There are many ways of moving through a city. Cycling is one which has received considerable attention from urban scholars. Yet it has remained largely neglected within the burgeoning literature on the post-socialist urbanisms of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study from Sofia, Bulgaria to address this gap in urban research. By exploring the practices and affordances of cycling, we offer a discussion of everyday mobility, public life and urban space in post-socialist Sofia. This case study incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews with regular cyclists. Through a discussion of bicycling spaces and practices, this paper complicates the notion of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities.

This paper examines the links between women’s un/safety and their night-time mobilities in Brussels, Belgium and Recife, Brazil. While the significance of women’s intersectional identities to the construction of fear and safety in urban space has been well documented in feminist urban geography, we argue that the lens of South-North comparison highlights specific ways in which local urban spaces are implicated in women’s experiences of un/safety. A comparative perspective draws out the spatial and temporal embeddedness of un/safety, while at the same time challenges the framing of particular cities and areas as either safe or unsafe (which is particularly damaging when it reproduces simple global North – global South binaries). The paper draws on mixed-method research combining a questionnaire-based survey and a series of interviews with women in Recife and Brussels. The four dimensions examined include transport modes; situated experiences of un/safety; the accumulation of unsafety feelings over the long term; and the work women perform in maintaining mobility. We find that while unsafety broadly limits women’s access to cities at night, feeling unsafe plays out differently in specific and situated interactions, many of which are recognisable from both Brussels and Recife. Across the two research locations, women’s mobility strategies at night are similar, in that they involve extensive planning, preparation, and drawing on financial and non-financial resources. We conclude with some reflections on the role of comparative research in the feminist geographies of gendered urban mobilities, particularly in relation to previously little-studied cities.

The importance of the tourism and hospitality sectors to the urban night and the economies of cities has been well-documented. However, commercialised night-time leisure as a timespace of work remains relatively underexplored. A greater understanding of bars, hotels, restaurants and clubs as workplaces as well as leisure destinations can contribute to conceptualising the potential of urban nights to be more diverse and inclusive. This paper examines the challenges faced by tourism and hospitality workers who need to commute at night. Drawing on a mixed-method study of Sofia, Bulgaria, and Brussels, Belgium, the paper explores the barriers encountered and resources mobilised to make the nocturnal commute possible. The dimensions discussed include the need to continuously adjust one’s commute; the economic and non-economic costs of night commuting; cycling at night; and the impact of collegial and employer relations on negotiating the night commute. The paper demonstrates that while tourism and hospitality workers mobilise a range of economic, organisational, affective and physical resources in order to make night commutes possible, much remains to be done by urban authorities and transport planners to ensure inclusive nocturnal mobilities which attend to work as well as leisure journeys.

In Malate, a district of Manila, flooding is a frequent occurrence. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with Malate inhabitants to approach urban floods as more than discrete disastrous episodes which interfere with a pre-existing normality. The paper employs a Levebvrian conceptualisation of rhythm and entrainment, while also offering reflections on the limits of its relevance to global South cities. Theorised from Malate, urban floods point to the mutual constitution of the social-technical-natural relations of urban infrastructures, and the on-going disruptive rhythms of floodwater. We argue that the rhythms of floodwater can be glimpsed at the intersections of different yet interrelated urban infrastructures. We focus on the infrastructures identified by research participants as pertinent to flood risk in Malate: drainage, waste management, and mobility. By tracing the spatial intersections and temporal rhythms of infrastructurally mediated urban floods, this paper contributes to scholarship on the situated hydrosocial relations of everyday life.

This commentary reflects on the pandemic commute and its significance for, on one hand, engaging with the problematic category of essential work, and on the other, future geographical research on transport and mobilities. Drawing on essential workers' contributions to the ‘Not working from home’ public engagement project, I outline some experiences of commuting during the COVID‐19 pandemic. I illustrate the role of pandemic commuting in defining, and wrestling with, what the category of essential work might mean. I then discuss the ways in which attending to pandemic commutes may extend and reshape existing research on unequal mobilities. Some of the future research directions made more urgent by a focus on pandemic commutes include critical engagements with: first, intersectional inequalities in the journey to work; second, the category of ‘essential journeys’ as used in transport policy and practice; third, the positionality of academic researchers who work on the topic of commuting; and finally, the treatment of commuting time as an integral part of working time.