The Walkable City

Dimensions of Walking and Overlapping Walks of Life

Jennie Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781315519197
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This book explores everyday walking in contemporary urban life. It brings together important theoretical and empirical insights to understand how the 'walkability' of urban spaces can be imagined, planned for, and experienced.

The book focuses on the everyday experiences of the urban walker, the bodily experiences of walking, and different walking research methods. It goes beyond the conventional focus on walkable places by delving into the ways in which urban space is consumed and produced through different ways of walking. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK and international secondary sources, the book examines how walking is socially and materially co-produced, focusing on pedestrian practices, infrastructures, and the social nature of walking. Chapters in the book offer key explorations of the cultural and social inclusions and exclusions of navigating the city on foot. The book considers transport planning and policy promoting pedestrian movement, pedestrian infrastructures, the politics of walking, and social interactions of urban pedestrians. The book offers vital analyses of how different but overlapping dimensions of walking and their relationship with urban space are often overlooked, and the importance of centring the lived experiences of walking in understandings of pedestrian practices.

This book provides a timely contribution to the field of mobilities due to a growing interest in urban walking. It will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, human geography, sociology, and public health.

1Introducing the ‘Walkable City’

‘You're the book that I have opened. And now I've got to know much more'. Shara Nelson, lead vocalist of British trip hop group Massive Attack, sings these lines as she walks along a section of West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles in the accompanying video to the critically acclaimed song ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. The video was filmed in one continuous shot on Steadicam and follows Nelson purposely walking along the sidewalk, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. The camera follows her disengagement as she strides past a group of men surrounding an aggressive dog, a young boy taking aim with a toy gun, a white couple having an argument, a black father and child holding hands, and a disabled man with no legs zigzagging on a skateboard behind her. She ignores a homeless person pushing a trolley laden with belongings, a woman handing out flyers, and the street vendor selling fruit and vegetables. Nelson crosses an intersection, focusing on the route in front of her. A collision with an oncoming motorbike to her left is narrowly avoided as she moves forward past an older woman, walking at a visibly slower pace to Nelson, who is then pushed past by a teenage couple.

This music video can be read as exemplifying the blasé indifference of the urban dweller (see Simmel, 1971) in relation to many aspects of contemporary urban life, including gentrification, street violence, homelessness, and urban poverty. However, it is also a telling example of how people appropriate space on foot and the richness of what unfolds through the ‘simple act of walking’. The video is not only a visual representation of everyday walking and the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and disability but also highlights central themes in this book relating to the rhythmicity of the walking body and pedestrian encounters. Yet, how should the complexity of these intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and disability be understood in the context of urban walking? How do we avoid treating all walking as the same? This book seeks to address these questions while attempting to dissolve some of the romanticism that surrounds everyday walking in the city, a romanticism that positions walking as an accessible, democratic, inclusive, and emancipatory urban practice. A romanticism that extolls the positive virtues of walking across academic research and the arenas of policy and practice. The central concern driving the development of this book is the everyday politics of urban walking. In other words, the inclusions and exclusions that emerge from everyday experiences of navigating the city on foot.

In December 2019, Channel 4 broadcast a Dispatches documentary that provided a devastating window into the lives of over four million children living in poverty in the UK. One of the families featured in the documentary were eight-year-old Courtney, her six-year-old brother, and their mother. They were living in a three-bedroom flat in Cambridge, having fled domestic abuse, yet were having to move again to another part of the country as they could no longer afford the rent due to a bedroom tax¹ being levied on a third bedroom. Of the many disturbing scenes throughout this broadcast of children enduring the contemporary equivalent of Dickensian Britain, due in no small part to brutal reductions in welfare provision, there is one that has particular poignance in the context of this book and its concerns with everyday urban walking. Courtney, her younger brother, and mum are shown visiting a local food bank for the first time, located 2.5 miles (4 km)² from their home. They are filmed walking there and back in the early evening darkness of winter as the bus fare exceeded their miniscule daily budget due to delays in Universal Credit³ payments. As I watched these young children struggle to help carry the heavy shopping bags of provisions from the foodbank on this 2.5-mile journey back to their flat, I wondered what difference a well-designed, ‘walkable’, high quality, ‘pedestrian friendly’, public realm would have made to their experiences. The conclusion I quickly came to was, very little.⁴

This book examines the everyday politics of urban walking – but perhaps more precisely, it is concerned with the different ways walking is situated in contemporary urban life. In doing so, I emphasise the need to consider experiences of walking beyond a narrow set of concerns relating to a well-rehearsed and familiar set of issues including, but not limited to, the built environment, low-carbon mobilities, air pollution, and fear/safety. I argue that making a city ‘walkable’ in terms such as these is meaningless without taking account of broader inequalities relating to concerns not only with class and poverty highlighted in the experiences of Courtney detailed above but also gender, race, disability, and ageing.

Framing the ‘walkable city’

The relationship between walking and the city is multiple and complex, with engagements ranging from the rational and planned to the poetic and sensual. Concerns with urban walking have a long history while featuring in contemporary debates within both policy and academic arenas. Urban pedestrian movement is closely associated with, among other things, urban planning, sustainable transport, public space, social mixing, and artistic practices. As a result, there are multiple ways in which walking and ‘walkability’ are conceptualised, framed, and understood in different contexts. Within urban and transport policy and academic debate, a crude distinction can be drawn between walking being commonly viewed as either a form of ‘active transport’ or a means for how we come to engage with and know urban space. However, all too often analytical perspectives focusing on walking are either divorced from broader political and socio-economic processes or the everyday experiences of walking practices themselves. For, as Bieri (2017) argues: ‘Walking as art, walking as research method, and walkable urbanism can all be understood as an attempt to reclaim an everyday practice – walking. It is striking, however, that the predominant forms that emerge from this endeavor are not everyday forms of walking but performative forms of walking’ (29). In this book I provide a critical examination of the socially differential nature of pedestrian experiences in relation to the everyday politics of pedestrian practices. With this, the book tends to practices of everyday walking as its central focus as opposed to the more performative walking practices concerned with walking as art, as a research method, or the commodification of walking through urban development processes.

The central argument of The Walkable City is that notions of ‘walkability’ and ‘walkable cities’ need to take greater account of how urban walking is imagined, planned for, and experienced. This reconceptualisation of urban walking goes beyond simply asking where, how often, and why people walk towards facilitating a greater understanding of the relationship between walking, urban space, and the everyday politics of contemporary urban life. As such, I am motivated by two overlapping questions:

1. How is urban space produced by different walking practices?
2. What kinds of inclusions and exclusions emerge from how a walkable city is understood and practised?

I seek to engage with these questions through the development of an interpretive framework in which walkability is not reduced to where/what is walkable and the frequency of pedestrian movement but the ways in which urban space is both consumed and produced through different ways of walking. In other words, the focus of analysis is not the extent to which cities contain walkable spaces but how people walk in and through urban space. I argue that paying closer attention to the ‘hows’ of walking makes it possible to gain a greater understanding of the social and cultural inclusions and exclusions emerging from pedestrian practices. Methodological concerns are engaged with throughout the book in terms of both a critical examination of methods for researching walking and walkability, and the possibilities and limitations of walking as a methodological tool in, and of, itself.

In what follows, I examine the intersections between walking practices and concerns with geographies of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and disability while situating pedestrian practices in the complex coordination of everyday life. Walking is not a singular practice but takes on many different forms and characteristics. However, the aim of this book is not to make a priori distinctions between different ‘types’ of walking or produce some form of walking typology but to explore how pedestrian movement features in everyday contemporary urban life. I am particularly concerned with the neglected, banal, everyday forms of walking that are often overlooked when the focus is on walking for leisure or as a mode of transport.

The romanticisation of walking is not limited to artistic, literary, and philosophical engagements but stretches through planning approaches, such as New Urbanism (see Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion), and health perspectives, such as the World Health Organisation ‘Steps to health’ framework (WHO, 2007). In The Walkable City, I argue that the extent to which walking is something to endure rather than enjoy is rarely reflected upon. In attending to this concern, I develop a conceptualisation of walkability as being socially and materially co-produced in relation to unfolding habits, routines, and practices. This conceptualisation of walkability provides an alternative lens to dominant perspectives in urban and transport research, planning, and practice, for critically engaging with a range of issues relating to the material, embodied, affectual, political, and social dimensions of walking. I argue that this theoretical position enables us to gain a greater understanding of how socially differentiated urban space is produced and consumed on foot. My starting point for stressing the importance of how walking is socially differentiated is to engage with more obvious forms of identity politics, particularly in relation to the ways in which walking can be gendered and racialised (see also Brown and Shortell, 2016). I then move on to examine more subtle forms of differentiation, hierarchies, and privilege that emerge through holding up a magnifying glass to the multiple and complex ways in which people use and appropriate urban space on foot.

Peripatetic ponderings: walking as practice, walking as knowing

There is an ever-increasing policy interest in promoting walking as a low-carbon and healthy form of urban transport with an associated growth of pro-walking organisations. Yet, much of the dominant focus on walking and the built environment in these transport and policy research contexts considers pedestrian movement in relation to rational choice and economic demand. These approaches include engagements whereby walking patterns and trends have been forecast and predicted; the implementation of walking policy has been considered; the health benefits of walking as active travel have been promoted; and cost-benefit analysis of pedestrian modes of transport has been conducted.

Much traditional transport research, and urban and transport policy, focuses on how people can be encouraged to adopt more active forms of mobility such as walking and cycling. There is a pre-occupation with quantifying rates of walking (Lee and Talen, 2014; Ogilvie et al., 2004; Tight and Givoni, 2010); examining barriers, including socio-cultural ones, to pedestrian movement (Frank et al., 2006; Sallis et al., 2006); and concerns with the built environment in terms of the optimal urban design features that facilitate pedestrian movement (Ewing and Handy, 2009; Southworth, 2005). Yet, such work frequently lacks any form of in-depth engagement with the lived experiences of walking and is based on a series of assumptions relating to pre-defined journeys with the built environment being the primary influence on a person's decision to walk, with these decisions being made at a specific time and place somehow outside the practice of walking (see for example Sallis et al., 2006). Furthermore, notions of ‘the body’, beyond a non-disabled, non-differentiated, and non-encumbered pedestrian, are still largely absent from transport, planning, and health discourses on walkability. As such, the complexity of what happens as people walk is often neglected, leading to the heterogeneity of pedestrian practices often being overlooked.

In this book, I develop an analysis that highlights how pedestrian movement is still largely positioned as a homogeneous and largely self-evident means of getting from one place to another with little attention being given to the importance of the processual and experiential dimensions of walking itself. In doing so I propose an understanding of urban walking that is constitutive of so much more than instrumental movements that can be plotted from A to B; whereby the built environment and the materialities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the ‘Walkable City’
• 2 Pedestrian infrastructures
• 3 Walking as social differentiation
• 4 Walking rhythms and the politics of time
• 5 Pedestrian politics of (non)encounters
• 6 Walking bodies, emotional geographies, and mobile methods
• 7 Stepping forwards: Some concluding thoughts
• Epilogue
• Index