Small Icons with Wide Borders: The Semiotics of Micro-Mobility in Urban Space

Today installed on our digital screens are several icons that converge the physical and virtual realities of cities. As new interfaces for smart city experiences, a great variety of mobile city apps provide location-based information and imagery on various categories, such as management and urban infrastructure, heritage and tourism, marketing and recreation. Smart icons that employ location-awareness, VR, AR and/or QR technologies, have become tools for augmenting urban space with ‘smarter’ (perceived through spatial practice), ‘experimental’ (lived through representational spaces) and ‘poetical’ (conceived through representations of space) boundaries. This chapter focuses on the recent smart micro-mobility trends emerging in the cities and aims to explore the material dimension of the physical circumstances and the social dimension of mobility culture from the new city media. It represents a relational model linking former semiotic theories and the author’s interpretation of the semiotic power of micro-mobility in urban space. The semiotic analysis regarding the two most popular smart sharing systems for e-scooters (Martı) and e-bikes (Isbike) in Istanbul reveals their technological, sociocultural and political implications in urban space.