Editorial
Top It Up, Keep It Close
About Travel, Place, and Spaces In Between
One of the things I like most about going to places is keeping all my electronic transport cards. Trapped in a 8x5cm piece of thin plastic, money becomes virtual and memories become real — as conventional tickets eventually will cripple, broken with wear and tear.
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I went backpacking about two years ago to Singapore with a couple of friends. My memory of the short trip wasn’t just about the photos we took, the kinds of food that we ate, or even jokes along the way, but it was also the small 8 x 5 cm card I took with me along the way. No, it wasn’t a credit card — heck, it wasn’t even worth that much. I bought it at the airport train station when I first landed then topped it enough for the next three days. But boy, was I thrilled — one (Gudetama-themed! — totally worth mentioning) card to rule all of Singapore!
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They say you haven’t really experienced Jakarta if you haven’t tried getting on a KRL or busway… on its peak hours!
I had to conduct my thesis survey in Jakarta — the one city I’ve always tried to avoid. The institutions I had to go see to collect data were spread all across Central and South Jakarta. And knowing that my Go-Pay was growing thin, I decided to get an e-ticket card (mine was an e-Money card). And there I was, squished amidst other Jakarta folks, a flustered girl who before her thesis survey had no clue what peron meant, traveled around Jakarta on bus and train! Scared that some random might pickpocket me, or that the lady next to me might start crying again, I held my backpack a little tighter.
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My parents were nearly always still at work/campus after school, so my brother and I would always take the 940 bus home. We were only about 13–14 years old back then, but tapping on-off buses with our SmartRider made us feel cool and so much like an adult. The funny thing is, even after nearly a decade after leaving Perth, the moments chasing the bus after school or forgetting to tap-off, our bus travels after school remains to be one of our favorite Perth memories.
Attachment to place
Place attachment and place identity are two aspects of people’s bonding to place that are considered complimentary components. Community or place attachment is a measure of the emotional bonding that people have to their neighborhood or other places (Kim and Kaplan, 2004). It occurs when geographical space has become a positively viewed place (Mooney, 2009).
In understanding place attachment, Scannell & Gifford (2010) states a tripartite framework — the person, process, and place dimension. In brief, the person dimension acknowledges the personal connections a person has to a place through personal memories and symbols, both in the context of that person as an individual and as part of a group. The process dimension concerns how that individual relates to a place, noting its affection, cognition, and behavior. The place dimension tries to understand the social and physical aspects of the place that an individual is connected to.
To take it further from Naufal’s take on place attachment, I do believe that transportation cards (and my habit of collecting them) manifests as one of the physical aspects of the memories, and thus attachments, I made whilst traveling.
For me, each transport card I have collected represents different memories, with different people, in different places, flushing me with all sorts of different feelings. On the other hand, I believe transport cards are particularly different compared to its more conventional, paper-based counterparts . It brings me back to a sense of liberation that I am able to be mobile in going places I want to go without the feeling that I’m dependent on someone else driving me there, that I can freely hop on and off public transport without the hassle of looking for small change, and that I fit in a stream of other ordinary people going about their own individual businesses. All that within a network that connected not just places but also different modes of transport.
Out with the old, in with the new
Innovations come and go. Paper tickets are substituted with smartcards. Smartcards are now supplemented with endless apps that provide more practical information and ease for even smarter travels. Indeed, means for easier travels can be found everywhere you go, if you can look for them and know how to use them.
In the context of place attachment, how does the smartcard innovation play its part? Compared to paper-based tickets or QR codes, what difference does smartcards have?
Nonetheless, the innovations that arise still include some kind of physical aspect that makes its users feel a sense of ownership, power, pride and eventual attachment towards that thing, deemed somewhat permanent at that time, that enables them to be mobile and I believe that that is necessary.
On a personal note, unlike paper tickets or QR codes, I think smartcards give a lasting feeling for its users that ‘hey, I did this, on my own, and I’ve got something to prove it’. It gives something for us millennial users an opportunity to take a photo and upload it on our ever-curated social media pages. Conventional tickets fade over time, if not already torn on its corners or scrunched somewhere in the abyss of your pockets, before you get to use your ticket for concession on the next ride, let alone reminisce your travels when you get home. And because who collects QR codes, seriously?
In other words, referring back to what it means to be attached to a place, unlike paper tickets or QR codes, the means for someone to be connected does not cease to exist in smart cards as the memory of travel, place, and the ‘space’ are trapped within the bulk of plastic in your wallet.
A little closer to home
Here we see that it’s not just about the places we go to that we remember, but also how we go about in getting to those places that matter.
So I’ve been bragging how liberating it feels to be a part of Singapore’s and Jakarta’s and Perth’s transportation network, but how about my own hometown? Having once dedicated my days as an angkot passenger for so many years during high school, has Bandung’s public transportation system made me feel any attachments?
The answer is no. Why? Because miraculously angkot can still operate even without a ticketing system! But of course that’s not the point as it does not necessarily translate to angkot providing me with any lasting attachment in terms of its mobility.
What I am trying to point out is that I think it is such a shame that mobility and the use of public transportation in Bandung has yet to recognize that there is more to going about the city than just about its fares, providing adequate stops at the right places, etc. Noting the declining use of public transportation in Bandung, what I am concerned is not about the lack of accessible transportation networks as I know how much the local government is struggling to implement them, but how I believe that the inability to look at the affective aspect of mobility could to an extent make its users ‘more attached’ in some senses to the transportation system elsewhere and not its own, further worsening the current public transportation crisis.
Though, I highly look forward to the day I tap my Gudetama-themed smartcard whilst hopping on the LRT from Cibiru-Dago, use it to pay a meal at the station, and perhaps then use it to ride around Dago.
References
Kim, J. and R. Kaplan. 2004. Physical and Psychological Factors in Sense of Community: New Urbanist Kentlands and Nearby Orchard Village, Environment and Behavior 36 (3): 313–340.
Mooney, P. 2009. The physical and social aspects of place attachment. Their role in self-sustaining communities. TOPOS 02.
Scannell, L. and Gifford, R. 2010. Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 30, Issue 1.
