Introduction: historical perspectives on pedestrians and the city

All travel generates a range of feelings, responses and emotions that can be stimulated by many factors but recovering such responses to everyday travel in the past is difficult. Few conventional sources provide information on the travellers’ experiences of movement and, not surprisingly, most transport histories focus mainly on matters of infrastructure, usage, and technological change. In contrast, contemporary mobilities studies that can talk directly to those who travel do explore the lived experiences of mobility in some detail. This paper shows how, by using a range of life writing drawn from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it is possible to begin to recover at least some of the feelings and responses that past travellers experienced. I argue that such an approach provides an important additional perspective to research in transport history.

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(Un)equal footing: Otherings and orderings of urban mobility

Emanuel

Normark

2023

The Journal of Transport History

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This special issue brings together articles on the history of walking in European cities and urban hinterlands since the late nineteenth century. Taken together, they reveal how the conditions to walk changed as cities and streets were rethought and rebuilt for motorised mobility, and they highlight the role of labelling and defining pedestrians in order to legitimise change. The anticipation and making of car cities entailed locally specific yet similar versions of marginalisation of walking. Discursive othering (vocabularies, rules, etc.) and material ordering (through designs, etc.) of pedestrians combined to make walking the “second” mobility and produced street modernities. Using the articles as interpretative inspiration, we claim that in the twentieth century, what we refer to as mechanical equality grew in importance at the expense of embodied equality. We propose that un-marginalising walking requires the revaluation of – and hence a more thorough understanding of – the bodily qualities and mundane practices of walking.

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Introduction: historical perspectives on pedestrians and the city

Cited by 3 publications

References 28 publications

Introduction

Introduction

Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

(Un)equal footing: Otherings and orderings of urban mobility

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