This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.
In this article, kerbstones are analysed as historical actors that participated in the changes of urban space and street traffic during the hundred years between the 1880s and the 1980s. Using the approach of new materialism and a large photographic source material from the Finnish city Turku, the article provides a new perspective into the tremendous changes many cities went through during this period and proposes possibilities of including non-human actors in the historical analysis of such change. Focusing on non-human actors also sheds new light on human agency. Such actions as moving in street space or planning cities and traffic infrastructure appear as co-actions of shifting and affective constellations of soft and hard bodies. In the changing street space, the kerbstone was able to assume both enabling and resisting agency as a rather permanent, hard and persistent presence. In intra-actions with the other bodies of the street space it softened or hardened as a border toward different vehicles, living bodies, materials and artefacts, thus also forming them.
Walking is a neglected topic in the history of transport and mobility in cities. The four articles in this special section demonstrate the importance of travel on foot in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in four different countries, and reveal the ways in which pedestrian mobility has persisted despite the development of a car-dominated society. Together they provide important new evidence on a neglected topic and hopefully pave the way for further research on this theme.
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