Techno-Politics of Walking: Continuity and Change of Streets as Public Space in Urban Europe
This project is about walking in cities, now and then. Considering streets as public spaces it will examine how changes to their physical layout and innovations in traffic technology impacted the (dis)integration of our most sustainable mode of mobility: the pedestrians.
The aim of the project is to contribute to the understanding of walking in the creation of public space and the potential for its revival in European cities. It will do so by examining the contestation during the 20 century between the governance of pedestrians and actual walking practices locally in Stockholm and Copenhagen. The analysis will be carried out within four case studies, focussing on different kinds of material and technological governance of walking: through the implementation of sidewalks, traffic signals, pedestrian streets and tunnels. Archive and document studies, used to capture stakeholder interaction in the governance of walking, are combined with sources particularly apt to capture mundane past practices in the past (photographs, letters to editors, court cases from accidents) and the present (ethnomethodological analysis). Combined, these studies provide a basis for a comparative analysis of urban walking and its governance at the street-level. Next to academic journal articles, the projects results will be communicated in the form of a policy-oriented paper, guided tours to the project’s sites of inquiry, and a show case model focusing on conflicts of walking to be shown at events.
Participating universities: Uppsala universitet
Collaboration: ArkDes
Funding: Formas
Project period: 2020-2024