Tag: A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture

Kevin M. Leyden, “Social Capital and the Built Environment: The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods”

Another article on walkability: this one, by Kevin M. Leyden, argues that walkable neighbourhoods encourage the development of social capital, meaning that they help people know their neighbours, participate in politics, trust others, and be more socially engaged (1546). The benefits of social capital don’t just accrue to the community: “People who are socially engaged with others and actively involved in their communities tend to live longer and be healthier physically and mentally” (1546). Leyden suggests the term “social capital” as a way of describing those social and community ties: he defines it as “the social networks and interactions that inspire trust and reciprocity among citizens” (1546). “Individuals with high levels of social capital tend to be involved politically, to volunteer in their communities, and to get together more frequently with friends and neighbors,” as well as “to trust or to think kindly of others” (1546). Social capital has been linked empirically to “the proper functioning of a democracy, the prevention of crime, and enhanced economic development” (1546). It’s very important, then, according to Leyden.

Leyden, a political scientist, wants to understand “why some persons and some communities have more social capital than others,” since it’s so important to public health (1546). He wants to examine “whether the built environment (i.e. the way we design and build our communities and neighborhoods) affects the degree to which people are involved in their communities and with each other” (1546). His “fundamental premise is that some neighborhood designs enable or encourage social ties or community connections, whereas others do not” (1546). His hypothesis is that mixed-use and pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods are most likely to promote social capital (1546). Such neighbourhoods are typically found in older cities and rural towns (1546). “These neighborhoods are walkable, enabling residents to perform daily activities (e.g. grocery shopping, going to the park, taking children to school) without the use of a car,” he writes. “Many of these neighorhoods have places of worship, a local tavern, a coffee shop, or restaurants within walking distance” (1546). In other words, they have what Jemima Stockton and her co-authors describe as a higher land-use mix (see Stockton et al). Such neighbourhoods encourage walking, because pedestrians don’t have to complete with cars along busy highways or massive parking lots (1546). Thus, following Stockton and her co-authors again, we might describe them as having high levels of street connectivity or, following Mariela Alfonzo, we might suggest that they satisfy pedestrian needs for comfort and pleasurability (Alfonzo 828-30). 

Leyden compares “[t]his traditional or complete neighborhood design” to “its modern suburban counterpart,” in which daily needs are met by shopping in malls “located along 4-lane connector roads that are typically clogged with traffic” and where trips “to shop, worship, or go to a restaurant, pub, park or library” must be made by car (1546). “Many contemporary suburban subdivisions do not even have sidewalks: citizens must drive to find a place to exercise or to go for a walk,” he writes (1546). 

In theory, “pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods are expected to enhance social capital because they enable residents to interact,” either spontaneously or intentionally, and that interaction helps “to encourage a sense of trust and a sense of connection between people and the places they live” (1546). Those interactions build webs of public respect and trust (1546). However, in contrast, “most contemporary suburban subdivisions do little to enable social interaction,” particularly spontaneous ones, and life takes places “within the home or in the backyard” (1546-47). 

Leyden’s study “examined the relationship between neighborhood design and social capital” (1547). His hypothesis was “that pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods are more likely to encourage social capital than are car-dependent, single-use neighborhoods” (1547). He surveyed people in and around Galway, Ireland, in 2001 (1547). At the time, Galway was the country’s fastest growing cities in Europe (1547). He chose Galway because “it has a mix of neighborhood types ranging from the truly mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented variety (built centuries before the automobile) to the contemporary, American-style suburb,” and because the city has no history of racism of “white flight” that has “affected American cities and that in many ways continues to distort decisions regarding where to live” (1547). The survey was conducted by mail (1547). Galway’s neighbourhoods were divided into three categories: city centre neighbourhoods, including mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods where people can meet their daily needs by walking short distances; older, mixed-use suburbs, which “incorporate some of the more positive aspects of both the traditional city center neighborhood and the quiet suburb”; and modern, car-dependent suburbs, where few places can be accessed on foot, and where some neighbourhoods don’t have sidewalks or parks (1547). By categorizing Galway’s neighbourhoods, Leyden ensured that the individuals surveyed lived in a range of neighbourhood types (1547). However, the determination of whether these neighbourhoods were walkable or not was made by the respondents (1547). The study measured four key aspects of social capital: “how well residents knew their neighbors, their political participation, their trust or faith in other people, and their social engagement” (1548). 

The results indicated that the research participants’ evaluations of the walkability of their neighbourhoods coincided with the researchers’ evaluations of those same neighbourhoods. In “traditional” neighbourhoods, people walked more (or at least perceived their neighbourhoods to be walkable), felt more connected to or part of their communities, were more likely to know their neighbours and to have trust or faith in other people, were more likely to contact elected officials to express their concerns, and were more likely to walk to work (1548-49). However, those simple mean comparisons do not control for other factors that might explain why residents in some neighbourhoods have more social capital, so Leyden used a multivariate method, which returned similar results: “the more places respondents reported being able to walk to in their neighborhood, the higher their level of social capital. This relation suggests that walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods are better generators of social capital than are modern, car-dependent suburbs” (1549). Thus, the more walkable a neighbourhood was—the more places someone could walk to—the more social capital that the neighbourhood generated (1549).“The neighborhood walkability measure had a statistically significant effect on all of the measures of social capital,” Leyden writes. “No other predictor was consistently significant. Moreover, neighborhood walkability consistently held its own in comparison with the other predictors, often playing a more powerful role” (1549). 

“This study suggests that the way we design and build our communities and neighborhoods affects social capital and thus physical and mental health,” Leydon concludes. “The results indicate that residents living in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods are more likely to know their neighbors, to participate politically, to trust others, and to be involved socially” (1550). Unfortunately, though America’s built environment—and Canada’s—has, over the past decades, “been moving in a direction that is likely to have a negative effect on social capital” (1550). Many Americans have no choice but to live in “a modern, car-dependent suburb, because not enough viable, affordable traditional neighborhoods exist,” and modern, car-dependent suburbs are what most developers build (1550). It’s not just the fault of developers; “municipal zoning codes and other public policy changes” have promoted “transport by private vehicle,” rather than public transportation, and have discouraged, even outlawed, “the building of mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods” (1550). “Changing this trend will require political will and a shift in land-use and transportation priorities and policies,” Leyden writes, along with a shift in public consciousness, perhaps through government policy (1550). However, before that can happen, we need to know whether the results of this study can be generalized. Did selection bias, for instance, affect the results? Is it possible that “[s]ocial people might be more likely to choose walkable neighborhoods, rather th[a]n walkable neighborhoods’ encouraging sociability” (1550)? In addition, “much more must be learned about which architectural aspects of the built environment most affect health and social capital,” and indeed about the components of walkability: “measures such as block size, density, street widths, and traffic speed” (1550). “Finally, more data must be gathered regarding how the built environment affects health in general,” Leyden writes (1550). Does urban sprawl affect peoples’ life spans (1550)? How does it affect young people or the elderly (1550)? “The consequences of not walking and of not interacting with others may have consequences far more negative, for persons of all ages, than we ever imagined,” he states (1550).

Somehow, and I don’t know how to do this, I want to extend Leyden’s argument from a discussion of social capital to one of walking culture. If places are walkable, then are people more likely to incorporate walking into their daily lives? And would that quotidian walking create a culture where walking is normal and not unusual or eccentric? Might such a culture include events, like heritage or tourism walks, the kinds of events that Wrights & Sites react against, that they want to subvert with psychogeography or mythogeography (see Wrights & Sites)? The city where I live is not that walkable—most of it resembles the car-dependent suburban neighbourhoods Leyden describes—and for that reason, does it lack the culture of walking that may exist in older neighbourhoods in Galway? I think it does, but how would one go about proving such a thing? I turn to yet another article, hoping to find a clue, frustrated that nobody (as far as I can tell) has ever asked this question before.

Works Cited

Alfonzo, Mariela A. “To Walk or Not to Walk? The Hierarchy of Walking Needs.” Environment and Behavior, vol. 37, no. 6, 2005, pp. 808-836. DOI: 10.1177/0013916504274016.

Leyden, Kevin M. “Social Capital and the Built Environment: The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 9, 2003, pp. 1546-51. Proquest.

Stockton, Jemima C. Oliver Duke-Williams, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Jennifer S. Mindell, Eric J. Brunner, and Nicola J. Shelton. “Development of a Novel Walkability Index for London, United Kingdom: Cross-sectional Application to the Whitehall II Study. ” BMC Public Health, vol. 16, no. 416, pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-016-3012-12.

Wrights & Sites. “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City.’” Performance Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-22. DOI: 10.1080/13528160600812083.

Wrights & Sites, “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City’”

A library search for the term “walking culture” turned up this manifesto, produced in 2006 by the walking performance collective Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Cathy Turner, although the manifesto includes contributions from Richard Layzell, Bess Lovejoy, and Fiona Templeton and contemporaries of the Dadaist movement [115]) for Walkzi’s “Everyday Walking Culture” conference in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2005 (121). What primarily interests me about this manifesto is its title: a call for a “new” walking culture presupposes the existence of an “old” walking culture, one which runs contrary, perhaps, to the manifesto itself, one the manifesto wishes to change, to make new. The use of the term “walking culture” in the name of the conference is also a suggestion that such a thing exists and is clearly recognized. Perhaps I don’t need to worry so much about defining a walking culture—unless there’s a literature that uses that term, one I can’t seem to find for some reason.

The manifesto is organized apparently at random (although looks can always be deceiving): each of the 52 sections is identified by a playing card. I think the nod to chance is both in recognition of the conference venue, a casino (121), and the chance procedures used by some psychogeographers to organize their urban dérives. Apparently each section was a PowerPoint slide, so I’m going to refer to the sections as slides, without trying to summarize the entire manifesto.

The first slide calls for walking to move beyond functionality: to become, in addition, “a wandering, an odyssey of sight and sound, a quest for knowledge and stimulation, a grand roaming expedition, and a living breathing work of art in its own right” (115). The third slide calls for walkers “[t]o combat the functionalism of walking” by, among other things, “having no particular place to go” and “[t]o write the city with your relationships” (115). The fifth slide quotes Guy Debord describing the dérive as a “great game” (qtd. 115). That slide also uses the term “mis-guide” (115), which was one of the themes of the work of Wrights & Sites. It suggests “making things strange,” as if the light had changed, thus making “the city ‘other’” (115). 

The seventh slide suggests that functional walking—from home to the train or automobile to work—is “the antithesis of walking culture” (qtd. 116). The eighth suggests shopping without buying anything, considering “shopping malls as hyper-real museums to consumerism” (116). The ninth advocates “discovering sensations in the textures and secrets” of the city, “a city disrupted to meet the needs and desires of an evolving, mutating walking” (116). The fourteenth slide calls on walkers to “[s]tep on the cracks and find the gaps and make new tracks” and to “[e]xtend your walking territory becoming more aware of the restrictions being imposed upon you by signs and surfaces and the aggressive armoured invasion of the car. . . . Walk a new walking culture to write the city with your bodies” (116). 

The seventeenth slide calls on walkers to “[a]bolish habitual walking patterns, such as the home-to-work-and-back-routine: those head-down journeys when the mind is focused elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’” (117). It cites the example of Lone Twin’s disruption of Colchester by carrying a telephone pole in a straight line across the city, through shops and houses, in Totem (1998) (117). The following slide demands that pedestrians insist upon their rights over the car (117). The twenty-first slide states, “We demand the right to linger. We are loiterers without intent. We are children taking the long way home from school” (117). The twenty-third slide suggests that walkers “re-value public space” as if they were children (117). 

The twenty-fourth slide quotes André Breton’s call for walkers to leave everything—including wife, mistress, and children—to “[s]et off on the roads” (117). In their article on women walking, Cathy Turner and Deidre Heddon object to the masculine adventuring implied by this statement, and instead call for domestic, convivial, participatory walking (Heddon and Turner). Later, the fortieth slide quotes a similar call for pedestrians to be free from domestic responsibilities (119), another example of a masculinist rejection of the domestic that Heddon and Turner refuse to countenance. Clearly Wrights & Sites was not in agreement about this slide, or else Turner’s thinking changed.

The thirtieth slide states, “Amble, ramble, and de-ramble the city in search of wildlife, ancient tracks, sacred signs and paths of desire and fill abandoned roadside cars with earth and turn them into immobile gardens” (118). The reference to rambling in this slide suggests one element of the walking culture to which this manifesto responds: rural rambling. That form of walking culture is relatively unusual in my city: while there are two footpaths within a 30-minute drive of the city, only one, the Fairy Hill trail, sees much use, although with the appearance of wood ticks this spring and the widespread fear of lyme disease, it’s possible that it will see less use until autumn arrives.

The thirty-first slide calls on walkers to create their own maps: to abolish published maps, and use GPS technology to map their own journeys. The thirty-second suggests inviting town planners “on practical courses exploring trespass and paths of desire” (118). The thirty-fifth slide calls on pedestrians to “[b]elieve absolutely that every walker is a potential mis-guide,” that “every walk leads to anywhere” (118). There is a strain of utopianism in that statement, along with the reference to the “mis-guide” theme.

The thirty-seventh slide suggests abolishing ETAs, “predetermined destinations and thoughts of artistic outcomes” (119). It calls upon pedestrians to, instead, “[d]rift for three or four months at a time,” following the Situationist psychogeographer’s Ivan Chtcheglov’s example or, like Richard Long, “let the walk become the work” (119). I’m surprised to see a positive reference to Long’s artistic practice here, given the way attitudes towards his work seem to have changed in the past 15 years since the manifesto was published.

The thirty-eighth slide suggests a variety of walking strategies or techniques, including “[p]layfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing,” “mis-guided tours,” using “wireless on-line technology” to spread “networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows in the glints in pedestrians’ eyes,” as “the instruments of the architect-walker” (119). The reference to “mis-guided tours” suggests another aspect of the old walking culture this manifesto reacts against: walking tours of historical sites, something that only happens in this city during the annual Jane’s Walk event. Again, the walking culture against which Wrights & Sites is reacting simply doesn’t exist here. Would it be possible to create a walking culture without that foundation? I’m not sure. If nobody walks, would anyone show up for a convivial, participatory drift? 

The forty-fifth slide calls on walkers to “[a]cquaint yourself with methods of urban exploration rejected by the good manners of the heritage and tourism industries” by misapplying a map of one city to the geography of another, an old psychogeographical strategem (119). Again, the heritage and tourism industries are not connected to walking in this city: tourists—when we get any—are expected to drive.

The forty-seventh slide demands that walkers follow the composer Erik Satie’s example and work while walking, instead of at their desks (120). The forty-ninth slide calls on pedestrians to “reclaim the nights in the city. Walking through the streets at the dead of night is not a criminal offence” (120). Such walking, if practiced alone, might be dangerous or at least frightening for some walkers—and I wonder if this is another example of gendered approaches to walking that are rejected by Heddon and Turner.

The fiftieth slide states, “Anyone, anywhere can be an architect-walker—begin by mapping atmospheres and feelings—they are our foundations as we build from ideas and emotions outwards. . .” (120). Again, I hear echoes of psychogeography here, particularly as practiced by the Situationists. 

The fifty-first slide tells walkers to “walk with a sense of not knowing anything about the city,” to consider walking “a constant experiment to discover the intricacies and individuality of your walk that is as distinctive as your handwriting” (120). I don’t see any sign of the kind of compromise required for group, convivial, participatory walking, where “the intricacies and individuality of your walk” would have to be subordinated to the group as a whole.

Finally, the last slide states, “Know that every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are potential material for an artwork” (120). It suggests recording “the stories of people that you encounter,” encouraging “personal associations,” generating mythogeographies, and looking for “the extra-ordinary in the seemingly ordinary” (120). That sounds like a call for the new walking culture to be a mythogeographical one, as I understand the term mythogeography.

The manifesto is followed by a brief explanation of its contexts. The work of Wrights & Sites is the most important part of the manifesto’s context, I think: for nine years, Wrights & Sites had been working on urban site-specific performance and art projects (121). The term “mythogeography” apparently was first used in their 2003 book An Exeter Mis-Guide, which generated interest outside that city (121). The purpose of the mis-guide was to encourage “new ways of exploring the city, of making it strange and seeking out its ‘mythogeography’ (the personal, mythical, fictional, and fanciful mappings that intertwine or subvert the official, municipal identities and histories of a place)” (121). That led to the publication of A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (2006), which I think I have a copy of, and other publications as well. “Drawing on our urban exploratory work,” the authors conclude, “this is a manifesto for the active and creative pedestrian—envisioning a walking that is neither a functional necessity (to shops, to work) nor a passive appreciation of (or complaint about) the urban environment” (121). If that is the old walking culture, it doesn’t really exist in my city: nobody really walks to work, or to shops, and nobody walks to appreciate the urban environment (unless the path around the small end of the lake, and to a much lesser degree the path along the creek, might be considered urban rather than park environments). I never see any other pedestrians when I’m walking away from the lake or the creek. So my question remains: can a new culture of walking begin when there’s no old culture of walking to react against dialectically? How can walking engage with and change the city, using art not as a passive expression of the city, but as an active way to change it (121), when nobody walks at all—when the city itself is not walkable, when almost everyone relies on their cars rather than their feet, and so when no culture of walking of any kind seems to exist?

Works Cited

Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.

Wrights & Sites. “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City.’” Performance Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-22. DOI: 10.1080/13528160600812083.