Politeness and friendliness in public spaces and transport

Abstract

Public spaces and transport play a very important role in the life of the society. They act as a “self-organising public service,” a shared resource in which experiences and values are created (Mean and Tims 2005). These are places where people are in the presence of other people. The success of a particular public space is not only in the hands of the architect and the urban planner, but it also depends on the people using it. In public spaces and transport, one can read notices which provide their users with instructions how to behave and interact with others, what is acceptable in a particular place and what is not, constituting the so-called traffic rules of social interactions (Goffman 1967). Others are expressions of friendliness, intended to make passers-by and customers feel good. The aim of the study is to analyze this type of inscriptions present in American and Polish urban public spaces and transport. Due to the specificity of the discourse, I decided to employ Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze it.