People and their walking environments: An exploratory study of meanings, place and times

Abstract

Seen as the most sustainable transport mode, people’s walking has been well investigated in relation to its environmental correlates and benefits to physical and mental well-being in current transportation and public health literature. Much of this research has considered that environmental features determine people’s responses, behaviors and level of satisfaction. Nonetheless, more scholars begin to argue that people’s responses to environments could be highly complex, depending on personal background, past experiences and emotional interpretation of the place. The meanings that people attach to their walking practices may differ by personal, social and cultural contexts, which consequently influence how they perceive and experience their walking environments. The transferability of westernized understandings of walking to other developing cities, thus, is questionable, and will need to be examined empirically. This study focuses on a rapidly developing Chinese city, and explores how pedestrians in Shenzhen respond to the walking environment through their articulation of walking practices. Through analyzing life stories of twenty local residents, three interrelated themes emerged to highlight the significance of meanings attached to walking, engagements with timescapes and attachment to place, illustrating how these themes were entangled with walking experiences. Insights from this study will enable future studies to reconceptualise the relationship between pedestrians and their environments as a more dynamic process which should take into consideration the temporalities of the walking environment and pedestrians’ bodily and emotional capacities.

Keywords:

• Built environment
• meaning
• place attachment
• temporality
• urban China
• walking experience

Acknowledgement

The authors are very grateful for the participants who were interested in this study and kindly shared their walking experiences. We also like to express our sincere gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the quality of this paper.

Notes

1 Due to the lack of publicly available data on micro-scale built environment features in the case study city, local accessibility was measured by a composite index measuring the distance to the nearest Shenzhen metro station, distance to the nearest park/plaza, and the number of restaurants within the neighbourhood (These variables were chosen as proxy measures to capture the accessibility to different destinations that are most common for people’s daily activities).

2 Laoxiang (老鄉) is a common term in Chinese, indicating ancestral fellows who are originated from the same geographical area of China.

3 Urban villages in Chinese cities were originally rural settlements that became absorbed into urban areas as transitional neighbourhoods under unregulated rapid urbanisation. They are usually characterised by apartment blocks of 2–8 floors in close proximity of each other.