Spatial tactics and sliding signs/symbols alongside a middle-aged ‘neurodivergent’ man and possibilities for troubling and reconfiguring already troubled and troubling classifications and practices in and around the moving city

This article critically reflects upon journeys taken in and around the city alongside a middle-aged ‘neurodivergent’ man often labelled ‘non-verbal’ and ‘challenging’. These forays, on foot and by car, which are conceptualised as spatial tactics, are deployed as prisms through which to reflect upon the things making up these places. Place is initially read as a coherent and cohesive text, or semiotic landscape, constituted by clear and determinate signs. However, this article becomes increasingly preoccupied by things which seem to evade, and complicate, fixed and unitary meanings. Place-based barriers are not ‘out there’ in place but constituted by apparently innocuous things, including ourselves. These shapeshift, accumulating meanings in the spaces in/between people in environments shaped, albeit not determined, by complex cultural/historical constructions. Meanwhile, other, seemingly contradictory, symbols—notably dog faeces and discarded cans of beer—individually and collectively make a troubled, or moving, ‘collage’ communicating multiple messages about matters in/out of place, inclusion/exclusion, attraction/rejection, desire/disgust, and in/civility. Lenses shaped, sensitised, and perhaps even energised by orientations associated with critical disability studies and neurodiversity studies bring into focus the open-ended, mythical, messy, indeterminate, undecidable, and impermanent qualities of these polyvalent symbols and things. These things accomplish or make up—in the sense of constituting and fabricating—not only ability and disability but also moving places of order and disorder. Such perspectives also illuminate the im/potence and arbitrariness of classificatory acts. Consequently, it becomes possible to think about how people, things, and places overlap and coincide with each other. This illuminates the fictiveness of ‘order’. This also makes it possible to realise and accomplish more inclusive inter/relations, places, and things, and difference for itself.