Page 25 - TLU magazine - The Way to The Top

Artist from Moscow Anton Polsky, research fellow Tauri Tuvikene and doctoral student Aleksandra Iachenko.
Åbo Academy researchers analyse the narra- tives of bringing back trams in London, where trams have been brought back in South London after they were replaced by buses. The same thing is also being studied in Turu.
The ULB researchers focus on accessibility in public transportation and analyse how much this aspect is affected by price and its control.
Artistic experiments
The project includes a short-term migration programme that allows researchers, artists, writers, activists and other interested parties unrelated to the project stay at an institution related to the project for a period of one to six months. Already, several outstanding experts have worked and are currently working. For ex- ample, in Brussels a film about the dispute over a subway replacing the tram is being made, and in Turu, a mobility researcher prepared a comic book on the city’s tram history.
Artist Anton Polsky from Moscow stayed at
TU in December and January. In collaboration with Aleksandra Iachenko, he created an artistic experiment in Lasnamäe where they established a temporary stop on the Saarepiiga bridge for the Laagna tee tram. Questions presented to passers- by about when such a tram route could be built
prompted reactions that either considered it mean- ingless (“buses are good enough and come closer to home”) or defeatist attitudes where people said that they will probably never see that day.
This micro project indicated perfectly how much people actually think about public trans- portation development and how history is im- portant and why dreams of future cities matter.
Such performance art survey methods create reac- tions that are great for the researcher to analyse.
For us, it is very important to create a debate about public transportation as public space using different research methods and artistic formats. Aside from public transportation connecting places for activities and being a considerable alternative for cars in sustain- able city planning, it is also a meeting place for social diversity. Similarly a place where societal understandings and norms are recreated.
“Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities (PUTSPACE)” is a three-year project supported by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) with around one million euros. The project involves nine people from four research centres across Europe, four of whom are research track associate professors or research fellows, with three post-doctoral fellows and two doctoral students. The project runs until April 2022 and the researchers are inter- ested in any cooperation opportunities.
Research fellow Tauri Tuvikene
TALLINN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE / NO. 14 / SPRING 2020
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Photo: Piret Räni