Arrested Mobilities: Affective Encounters and Crime Scenes in the City.

This article examines everyday urban encounters during routine mobility—such as commuting and walking—through the lens of mobility studies, focusing on how these encounters are shaped by affect, aesthetics, materiality, and social dynamics within the city. Using the recent killing of a Somali-Australian taxi driver in Melbourne alongside literary analyses of Teju Cole’s novel *Open City* and Claudia Rankine’s poetry in *Citizen*, it explores how movement through the city can be arrested or halted by racism, violence, or crime, rendering urban spaces as a patchwork of invisible crime scenes. The concept of hauntology, drawn from Derrida’s philosophy, is employed to understand how these moments of arrested mobility reveal the “ghosts” or suppressed violences embedded in urban life. The article argues that recognizing these hauntological aspects challenges the taken-for-grantedness of urban mobility and calls for a deeper ethical engagement with the city’s social and spatial injustices.