PhD Oral Exam - Nasim Naghavi, Individualized Program

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This thesis journeys from void to vital, reclaiming the social life of urban mobile spaces through cinematic representation. It argues that urban mobile spaces of roads, transit systems, vehicle interiors, and the fluid thresholds of the contemporary urban infrastructure are not residual left-over spaces but among the most socially generative environments of current urban life. Against their persistent dismissal as non-places or transitory voids, the thesis repositions mobile spaces as primary sites of social interaction, cultural production, identity formation, and belonging, where “place” is measurable by the intensity and quality of relational time-space: the lived, embodied, and socially negotiated experience of being-in-the-world through mobility.

This thesis situates being mobile not as mere physical movement but as a complex system of social organization involving the assemblage of people, information, and materials within the new mobilities paradigm. It follows Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad as the methodological framework in which the conceived, perceived, and lived space is adapted to film space analysis. Cinematic representation enters not as an aesthetic choice but as a methodological necessity, uniquely adequate to the embodied, atmospheric, and politically situated dimensions of mobile experience. Through five films spanning documentary, docufiction, and fiction, three case studies are developed. The first case examines driverless and autonomous vehicles, revealing the social infrastructure potential of the networked mobility and the governance issues of data ownership and democratic access. The second reveals the car and taxi as socio-political space, demonstrating how the mobile interior functions as a moving agora—a sphere of political discourses and cultural negotiations that the fixed public space cannot offer. The third case explores the dwelling-in-motion under environmental catastrophes, where mobile spaces become the irreducible condition of social existence, producing provisional communities and forms of belonging.

The thesis concludes by proposing quantum urbanism as the disciplinary framework through which urban studies can theorize and design mobile spaces as primary social infrastructure. Borrowing Lefebvre's dialectical utopianism and rhythmanalysis and extended through David Lynch's mobile perception across the full spectrum of contemporary mobilities, it advocates for a shift from the static built form to the space-in-motion, from the technocratic optimization to the citizenship-in-motion, and from the marginalization of mobile environments to their recognition as the constitutive and designable terrain of the contemporary urban social life.