Being mobile today: some recent findings from social science research and lessons for urban walking

Abstract

This text deals with the issue of urban walking in the light of social science research on mobility in general. A good number of authors, without necessarily always dealing with walking as such, have developed statements which make it possible to identify useful reflections on this issue.
Thus, urban history invites us to understand the evolution of the place of walking in the city and to look at the urban transformations, in particular those resulting from the modernist period, from the angle of the barriers put in the way of pedestrian movement by the major transport infrastructures. Then, based on the distinction between mobility and displacement, can we question urban walking in its capacity to give us access, in a sensitive manner, to contexts that are certainly geographically close, but yet socially very different. In the same vein, we can also ask ourselves whether or not urban walking is part of the injunction to be mobile that characterises contemporary societies and whether or not it contributes to reinforcing our mobility capital.
For its part, the construction of 'spatio-temporal attitudes' makes it possible to better understand the logics underlying the practice of walking or, on the contrary, leading to its avoidance, at a time when travel time, thanks in particular to new information and communication technologies, tends to become a time in its own right. Finally, in this context, the meaning of waiting and stopping, as a pause in a peregrination, deserves to be understood in its entirety, as well as the devices put in place to improve the comfort of these two inseparable moments of movement.