Re-municipalising sociospatial infrastructure: A journeying ethnography of Greater Manchester's dementia (un)friendly buses

Transport can pose substantial challenges for people with dementia. Dementia-friendly approaches seek to encourage public transport use by enhancing people and places through educational initiatives and architectural augmentation respectively. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority is implementing dementia-friendliness within a major re-municipalisation of public transport. Reporting findings from a journeying ethnography of bus travel with passengers with dementia, this paper critiques contemporary friendly transport. It argues that buses are vital sociospatial infrastructures, the friendliness of which is constituted by entangled socio-material and political economic forces. The re-municipalisation of friendly transport requires a radical civic offer of social de-segregation and equitable development.