Figures du trafic. Ethnographie cinétique d’un carrefour sans feux

Abstract

Seen from above, the crossroads without signals that one can find in India today seem to be chaotic with no explicit rules. Rickshaws, buses, pedestrians and even bullock carts, must coexist together and avoid collision. Based on a video analysis of several crossroads where one can see clearly the variety of negotiations that take place between vehicles, this article questions the different models applied to « improvisational processes » especially in the field of complex systems. Then a few hypothesis are proposed to shed a new light on the variation dynamics of such crossroads and their exceptional variety of behaviours in order to reelaborate the notion of « shared space ».

Keywords

• traffic
• India
• driving
• shared space
• model
• emergence