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

Abstract

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.