The Act of Walking: Exemplifying Danish Pedestrian Culture

The ability to walk in an area is, in the existing literature, often explained by the physical structures like building density and the presence of facilities in an area, and it is often termed ‘walkability’ (Patton 2007; Forsyth and Southworth 2008; Krizek, Handy and Forsyth 2009; Johnson 2003; Frumkin 2002). The term ‘walkability’ focuses on how the physical structures in the urban environment can promote walking, and how this potentially eases issues of public health and liveability in our cities (Krizek et al. 2009). However, the study of walking should not be reduced merely to the ‘hardware’ of mobility (Jensen 2013:111) such as the urban environment, and the infrastructures. Walking has indeed also a ‘software dimension’ as an embodied performance that trigger the human senses (Jensen 2013) and which is closely related to the habitus and identity of the individual (Halprin 1963).
The individual perception of ‘walkability’ is based upon a subjective judgement of different physical factors, such as sidewalk width, traffic volumes and building height (Ewing and Handy 2009:67). And iIn order to understand the act of walking it is therefore necessary to create a vocabulary to understand how and why the individuals evaluate, interpret and act (Bourdieu 1984), and how this affects their choice to walk. Therefore it could be questioned if whether an assessment of the physical environment is sufficient to identify all the factors that influence the individual perception of ‘walkability’, or if other influencing factors like lifestyle and life situation should be addressed in order to understand ‘walkability’ fully. The challenge is to approach issues linked to the ‘more-than representational’ (Thrift 2007; Vannini 2012) act of walking and thereby understand pedestrian behaviour in general, but also the individual perception of walking.
This chapter exemplifies shows how a ‘more-than representational’ dimension can be added to the act of walking and open up for a more value-based discussion of walking, in this chapter exemplified in the Danish context. The chapter provides seven different cases of how individuals in Denmark conduct and experience walking, and the ‘rationalities’ (Giddens 1984) that lie behind their choice of mobility. It provides insight into how different lifestyles perceive and act walking in their everyday life. Kaufmann (2002) describes how the individual mobility is influenced by individual strategies, values, perceptions and habits, and how appropriation of mobility is constructed through the internalization of standards and values. The act of walking could thus be understood as the result of dynamic internal negotiation of individual, everyday mobility strategies (Lassen 2005) and norms and standards around walking in the wider society.
Through In this chapter the individual and the aggregated level of values will be explored through seven Danish individuals, in order to identify certain indicators of a Danish pedestrian culture, but also to investigate how individuals internalize the common norms and values of pedestrian culture and are influenced by their physical environment when walking. In conclusion the chapter questions and discusses how this knowledge could be used in future planning practices.