Flow and flood: mobilities, life in roads and abiotic actors of the (m)ôtô-cene

Traffic in mega-urban Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures. Like eddies of a river, traffic flows are abiotic actors – other-than-human physical phenomena that influence how traffic makes its way. But the liquid sense of flow in Vietnamese imaginings has unique qualities that challenge singular conceptualisations of the Anthropocene. Moving beyond human-centredness, this paper re-imagines traffic of metropolitan HCMC as the (m)ôtô-cene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine transformations of diurnal patterns of banal journey-making where infrastructure routinely fails and ask how abiotic actors shape ways of inhabiting the Anthropocene and living with roads.