Gordon Pirie is Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. His current work is on transport infrastructure and transport spaces in the historically divided port city of Cape Town. The work complements my other research on transport provision serving objectives beyond mobility.Most of my empirical research has been on transportation as a space of control, resistance and transformation. My earliest work examined railways as an agent and expression of apartheid politics and economics in South Africa. Subsequent work on colonial mobilities has explored motoring (automobility) in British colonial Africa, and cruise tourism history in South Africa. My book on the hopes for British imperial air routes and services, and their geopolitical realities, was published in 2009; a companion volume (a socio-cultural history of private pilots and Imperial Airways passengers, crew and publicity) was published in 2012.I am currently Editor of the Journal of Transport History, and serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Tourism History, the Journal of Transport Geography, the South African Geographical Journal, Afrika Focus, and Urban Forum.