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Introduction
Walking - more than pedestrian
C. Michael Hall, Yael Ram and Noam Shoval
In one sense, it may seem strange to have an introduction to walking. After all, walks are something that almost every able-bodied person is able to experience, and every journey begins and ends with a walk. However, like many taken-for-granted everyday experiences, there are (sometimes unseen) influences and factors that affect how, where and why we do what we do, many of which we are unaware of until they are pointed out to us. So it is with the present volume, in which we bring together a range of perspectives on the histories, cultures, psychology, geography and planning of walking. The range of academic approaches is no accident; walking is an inherently cross-disciplinary topic, it
trespasses through everybody else’s field . . . and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route . . . If a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field . . . yielding a specific crop – then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.
(Solnit 2000: 4)
The purpose of the volume is therefore to highlight current research approaches, encourage further conversation between different fields on the subject of walking and contribute to walking as an important area of study in its own right.
Walking is a good thing. Walking encourages good public and private health, interaction between neighbours, contributes to feeling of community and positive sense of place, and, importantly in a time of concerns over climate and environmental change, contributes to reductions in traffic congestion, air pollution and emissions, and resource use (Leyden 2003; Forsyth and Southworth 2008; Ewing and Handy 2009; C3 Collaborating for Health 2012; Forsyth 2015). Furthermore, walkable places are increasingly being positioned as a positive in terms of economic performance and desirable from a real-estate perspective (Leinberger and Alfonzo 2012; Trowbridge et al. 2014) (see Box 1.1). However, in many cases, walking, especially in terms of where and when you can walk, is also constrained by social practices shaped by gender, culture, religion and economics. Furthermore, despite all the perceived benefits of walking, in many parts of the world the extent to which people engage in walking as a daily activity appears to have been in decline, as a result of new lifestyles and forms of personal mobility, as well as changes in planning and design of the built environment, that have often led to a decline in public space.
Walking is about being outside, in public space, and public space is also being abandoned and eroded in older cities, eclipsed by technologies and services that don’t require leaving home, and shadowed by fear in many places . . . In many new places, public space isn’t even in the design: what was once public space is designed to accommodate the privacy of automobiles; malls replace main streets, streets have no sidewalks; buildings are entered through their garages . . . Fear has created a whole style of architecture and urban design, notably in Southern California, where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion in many of the subdivisions and gated communities.
(Short 1991: 10)
Simultaneously with the transformation of public space, and arguably a part of the same processes of neoliberal capitalism and a reduction of the public sphere, walking has developed more as a commodity with associated development of commercial products such as specialist clothing, walking and fitness aids, as well as walking holidays and walking trails. Walking therefore represents some of the major themes of our age with respect to the marketization of what was previous private activities; indeed, the clash between notions of public and private is an important theme in much of the walking literature, relating as it does not only to the act of walking as an activity but where, when and how it can be conducted. As Macauley (2000) observed, walking
might be re-rooted in and re-routed through the urban and suburban landscape so as to pose a challenge to social tendencies that accentuate forms of domestication or domination. By understanding the dynamic and democratic dimensions of walking, we can also begin to interrogate and critically contest the opaque and authoritarian features of urban architecture, private property and public space. If we follow walkers through city and suburban placescapes, we might begin to observe the implicit cultural politics at work in various orders of ambulation. The control and maintenance of space and place, the organization of speed and pace, and the erection or transgression of community ideas of citizenship or race are instances of such phenomena. Further, the similarities become noticeable between pedestrian activity and linguistic speech acts in terms of a rhetoric of walking – a trail of ‘foot notes’ so to speak – within the processual setting and mobile text of the city. In short, an examination of walking in the city and suburbs shows us the many particular and overlapping ‘walks of life’.
(Macauley 2000: 4)
The book is divided into five main sections: culture, society and historical context; social practices, perceptions and behaviours; hiking trails and pilgrimage routes; health, well-being and psychology; and method, planning and design. Each of these highlights current approaches and major themes in research on walking in a range of different environments. This first chapter looks to broadly introduce the reader to the topic of walking.
Walking
Although almost everyone walks, data on walking is highly variable. Table 1.1 provides a range of data on walking and related factors, such as obesity and perceived safety, for a range of countries. As the table illustrates, there are substantial variations between countries regarding the extent to which individuals engage in active transportation (bicycling and walking) as a percentage of all transport. However, of equal importance is the number of able-bodied people who do not go walking at all. For example, between April 2008 and April 2009, the US National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) asked respondents: ‘In the past week, how many times did you take a walk outside including walking the dog and walks for exercise?’ Remarkably, for this one-week time period nearly
Box 1.1 The economic promise of walkable places in Metropolitan Washington, DC
An economic analysis of a sample of neighborhoods in the Washington, DC metropolitan area in the United States using four metrics (Walk Score walkability measures, regional serving, economic performance and social equity) and a modified stratified random sampling scheme of 201 places found the following.
- More walkable places perform better economically. For neighborhoods within metropolitan Washington, as the number of environmental features that facilitate walkability and attract pedestrians increases, so do office, residential, and retail rents, retail revenues and for-sale residential values.
- Walkable places benefit value-wise from being near other walkable places. On average, walkable neighborhoods in metropolitan Washington that cluster and form walkable districts exhibit higher rents and home values than stand-alone walkable places.
- Residents of more walkable places have lower transportation costs and higher transit access, but higher housing costs. Residents of more walkable neighborhoods in metropolitan Washington generally spend around 12 per cent of their income on transportation and 30 per cent on housing. In comparison, residents of places with fewer environmental features that encourage walkability spend around 15 per cent on transportation and 18 per cent on housing.
- Residents of places with poor walkability are generally less affluent and have lower educational attainment than places with good walkability. Places with more walkability features have also become more gentrified over the past decade. However, there is no significant difference in terms of transit access to jobs between poor and good walkable places.
(Leinberger and Alfonzo 2012: 1)
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