Walking beyond the city? On the importance of recreational mobilities for landscape planning, urban design, and public policy

Abstract

Walking engenders many descriptive, normative, and speculative debates. This article reviews work done in the interventionist realms of landscape planning, urban design, and public policy, where attention is increasingly being paid to walking (as a matter of fact) and its often-prescriptive corollary of ‘walkability’ (as a matter of concern). What patterns of critical engagement are seen in work on how, why, and where people walk? I explore how (a) the so-called compact city is seen as the only context where walking and other ‘soft’ modes of everyday mobility meaningfully occurs, and (b) scholarly debates on self-propelled movement seem to focus too narrowly on necessary or utilitarian activity. Recreational mobilities at various temporal and spatial scales thus tend to be overlooked or ignored altogether. Drawing on the interdisciplinary explorations presented in this special issue of Mobilities, a provisional agenda for research and practice is presented. Suggestions are made as to how one might approach the dense, compact city (as phenomenon and as normative impulse in spatial planning) in new ways by foregrounding walking as a widespread example of ‘discretionary’ mobility, i.e., as optional movement in space.

Keywords:

• Walking
• walkability
• recreational mobilities
• active transport
• landscape planning
• urban design
• policy

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to many colleagues who helped develop the ideas shared here, especially Annmarie Adams, Marie-Hélène Armand, Lisa Bornstein, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Katrine Claassens, Carole Després, Martin Emanuel, Jan Gehl, Jeremy Guth, Paul Hess, Nina-Marie Lister, Paul McCrorie, Daniel Normark, Jon Olsen, Mattias Qviström, Richard Shearmur, Kai Tarum, and the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript. Much of the work was done while rambling at Soup Harbour. Excellent support was provided by research assistants Dominique Boulet, Graham Hauptman, and Adam Popper.

Declaration of interest

The author acknowledges that there is no conflict of interest, real or perceived.

Notes

1 See OECD/EC (2020), Figure 4.1 (113), which notes that by 2015, over half of the total population for countries in the World Bank’s country-income categories of ‘lower-middle’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’ was already living in metropolitan areas, with these proportions tending to increase. Similarly, UN-Habitat estimates that approximately one-third of the total global population was urban in 2020, with at least 2.59 billion people living in metropolitan areas with more than 300 000 inhabitants (UNHSP 2020).

2 See Appleyard, Gerson, and Lintell (1981), Cullen (1961), Jacobs (1961), and Whyte (1982).

3 See the delightful and well-travelled chapter originally entitled ‘Marcher dans la ville’ in the first volume of L’invention du quotidien (de Certeau 1994 [1980]).

4 To be sure, many UDLP studies of people moving through space explicitly consider motivation or purpose (e.g. Ewing and Cervero 2001, 2010; Frank et al. 2010; Mitra and Manaugh 2020; Saelens, Sallis, and Frank 2003)—albeit sometimes only after the fact as recognition of study limitations (e.g. Piatkowski et al. 2019, 57)—and acknowledge the importance of leisure and recreation, particularly for walking.

5 See for instance Boschmann and Brady (2013), Curry (1994), Moreno-Monroy, Schiavina, and Veneri (2021), and Sieverts (2003).

6 Wang and Yang (2019) noted in their detailed review that most published studies on walking and walkability are limited to only certain contexts in Europe and North America, with surprisingly little on developing countries and the Global South more generally; similar findings were reported by Herrmann-Lunecke, Mora, and Sagaris (2020) and Wood (2022), although both of these latter pieces are notable exceptions.

7 See the empirically-grounded critique articulated by Shashank and Schuurman (2019).

8 See e.g. Heynen (1999).

Additional information

Funding

This work was completed with support from Nordforsk and the Canadian research agency Fonds québécois de recherche (grant numbers 2015-SE-179044 and 2016-QS-203342), as well as the Swedish research agency Formas (grant number 2016-01273).