiar with the sudden stops and jerki-
ness of these automated systems as we grow accustomed to the repetitive and prosaic routes around the city,
similar to our experiences of shuttle services navigating in congested traffic conditions. Marshall (2017) in Wired
expressed this possibility clearly when she wrote about her experiences with self-driving cars in San Francisco:
“every movement [of the vehicle] was a cause for alarm”. Sharing a similar sentiment, Standage (2018) in The
YEO AND LIN 5of12
Economist reflected on how the AV that he was in “made no attempt to avoid Pittsburgh's notorious potholes, mak-
ing the ride slightly bumpy at times”. These disturbances and discomforts would have been felt and perceived by
both Marshall and Standage as shocks and sensations to their bodies, which could have motivated movements in dif-
ferent ways. Rather than seeing these corporeal adjustments as merely knock-on effects from technological crack-
ups or allowances, we should instead consider them as transient articulations of human agency that give salience to
automated movements in cities. On encountering these sensations enacted by automation, passengers may react in
dissimilar ways, from reaching out for additional support to firming their posture for stability and even to fixing their
gaze intently on the road for assurance.
Most significantly, conceptualising AVs through these micro-bodily sensations extends existing approaches
within the study of AVs in two important ways. First, it advocates the sense that the heuristic categories of ‘social’
and ‘technological’are increasingly folded together in the city. As AVs gradually take on more human(e) qualities and
urban dwellers develop intimate movements to automation, this blurring might take the shape of what scholars have
called the ‘human–machine cyborg’(Randell, 2017; Sheller, 2007). Such a reconceptualisation thus invites an onto-
logical rethinking to better account for the relational nature of technology–society interactions in place of the cur-
rently hegemonic technocentric outlook among studies of AVs. Second, and related to the first, these bodily
sensations are fundamental to our embodied experiences of automated urban mobility and they can, in turn, inform
our subjectivities. These senses of self, and how we understand our place in an automated urban world, are consti-
tuted by our connections to other people, things and events as we move (Conradson & McKay, 2007; Cresswell,
2006; Thrift, 2005). Giving more attention to micro-bodily sensations of urban dwellers in AVs could, therefore, help
illuminate the everyday processes of subjectification as individuals interact with autonomous technologies.
4.2 |The role of human agency in actions
How urban dwellers act in their interactions with AVs could also be telling of their agency. Whereas some people
might use AVs in ordinary ways aligned to their design, others might temper with the technology in ways beyond
what they are idealistically crafted for, such as to conduct deviant acts. This paper focuses specifically on the latter
since it provides a more immediate way of locating human agency in relation to other forms of agencies. In particular,
the functions, mechanics and design of AVs could be modified and repurposed in unplanned manners by people, sim-
ilar to how the automobile has been appropriated (Best, 2006; Delbosc & Currie, 2014). Technologically savvy indi-
viduals, for example, may tinker with the technology and some might even exaggerate the autonomous functions in
these vehicles to tap into breakneck speeds, which are illegal in most cities due to safety regulations and the experi-
mental nature of AVs. Currently in several United States cities, and as elsewhere, only low-speed AVs that travel up
to 10 to 35 mph are deployed. This cautiousness, or slowness as compared to the automobile in the eyes of ordinary
people, could foment experimentation among speed-obsessed hackers or technical experts to remodel the nuts and
bolts of the vehicle.
AVs might also be employed analogous with how drone technology has been misused (Bilton, 2016). AVs, espe-
cially those mounted with a camera, might be used to conduct illegal reconnaissance around the city, which may
infringe on the privacy of others. More problematically, people might mobilise AVs to commit acts of crime. Drug
dealers might use AVs to move drugs and illegal products around the city or to commit crimes in the same way that
drones have been used to smuggle drugs across cities (Tarantola, 2017). Hackers might also break into the algorith-
mic system to gain control of AVs, and some might use AVs for acts of terror including the creation of collisions and
gridlocks, leading in severe cases to the loss of lives (Carter, 2019). This possibility unsettles the sense that AVs are
independent of human control and cannot be disrupted or breached into by ordinary people.
This is, however, not to suggest that people will only use AVs in aberrant manners; indeed AVs have the poten-
tial to be used in progressive ways for urban development, as advocates of automation promise. Like how drones
and robots are mobilised to fight COVID-19 through, for example, the provision of care from a distance, delivery and
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logistical concerns, surveillance, and awareness (Marr, 2020), AVs could also be used in a similar fashion to facilitate
a more convivial and responsible society in future scenarios of crisis and pandemic. At the same time, we need to be
careful not to over-extend such possibilities of (mis)appropriation. For some people, they may want to use AVs as
they are and for what they already serve without necessarily trying to manipulate their functions; for others, AVs,
like other technologies, might afford a limited range of technological pathways for ordinary people to use them crea-
tively beyond their intended utility (Graham, 1998). Nevertheless, the point here is that actions emerge through
urban dwellers' use and interactions with AVs. Thinking through the activities and things one might do with AVs thus
alerts us to the capacity of urban dwellers to inhabit autonomous technologies in and through their own ways. More
importantly, the emphasis on emergent actions shifts analytical attention from outcomes and forms to the processual
and excessive enactments of the interactions between automation and ordinary people. These idiosyncratic and
unpredictable practices speak to, and perhaps challenge, how automation is currently framed—as a deterministic
technology of control and regulation. And if urban dwellers are capable of negotiating structures established by
autonomous technologies in the vehicle, then there is equal potential for people to express their agency in the pro-
spective automated urban world.
4.3 |The role of human agency in encountering AV landscapes
On a broader level, the interactions between AVs and humans might generate novel ways of understanding and
relating to the wider AV landscapes. First, new properties might be accorded to the sociocultural landscapes sur-
rounding AVs in these interactions. For example, the use and non-use of AVs by ordinary people could produce cul-
tural meanings for how one understands self and others (Kinsley, 2019). Writing about automobility, Bengry-Howell
and Griffin (2007) point out that people's practices of driving can lead to the construction of subjectivities (see also
Merriman, 2009). In the same way, new meanings particularly those associated with a sense of cultural taste and
economic superiority might emerge as wealthy and upper-class individuals use and experience AVs. This is a conceiv-
able proposition given that the cost of an individually owned AV is likely to be high and possibly only affordable to
the rich, especially when they are first introduced. George (2017) in Jalopnik discusses this where he notes that the
introduction of AVs into the society will be “a future only for the wealthy who can afford an expensive new driver-
less car”. AVs may thus be associated with a particular social class within the city and be seen as exclusive to others,
an outcome possibly shaped by companies and urban elites in the society in the same way as the automobile when it
was first introduced (Stilgoe, 2019). Similar to technologies of transit, AVs are not neutral and have the capacity to
transform forms of social divides, including class distinctions. Put differently, the use of AVs might generate new
axes of exclusion or be complicit in reproducing inequalities along lines of class, gender, race and so on.
Second, these interactions might challenge how one views the rhetoric of advancement espoused by narratives
of AV development. Specifically, the use of AVs could rupture dominant discourses of technological progress
advanced by state and corporate authorities. In 2018, a woman was killed in the street in Arizona by Uber's self-
driving car, leading to a countrywide safety time-out in the corporation's self-driving car operations. Across the globe
in Singapore, AV experimentations also have their fair share of failures, such as the widely discussed media coverage
in 2016 that a driverless car had collided with a lorry (Lin, 2016). These accidents, along with many unreported, trou-
ble the discourses of safety and efficiency around AVs by bringing to the table a range of ambiguities, uncertainties
and anxieties (see also Lindgren et al., forthcoming). With these competing narratives at play, how people perceive
AVs and what they take autonomous technologies to mean could become more complex than what advocates of
AVs have planned and might hope for. In other words, there will invariably be a chasm between top–down represen-
tations and how people relate to AVs from ground-up. What this means conceptually is that these AV-human inter-
actions on the ground would allow for a range of encounters, eagerness, and anxieties that are not often
acknowledged in dominant discourses of AVs to be made present.
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Third, the use of AVs could (re)shape encounters with service landscapes. Writing about England's M1 Motor-
way, Merriman (2004) discusses how landscapes of automobility have been shaped by notions of speed, isolation,
boredom, and detachment that emerge through driving. Here, landscapes are constructed and performed through
the movements of people. Likewise, the use of AVs could also engender notions of speed and isolation that we might
attribute to landscapes. But at the same time, landscapes could be reshaped to account for the increased and dis-
persed attention of passengers (Bissell et al., 2020). Put differently, how people interact with landscapes could pro-
ductively change with automation. For instance, service landscapes such as motels and pit stops might become
obsolete as sleeping is now possible in an AV. In this sense, some landscapes of travel might eventually come to hold
new significations and purposes as they are folded into the materialities of the AV.
Examining AVs through the notion of encounter, therefore, foregrounds the multiplicity of understandings that
could simultaneously exist. This perspective also enfranchises ordinary people with the capacity to produce mean-
ings about automation and technology in their encounters with AVs; despite structurally circumscribed to some
extent by existing dominant representations. Although discourses have scripted ways for people to understand AVs,
these definitions are not fixed and might be challenged, or affirmed, through individuals' encounters with these auto-
mated technologies. Indeed, AVs might be seen in ways beyond their technical utility, taking on unplanned and
diverse sociocultural meanings as people interact with it over time.
5|CONCLUSION
Cities play an instrumental role in the development of AVs. To render urban flows and rhythms more efficient, structured
and regulated, autonomous technology, as a catchall term, has been mobilised by corporate and urban authorities and is
introduced into cultures of urban transportation to phase out the current human-driven automobile for vehicles that are
governed by algorithms and codes. In doing so, urban spaces and mobilities are reconfigured in a way where human agency
is thought to be increasingly displaced and repressed to facilitate the aims of a productive society. By offering a rec-
onceptualisation of how urban dwellers might interact with and use AVs, this paper is an attempt to relocate human
agency in the face of automation. Drawing upon the notions of sensation, action and encounter, we show how and where
human agency might emerge in the space of these micro-interactions. Such a relational approach to how we understand
and study AVs, and the automative city more broadly, is vital to capture the excesses of human agency that are increas-
ingly subjugated and displaced in a world of order and automation. Moreover, what we have alluded to in this paper is that
the gradual fusion of cities with automation might not result in a seamless mode of control but sentient beings with the
material, the technical and the practical could disrupt codified rules of automative life (Kinsley, 2014). This form of analysis
that centres on interactions and relations thus departs from existing conceptualisations of autonomous technologies that
are informed by technocentric ways of thinking. In addition,wehavealsoshowedhowtheseinteractions and relations
couldmanifestindifferentways:fromdeviance and recalcitrance to more purposeful encounters and hopeful experiences.
Taking the space of the AV as a microcosm of the increasingly automated urban world, the implications of this
reconceptualisation for urban studies are threefold. First, this conceptualisation builds on existing efforts by scholars
to think through human–nonhuman interactions in the city (Haraway, 2008; Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2009).
Although this paper focuses on the minute interactions between humans and AVs, we suggest that the insights can
have wider resonances for how we study the ways in which people relate to the nonhuman urban world. Automa-
tion, when taken out from factories and speciality professions such as flying into an everyday context, is utilised to
systematise and optimise flows and processes at an urban scale. The effect of this is a system of governance that
holds a simplistic view of humans as passive and rational subjects who will conform to the prescriptions of technol-
ogy. In this light, this reconceptualisation offers, as the second implication, an analytical way to recuperate the
agential, sentient qualities in urban dwellers to use and interact with autonomous technologies in and through their
own ways. Focusing on the spaces of sensation, action, and encounter could provide a way for scholars to better
account for these agencies. Third, this reconceptualisation is important insofar as city authorities around the world
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are promoting and experimenting with the concept of AVs. Large-scale AV use and deployments thus becomes
largely a matter of when and not if. Brooding over this optimism, however, are documented fatalities around self-
driving test. In this wider context, urban studies must start to consider how AVs and automation might be under-
stood and interacted with on the ground to develop a more agentically sensitive and socially nuanced picture of the
transformative potential of autonomous technologies on urban lives and spaces.
ORCID
Si Jie Ivin Yeo https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9960-7475
Weiqiang Lin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5484-0860
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Yeo Si Jie Ivin is a master's student in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His
research interests include smart urbanism, geographies of futurity, urban geography, non-representational the-
ory, and technology-society relations.
Lin Weiqiang is a mobilities geographer interested in the infrastructures of moving. Employing cultural geograph-
ical approaches, his work examines the myriad ways in which contemporary society moves, not least through air
transport. Rather than explaining these mobilities in broad economic terms, his work opens up the cultural
dimensions of their production (norms, laws, science, affects, practices, etc.) through various infrastructures and
regimes. In extension of his distinctive work on airspace organisation in Southeast Asia, he has also researched
on the rationalities behind air logistics and other mobility issues. He is a member of the editorial board of Mobil-
ities and is a Section Editor of Transfers (Ideas in Motion). He is also a recipient of the inaugural Social Science
and Humanities Research Fellowship in 2019.
How to cite this article: Yeo SJI, Lin W. Autonomous vehicles, human agency and the potential of urban life.
Geography Compass. 2020;e12531. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12531
12 of 12 YEO AND LIN
