Capturing Gendered Mobility and Street Use in the Historical City: A New Methodological Approach

Abstract

While in the social sciences everyday mobility and street use are seen as central to the understanding of urban societies, in the work of historians these phenomena only play a limited role. Building upon methods from related fields and using digital tools, this article proposes a new methodological approach to study historical mobility and street use. This 'snapshot approach' facilitates intercultural comparability and creates possibilities for systematic spatial analyses. We propose it forms an important tool to enhance our understanding of gendered urban experience in the past .

Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

“…13 Court records such as witness and victim statements may also provide relevant data, 14 and an ambitious study of Amsterdam is currently utilising a range of sources to map spatial patterns of street use in the nineteenth-century city. 15 While the above archival sources do allow some reconstruction of who was on the street, when and where, they tell us much less about the motivations for travel and the feelings and emotions that mobility generated. No source allows a complete reconstruction of travellers' responses to journeys, and such emotions were often fleeting and totally unrecorded, but personal diaries can begin to provide some insights.…”