I have accumulated a pile of articles on a variety of topics, and I am determined to work through them, somehow. So this morning, before turning to the reading I really should be doing, I’m going to return to Jennie Middleton’s “‘Stepping in Time’” Walking, Time, and Space in the City.” I started this article weeks ago, and then I put it aside. I hate to leave anything unfinished, so I’m coming back to it this morning.
I started reading this article as part of my excursion into debates around walkability. I wasn’t quite finding what I was looking for in this literature, and that might be a sign that it’s not there, that I’m going to have to make up my own theory about walkability and culture. Maybe that’ll work; maybe it won’t. Maybe someone reading this blog will let me know where I can find discussions of cultures of walking and their connection to the walkability of places where people live. For now, I’m stumbling around, reading these articles, hoping to find something that supports my hunch about walking in the city where I live.
That hunch is simply this: walking in this city—except in two places, the park and, to a lesser degree, on the path along the creek, which tends to be used by cyclists rather than pedestrians—is an eccentric activity, and I rarely see other people walking here, because the urban form here discourages walking, since it isn’t, according to what I’ve been reading, particularly walkable. The city where I live lacks population density, street connectivity, and a mixture of land uses (see Stockton et al), all of which promote functional walking. For that reason, it does not satisfy the hierarchy of needs Mariela Alfonzo describes: feasibility, accessibility, safety, comfort, and pleasurability (see Alfonzo). It also lacks what Michael Southworth calls “path context” (Southworth 251), or what I’ve been calling “texture density”: simply put, it tends to be a dull, uninteresting place to walk. Even areas of the big park, Wascana Centre, are dull deserts of lawn, a boring monoculture that can be painful to walk across on a hot summer day—or a day in winter when the temperature is below minus 30. All of these factors are interrelated in complex ways. Because the city lacks walkability, people don’t walk here—they drive instead, partly because driving is cheap and easy (see Forsyth 279)—and, as a result, there’s no culture of walking.
In other words, walking in this place is an eccentric activity; it’s not normal for adults who could drive to ambulate instead. That lack of a walking culture feeds the lack of walkability here. Why should the city invest in sidewalks or signalized crosswalks when nobody would use them or complains about their lack? I’m sure city councillors hear more complaints about potholes than they do about broken or missing sidewalks. More importantly for my purposes, it means that the forms of walking that exist in more walkable places—guided tours, promenades, heritage walks, rural rambles—don’t tend to exist. Many forms of participatory, convivial artistic walking are reactions against those pedestrian modes and models. Are those forms of participatory, convivial artistic walking possible in contexts where the types of walking to which they respond—as parody, as mythographic or psychographic subversion—do not exist? In that case, are the demands that all artistic walking be participatory and convivial perhaps ignoring their own contexts—the walkability of the places where those walking events take place? I mean, what kind of convivial or participatory walking is possible in North American cities, where the distance most people consider walkable is only 1/4 of a mile (Talen 264-66)? How much convivial walking can happen if people can only walk 10 minutes before they feel they’ve gone far enough?
I’ve already blogged about one of Jennie Middleton’s essays, “Walking In the City: The Geographies of Everyday Pedestrian Practices,” but this one, “‘Stepping In Time: Walking, Time, and Space In the City,” with its title resonant of phenomenology, caught my attention. “This paper explores walking and its relationship with and through time and space,” Middleton begins (“Stepping” 1943). Her study “reveals time as a significant dimension of pedestrian experiences” and it argues “that the relationship between walking and time is not one of clock-time passing, as pedestrian policy implies, but is made up of multiple temporalities that emerge out of, and shape, people’s experiences on foot” (“Stepping” 1943). She uses the work of Barbara Adam and Henri Bergson as a theoretical grounding “to suggest that people become aware of their own duration as they move on foot when they are made to wait” (“Stepping” 1943). She discusses space in similar terms; she is interested in “the multiple spatialities that are constituted by and practised through walking” (“Stepping” 1943). For Middleton, urban walking is “an inherently spatiotemporal experience” (“Stepping” 1943). That’s likely true of all forms of walking, too. She also suggests that notions of rhythm provide a way of engaging with the spatiotemporality of walking (“Stepping” 1944).
Middleton wants to get deeper into the experience of walking than the existing policy research on walking, which is “primarily characterised by statistical data, such as travel surveys, pedestrian counts, or local pedestrian audits” (“Stepping” 1944). Theoretical accounts of walking “are characterised by a lack of empirical exploration of the actual practice of walking” (“Stepping” 1944). So Middleton wants a different kind of empirical study. Her research has “three principal aims; first, to explore the relationship between walking and the built environment; second, to explore the many different types, forms, and characters of walking; third, to engage with the social dimensions of pedestrian movement” (“Stepping” 1944). “These research aims were interrogated across a transect through the inner London boroughs of Islington and Hackney,” she continues—I hope she explains what she means by “transect” (“Stepping” 1944). Her study “drew upon a mixed-method approach, including a postal survey, experiential walking photo diaries, and in-depth interviews” (“Stepping” 1944). The diaries asked participants to note when and where and for how long they walked—in other words, “they spatialised their experience of time on foot by producing personalised time-space budgets in the diaries” (“Stepping” 1944). Participants were also encouraged to explain why they were walking (out of necessity or by choice), how they felt about where they were walking, who they were walking with, and how they were walking (“Stepping” 1944). “The task of recording the time-space budgets was something each participant did with ease and consistency, yet a tension emerged between these recorded movements and the accompanying accounts—which made it possible to question whether walking, time, and space are experienced in such linear terms,” Middleton continues (“Stepping” 1944). Photographs of items of interest were taken by the participants using a disposable camera, and they were used as discussion prompts in the follow-up interviews (“Stepping” 1944). “It is by engaging with the discursive organisation of the interview and diary accounts that the multiple temporalities and spatialities of walking are made visible, particularly in terms of how the interviewees and diarists used issues of temporality and spatiality as resources to account for their experiences as urban pedestrians,” Middleton writes (“Stepping” 1944-45).
The policy context of this study is the efforts by UK governments to decrease vehicular traffic by promoting public transport, walking, and cycling (“Stepping” 1945). Often those efforts suggest that walking can save time (“Stepping” 1945). From her research, Middleton has learned that “time is considered a limited resource and a currency not to be wasted” (“Stepping” 1945). “Issues surrounding wayfinding, routes, and shortcuts” emerge in her participants’ diaries, along with “the importance of how people talk about issues associated with time”—for instance, whether one would take a slightly longer but more pleasant route if one were in a hurry because one is late (“Stepping” 1945). The notion of time as a resource emerged throughout the data, but participants might not choose a shorter route if it happened to be less pleasant (“Stepping 1946). The diary accounts “bring into question the temporal assumptions made in transport policy of people’s desire for high-speed travel,” which are “based on the premise that ‘faster is seen to be better’” (Harris et al, qtd. “Stepping” 1946). “Yet is this really the case?” Middleton asks. “Does faster travel ‘achieve more’ than, for example, the ‘slower’ transport mode of walking?” (“Stepping” 1946).
Middleton cites John Urry and Mimi Sheller’s argument that travel time is often considered to be productive, although little attention has been paid to walking as productive time (“Stepping” 1946). “Productive” in this instance refers to the ability to get work done while travelling. Middleton’s participants noted that they are often thinking about their work while walking (“Stepping” 1946). Her participants reported that walking is less stressful than using public transportation, and that walking gives them time to think about the work they have to accomplish (“Stepping” 1947). Middleton suggests the issue of stress draws attention to “the multiple rhythms and rhythmicity of walking” compared to full buses not stopping, for instance, which disrupts the rhythm of getting to work on time (“Stepping” 1947). That disrupted temporal rhythm, and the sense of being late, is a contrast to walking to work (“Stepping” 1947). Of course, if one happens to leave late for some reason, walking can generate similar anxieties about making it to work on time—I know that from experience.
Here Middleton turns to theoretical accounts of time-geography, which tend to see time as linear, and critiques of time-geography as too linear as compared to the way people actually experience time and its rhythms (“Stepping” 1948). “So what are the multiple times and rhythms associated with walking?” she asks. “And are there other ways in which pedestrians experience time than those discussed up to this point—something more than clock time passing?” (“Stepping” 1948). Yes: in the diaries and interviews that were part of her research, “it is possible to discern how the research participants are much more than ‘urban pedestrians’ as the multiple temporalities in their walking patterns make visible their multiple identities as, for example, partners, parents, professionals, and persons in relation to others” (“Stepping” 1949). She continues, “how can further sense be made about the relationship between time and issues associated with identity?” (“Stepping” 1949).
In her participants’ diaries, Middleton sees evidence that “people temporally frame distinctions they make about who they are in relation to others” along with temporally framing other issues as well, such as their own multiple identities (as pedestrians who temper the rhythm and pattern of their walks to work in relation to the situations they have to deal with, but also in terms of their accountabilities to others as a partner, family member, and employee) (“Stepping” 1949-50). She suggests that there are different forms of time, including but not limited to linear time, the time of clocks and calendars, and that there is a disjunction between collective time and the individual felt experience of time (“Stepping” 1950). “‘Clock times,’ ‘collective times,’ and ‘timings’ mutually interact, both shaping and emerging” from the movements of her research participants (“Stepping” 1951). She uses Henri Bergson and Doreen Massey to think about “the continuity, irreversibility, and openness of time” to think about time spent walking compared to time spent waiting (at traffic lights, for instance) (“Stepping” 1951). Time expands and contracts at different moments in a walker’s journey—expanding when the walker is forced to wait (“Stepping” 1951). The walker’s sense of time and of his or her own physicality intersect (“Stepping” 1952).
Middleton notes that Bergson’s privileging of time over space has been critiqued, particularly by Doreen Massey, who argues that they cannot be understood in isolation, and asks how pedestrian movement can be understood in light of these conceptual concerns (“Stepping” 1953). Walking, time, and space are related, because walking is a spatiotemporal practice (“Stepping” 1953). This relationship seems particularly salient in the mental maps pedestrians make of obstacles and difficult places (“Stepping” 1953). Tim Ingold has argued that wayfinding is a complex spatial practice and a means of inhabiting the world (“Stepping” 1953). A wayfarer has an active engagement with the country that opens up along his or her path, according to Ingold, and for Middleton, the mental maps her participants construct are examples of wayfaring (“Stepping” 1954). The experiences of those participants highlights “the complexity of how paths are constructed, imagined, and lived out,” as well as “how spatial practices, such as walking, are also temporal” (“Stepping” 1954). The spatiotemporal complexity of urban walking also “illustrates the significance of identity in terms of how these relations emerge and are configured” (“Stepping” 1955).
Here Middleton returns to the notion that the rhythm of walking is conducive to thinking about other things (particularly work) (“Stepping” 1955). She cites Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis here as a way of thinking about space, time, and place as interrelated (“Stepping” 1955-56). Her research participants discuss how the rhythm of walking seems to enable them to think, and how different speeds of walking make such thinking easier or more difficult (“Stepping” 1956). For Middleton, “rhythm is a way of understanding the multiple temporalities, spatialities, and corporealities of walking together. In other words, where there is rhythm of sorts, there is something to be said about time and space” (“Stepping” 1956). Thinking about walking “in relation to rhythm provides a productive means for exploring the multiple temporalities and spatialities of walking and the ways in which they interrelate,” and “by engaging with notions of rhythm . . . further sense can be made of how issues associated with identity emerge within participants’ accounts and how they relate to spatiotemporal concerns” (“Stepping” 1957-58).
In her conclusion, Middleton notes that by thinking about the relationship between walking and time and space, “the notion of time has been reconceptualised in relation to how people move on foot from the linear temporal understandings present in current transport and walking policy” (“Stepping” 1958). Her point is “that time is an issue which is relatively neglected in current walking policy documents, or an issue bound up in the concern of transport policy for speed and efficiency,” while in contrast, for pedestrians, “time emerges as an issue of great significance for walking, with temporal concerns being drawn upon as resources in the framing of other issues” (“Stepping” 1958). Walking is more than just a mode of transport, and it should be promoted “as something which resources people’s day-to-day routines, rather than solely being framed as a healthy, sustainable transport choice”—in other words, it is “a resource for organising families, friendships, and households” (“Stepping” 1958). Along with the multiple temporalities of walking, her research “reveals the multiple spatialities that are constituted by and practised through walking. Issues associated with physical mobility difficulties illustrate how walking is an inherently spatial practice, connected to a sense of identity” (“Stepping” 1958). Finally, rhythm is “a productive means for engaging how time, space, and identity interrelate as people walk” (“Stepping” 1959).
I admire Middleton’s success in bringing a dense theoretical context and empirical research and analysis together, but I would need to read Lefebvre or Bergson, and reread Massey, before I could say very much about the results of her research. Walking research goes in surprising directions, and I’m impressed by the range of philosophical and theoretical material Middleton has brought to bear on her research participants’ experiences. Maybe I’ll get to reading Lefebvre and Bergson and Adam for this degree, although I might be better off spending my limited time—it’s a resource not just for walking—on reading more work by Tim Ingold. There are so many directions my research could travel in, and I need to be careful which paths I choose.
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.
Forsyth, Ann. “What Is a Walkable Place? The Walkability Debate in Urban Design.” Urban Design International, vol. 20, no. 4, 2015, pp. 274-92. DOI: 10.1057/udi.2015.22.
Middleton, Jennie. “Walking in the City: The Geographies of Everyday Pedestrian Practices.” Geography Compass, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 90-105. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00409.x.
Southworth, Michael. “Designing the Walkable City.” Journal of Urban Planning and Development, vol. 131, no. 4, 2005, pp. 246-57. DOI: 10.0161/(ASCE)0733-9488(2005)131:4(246).
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.
Talen, Emily. “Pedestrian Access as a Measure of Urban Quality.” Planning Practice and Research, vol. 17, no. 3, 2002, pp. 257-78. DOI:10.1080/026974502200005634.