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The Social Qualities of Being on Foot: A Theoretical
Analysis of Pedestrian Activity, Community,
and Culture
Loren Demerath∗
Centenary College
David Levinger
Transportation Usability Consulting
This article presents a theoretical framework for explaining how pedestrian activity broadens people’s access to cultural meaning-making processes. A lack of vital
pedestrian activity constitutes a social problem because of lost opportunities for
social interaction. According to a theory of the micro-level production of culture,
“Epistemological Culture Theory,” collaborative self-expression in the course of interaction with others is essential for developing shared meanings (i.e., culture), a sense
of community, and a sense of security in what we know. A review of urban planning
and environmental psychology research on pedestrian environments finds significant
appreciation for conditions conducive to such collaborative self-expression. This literature presents a highly developed environmental (or technological) determinist
perspective. This article complements previous research by focusing on the cultural
significance of being on foot. Four concepts are introduced to help enrich the discussion: “breadth of experience,” “pausability,” “identity expression,” and “collaborative creativity.” These concepts enable a better understanding of how pedestrian
activity facilitates interaction. This exploration posits principles and raises questions
about how these qualities may be sought out or even avoided in personal and cultural
preferences regarding transportation and public life.
“Individuals separated from one another are powerless.”—Murray Bookchin
“For you, as well as I, can open fence doors and walk across America in your own
special way. Then we can all discover who our neighbors are.”—Rob Sweetgall
INTRODUCTION
All of us know there are benefits to walking—physical health benefits, psychological benefits such as stress relief, even spiritual benefits—but here we will be describing benefits at
least as important, yet most overlooked: social benefits. As pedestrians we have a capacity
∗ Correspondence
should be addressed to Loren Demerath, Department of Sociology, Centenary College, Shreveport, LA; (318) 869-5161; [email protected].
City & Community 2:3 September 2003
C American Sociological Association, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701
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for interacting with others that we do not have in automobiles. Had urban designers not
overlooked the social benefits of pedestrian activity, and had they designed communities
more around walking and less around driving and parking, we might not have so many
social scientists in the United States concerned with “problems” such as a lack of community, moral disintegration, and social isolation. Other factors we might blame for such
ills—such as capitalist materialism and individualism—may have also caused the rise of
an automobile-centered culture. Nonetheless, that culture has its own consequences for
interaction, and the significant roles pedestrians play in generating social life is undertheorized. We will attempt to give a solid theoretical account of pedestrian environments and
their ramifications for social life. Our framework and analysis highlights the activities and
processes of pedestrian mobility. We find a bias toward environmental determinism in architectural, planning, and psychological literatures. Our sociocultural framework addresses
and balances those limitations. Further, while we are choosing to focus on the benefits of
pedestrian modes of mobility, we also note some of its costs and certain advantages of
automobiles.
We will be discussing here the benefits related to environments with high pedestrian
activity. Those benefits include the variety of opportunities for people to interact, to
interact in certain ways, and in certain combinations of interactants. The outcome for the
individual, we will argue, is that shared meanings of the world and self are more easily
developed, resulting in the individual’s greater sense of community, self-awareness, social
support, and shared interests with others. We will also describe technological initiatives
that can increase pedestrian activity to create these benefits. Because being on foot is often
central to urban life, we join those such as Jacobs who disagree that cities are necessarily
alienating. Indeed, we describe and analyze pleasures of life that are often distinctly urban.
We, the authors of this article, draw on different repertoires to this end. Although one
of us (David Levinger) is an expert in pedestrian technologies and their importance for
communities, the other (Loren Demerath) has developed a micro-level theory of culture,
accounting for how shared meanings are constructed through interaction. We combined our
interests here to explore the benefits of pedestrian environments and forward a theoretical
framework for understanding pedestrian environments and the interactions they facilitate.
Our thesis, in part, is that as pedestrians we are uniquely able to have interactions during
which we develop shared meanings. We view this as an important point because of the role
shared meanings play in developing such important things as support networks, a sense of
community, and an awareness of shared interests, such as a sense of class, race, or gender
interests. Many an observer of U.S. society has noted a problematic lack of such things.
Social scientists such as Robert Putnam, Amitai Etzioni, Robert Wuthnow, Robert Bellah,
and Michael Hechter are more recent additions to a long line of American sociologists noting
the lack of community in the United States, particularly in the last 50 years. However, we
are not here to add to the discourse on community, where simply defining the term is the
first problematic task, closely followed by the need to argue whether community is even
something that should be valued. Instead, we are seeking to explore how being on foot
allows us to do what we like to do: engage with other people in serious play. It is also worth
looking at what people give up for greater automotive mobility and how these qualities
factor into such choices.
Demerath has argued (1993, 2002) that we enjoy many of our conversations for the
way they allow us to collaboratively construct accounts and interpretations of our worlds
that are aesthetically appealing. Such accounts are appealing because they “make sense”
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of our worlds. It is in casual interactions that we make our worlds more ordered, more
understandable, and more related to the concepts and understandings most important to
us; in sum, through casual conversation we make our worlds clearer and more meaningful.
We do this by telling stories about ourselves or others, by predicting the future, or interpreting the past. As entertaining as these interactions are, though, serious work is done
within them as well. We are empowered through these interactions when they increase our
awareness of shared interests and potential resources. The empowerment is particularly
important for those who are oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from power. Most of
the time, however, our “meaning-making” interactions are common and casual, regardless
of their perhaps profound political importance. They happen at the proverbial workplace
water cooler, at the beauty salon and barbershop, at the bar, the cocktail party, or over
the dinner table. Our enjoyment of these interactions is so much a part of who we are as
social beings, of what we enjoy in our lives, that one might say it is innate; our desire for
making the world meaningful, in part through conversation with those who share it, is a
basic part of human nature.
We are interested in the ways the experiences of culture and community are affected by
transportation choices and infrastructures. Transportation technologies always necessarily
structure meaning and culture, and some of the choices do not afford the casual interactions
we find integral to meaning making. Such a critique need not (and here does not) imply
romanticism for preindustrial, prevehicular eras. Those times were not utopias, and today
there are many new ways to experience community, and to participate in the creation of
culture.
CONSTRUCTING PEDESTRIAN CULTURES: ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVES
In this section, we draw on observational research from architecture, planning, and environmental psychology that might be classified as “environmental determinist,” due
to its emphasis on the importance of the urban landscape in governing human behavior. Aside from demonstrating the determinist bias present in such literature, this work
contributes by identifying positive opportunities for the articulation of cultural meanings. In the subsequent sections, we demonstrate how a more constructivist analysis
might re-center the discussion of meaningful urban places with the pedestrian as the focal
actor.
Successful cities and towns create scenes for living by affording people opportunities to
interact in diverse modes of exchange. But many contemporary cities and towns are so torn
and maligned by their own infrastructure that they no longer constitute pleasing places
to conduct public life; their public spaces are neither enjoyable nor functional. Certain
European countries have gone farthest in the diversity and scale of initiatives to improve
built environments toward these goals (Pressman, 1991). European cities have historically
placed a higher priority on public art and the public retention of prime real estate than have
U.S. cities. In the past 20 years, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark have launched
significant efforts to accommodate pedestrians and bicycles on city streets. These efforts
involve reappropriating space ceded to automobiles. In America, similar efforts are only
now gaining credibility and they face enormous cultural obstacles. Let us consider how the
regard for pedestrians and pedestrian environments might factor in the quality of public
spaces and public life.
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Popular pedestrian environments seem chaotic; they accommodate movement, but
offer many opportunities for spontaneous exchange. This chaos conflicts with the linear goals of traditional vehicular traffic engineering. Indeed, years of constraint and
encroachment by parallel motorized transportation have resulted in greater constriction of and significant safety risk for pedestrians. According to leading planners and
architects who are critical of such outcomes, rehabilitating pedestrian environments
to develop the quality of place involves (1) increasing mobility, (2) improving opportunities for interaction, (3) designing with appropriate spatial and aesthetic complexity, and (4) attending to safety. Developing place becomes a dilemma for designers and
planners trying to maximize these sometimes mutually exclusive factors. Each of these
factors draws on a diverse set of environmental elements, including street plans, land
use, architecture, sidewalks and trails, parks, trees, landscaping, sculpture, and street
furniture.
MOBILITY AND PERMEABILITY
Perhaps self-evident, mobility is a measure of the degree of freedom or facilitation of
movement in any direction. Wide sidewalks provide added mobility when compared with
narrow sidewalks because the former enable people to “weave” and adjust while maintaining pace. Better than either of these is the situation where it is possible to step freely into
the street—be it to change direction spontaneously or to negotiate an obstacle. Of course,
in the United States, heavy motor vehicle traffic more frequently takes over pedestrian
territory than the reverse. Indeed, a study correlating vehicle speed and volumes with
pedestrian activity and neighborly interaction showed an inverse relationship. This work
led to street closing and “traffic calming” experiments to maximize nonmotorized mobility
in urban Berkeley, California (Appleyard, 1981).
Plazas and parks derive their popularity in part from the way they enable their patrons
to experience special kinds of vantage and mobility. These spaces offer freedom to move
in new and creative directions, including playful chances to rise above others on steps, a
hill, or a bridge (Whyte, 1980). Vistas and open views are often appealing aspects of parks.
Demerath (1993) has argued that views are appealing for the way they allow us to perceive
meaningfulness in our environment, as we are better able to see what that environment is.
In contrast, the closed spaces of urban environments leave us with more limited views of
environment, and less freedom for exploring it.
In urban or suburban environments, a lack of wide-open public spaces makes the “permeability” of street networks (another manifestation of mobility) more important. Permeability is our term for describing the extent of constraints on a person’s chosen route
between two destinations. In an impermeable environment, people find themselves making significant detours to get through a complicated street network. Cities with shorter
blocks offer more tightly spaced connections and therefore have neighborhoods that are
more permeable. In more permeable environments, trips require fewer detours and provide
pedestrians a broader choice of routes. Vernez-Moudon et al. (1997) show that pedestrian
activity correlates inversely with block size. Often, where there is a high demand for
pedestrian activity, but low permeability, pedestrians develop “shortcuts” through private properties. An example of this can be found in the trailblazing behaviors of school
children and their creative trespasses.
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To this research on mobility and permeability, we would add two statements. First,
physical and interpersonal mobility increases our knowledge of our environment, increasing in turn our ability to make it meaningful in collaborative efforts with others. Both
those meaning-making efforts, and the fact that the mobility itself causes people to feel
more in control of their ability to navigate that environment, result in a better sense of that
environment and the self’s position within it. Moreover, the concept of physical mobility
so often theorized by planners and environmental psychologists can easily be extended
to the concept of social mobility among diverse groups and economic strata. When social
mobility increases, pedestrians find greater opportunities for diverse meaning-making efforts. Second, a permeable pedestrian environment makes social contact significantly more
likely, whereas a permeable motor vehicle environment does not. Permeability of pedestrian
environments creates potential for social exchange among diverse social groups. The rising number of gated “communities” provides evidence that diverse social exchange is
not always valued (e.g., Blakely and Snyder, 1997). Indeed, guards, fences, and cul-de-sac
neighborhoods exhibit intentional efforts to control mobility so as to reduce unpredictable
interactions around people’s residences.
COMMON SPACES AND REFERENTS
Research from an environmental perspective theorizes interaction as determined by a
function of culturally predefined rules and external referents. For the purposes of some
of his work, Goffman (1971) identified pedestrians as “vehicular units” and studied the
rules determining their interaction and avoidance. Goffman observed nonverbal interactions between passing pedestrians. He found that pedestrians communicate and express significant cultural meanings in subtle acts. For example, yielding to another’s
path can express one’s perceived relative status; the other’s status may be higher or even
lower.
The greater the activity on the street, the greater the potential for interaction. Resting
places or benches along routes make it more likely that people will pause, and possibly
meet someone rather than simply cross paths. Similarly, entertainers, vistas, and art can
cause spontaneous social interaction as observers share perceptions of the common referents before them. Street vendors, cafés, and open-air markets bring economic and social
exchange to the street. Common referents in the environment also increase the availability
of pedestrians to each other for interaction. Having stopped to observe something, pedestrians are more accessible to the approaches of others. One pedestrian may engage with
another by commenting on a store window, on a street performer, artwork, or children
playing in a park. Such topics serve as a starting point for the interaction.
Common referents help establish a shared orientation toward the interaction. Whyte
(1980) calls the connecting influence of a third presence “triangulation.” Research in
conversational analysis establishes the fundamental nature of common referents to interaction. Conversational talk tends to center around experiences (topics) on which the
participants have similar perspectives. Unacquainted participants in a conversation will
often discuss the one body of knowledge that is shared: knowledge of the setting (Schegloff,
1972), and talking about the weather is one example. Often, participants will go through
“pre-topical sequences” (Maynard and Zimmerman, 1984) in which they will probe for
shared knowledge, knowledge that will then be the basis for topical talk. Thus, a common
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referent makes extended pretopical sequences unnecessary. Shared knowledge is demonstrated by co-observing the store window, the performer, the game, and so forth. The
referent provides the basis for similar perspectives and can facilitate conversation in any
environment—such as a pedestrian one—where people may pause, observe, and discuss
the referent.
People themselves can function as beneficial common referents. Jacobs’s notion of “eyes
on the street” refers to the relative safety one experiences when others are permanently
present and adjacent to public places. These people may be residents, or business owners, or, in Duneier’s ethnography (1999), used-magazine vendors, all of whom spend time
watching the street and have interests in maintaining a certain order. The co-presence
of others also enables us to exploit the knowledge and resources of any such people who
are accessible enough to function as “public characters,” that is, people who are available
to share information about the immediate environment, including directions, information, history, advice, or even mentoring on how to behave in or profit from it (Duneier,
1999).
Although design can attend to many features of an environment to enhance interaction,
including the presence of common referents, the most significant interaction opportunities
result from the simple (and complex) presence of others. Chance interactions are the stuff
of spontaneity and serendipity. The amount of time spent in public spaces constitutes the
most significant variable in creating opportunities for interaction. People’s likelihood for
interaction depends on the amount and regularity of time they spend in public. This is why
college campuses, summer camps, occupied downtown areas (as opposed to vacated ones),
parks, and some neighborhoods exist as vital places of interaction. In contrast, malls, major
urban streets, amusement parks, and stadiums function well for certain purposes, but not as
well for interaction. Where there are many people, and where they are there irregularly and
infrequently, they are less likely to have frequent interactions with the same individuals.
In these situations, people are less likely to have shared knowledge, and so they are less
likely interact on the basis of such knowledge to build a sense of shared meaning. That
is, they are less likely to participate in the collaborative production and reproduction of
culture. Indeed, people will be less likely to make friends in such environments, following
the inverse of Homans’s principle that people who interact frequently with one another
will tend to become friends (1950).
Oldenburg (1984) argues that we have much less access than we once did to the “great
good places,” such as the neighborhood bars, coffee shops, drugstore soda fountains. It
was at those places where we spent time in the co-presence of others on neutral turf, away
from work or home, or with people who we did not work or live with, and with common
referents as well, usually in the form of food or drink. Oldenburg, along with others, such
as Langdon (1994), points out that such places have been designed and marketed out
of our everyday lives. This has coincided with the design of American cities around the
automobile, which has led to suburbs and urban residential areas being relatively isolated
from shopping, schools, and work areas (Jacobs, 1961; Appleyard, 1981; Langdon, 1994).
We observe that at least coincidentally and probably prior to that change, with the advent
of the automobile, another place where we are in the co-presence of others with common
referents has been designed out of our lives, that being any place between places, and on
foot.
Urban design professionals regularly tout the examples of revitalizing civic life through
efforts that take space back from the automobile. Portland, Oregon, reclaimed significant
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tracts in its downtown area from the automobile in an effort to create new common referents. In the 1970s, the city tore up a major roadway at the edge of the Willamette River
to create Waterfront Park. In the 1980s, the city purchased a parking facility and created
Pioneer Square to attract events and street activity at the center of the city. Boston’s “Big
Dig”—the over $10 billion project to bury the Central Artery through downtown—has
become a symbol of how much can be justified by the desire to recreate the center of our
cities around positive referents.
COMPLEXITY
Appropriate complexity in social settings helps us maintain interest in the environment.
This is supported by Lofland’s (1998, pp. 78–87) observation that stimulus diversity, as well
as historical layering and physical juxtaposition, are associated with positive perceptions
of urban environments. Lofland (among others) argues that environments designed for
minimal complexity in the interests of such things as safety and speed are underused and
perceived as sterile (1998, pp. 205–221). A lack of complexity also characterizes accounts
of “placelessness” (Relph, 1976; Engwicht, 1993).
To explain the importance of complexity we begin with research on aesthetic perception that shows the complexity of a stimulus is positively related to its perceived attractiveness (e.g., Berlyne, 1970, 1971). However, this research also shows the relationship
to be curvilinear—stimuli lose their attractiveness when they exceed a certain degree of
complexity. Demerath (1993) has interpreted this research to posit a principle of environmental perception: environments are enjoyed for the meaningfulness with which they
can be perceived. As such, a complex environment would be enjoyed more than a simple
one because an individual can perceive more meanings, more interrelated possibilities. In
a more complex, crowded, and unorganized environment, however, an individual is less
likely to perceive meanings and their interrelationships. When traveling on foot through
an urban environment, for example, short blocks, detail, and variability all contribute to
perceptual complexity (Langdon, 1994). Furthermore, the complexity will be a function of
pace.
An environment comfortably stimulating from a car becomes monotonously boring
on foot while what is interesting on foot becomes chaotic in a car. . . . The two environments need to be quite different in terms of noticeable differences and perceptual organization: at high speeds, one needs distant views, simplicity and large-scale
while at slow speeds one needs small-scale, intricacy and complexity. (Rapoport and
Hawkes, 1970, pp. 242–243)
We add a corollary to this, theorizing popular critiques of strip malls (Kunstler, 1993),
to posit causes of reduced complexity. Design for car culture necessarily reduces complexity for two reasons: motorists traveling at faster speeds prefer greater visual and
geometric simplicity, and the swath cut by automobile infrastructure (streets, parking,
signage, etc.) subtracts from the space available for complexity.1 Spaces designed to attract shoppers off the roads paradoxically lack the environmental complexity to support
pedestrian activity. As a result, locations designed to be motorist destinations tend to
lack the sense of place. To borrow a line from poet Gertrude Stein, “there is no there
there.”
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SAFETY
When people are free of concerns for their safety, they feel freer to interact. Default pedestrian environments—ones that exist only as an afterthought and are built around highway
and street systems—force pedestrians to always be on guard. When one’s attention is focused on continuous strings of driveway ramps and high-speed stampedes of modern armor,
one’s attention is drawn away from conversation, the environment, and the kinesthetics of
walking. As a friend once said: “If I have to pay more attention to cars while walking than
I do while driving, I might as well be driving, too, because I hate cars.” This person was
expressing how he disliked watching out for cars when he walked, and how it detracted
from the pleasure of walking.
Proponents of “traffic calming” want to protect pedestrians from collisions and from
the perception of threats from cars. Road narrowing, speed humps, and traffic circles are
three simple elements used to slow drivers and discourage through-traffic. In its most
sophisticated form, the Dutch “woonerf” (or “living street”) is raised to the level of the
sidewalk and incorporates obstacles such as trees and planters into the path of travel to
slow automobiles to a pace that makes residential streets comfortable places for pedestrians
and playing children. In these environments, children chase balls into the street without
fear. Articulations of fear are rare, the culture of pedestrian interaction is less interrupted
by automobile traffic, and, because cars travel much slower, social interaction is increased
between the modes of movement (Pressman, 1991).
Of course, automobiles are not the only source of danger that can inhibit pedestrian
activity. The public spaces in neighborhoods with high crime rates are often patrolled
by “predators” who the streetwise must avoid or confront with threatening behavior
(Anderson, 1990, p. 189). Indeed, relative to driving, the greater freedom for interaction when walking increases the potential for aggression through interaction. Gardner
(1995) has documented how women can be harassed by men when on foot. Duneier and
Molotch (1999) analyze typical acts of harassment by lower-status men against higherstatus women, and interpret the acts as forms of “interactional vandalism.” They note
the acts often constitute an oppositional move on the part of the less powerful, when “a
subordinate person breaks the tacit basis of everyday interaction of value to the more
powerful” (1999, p. 1263). Be it through mugging or sexual harassment, it is clear that
the greater freedom for interaction provided by a pedestrian environment can mean that
freedom will be used by some to exploit others. That said, Anderson (1990, p. 231), Duneier
(1999, pp. 197, 207–209), and Gardner (1995, p. 199) all note instances in which pedestrians
act to increase their control of the situation by using norms of interaction against their antagonists. Such pedestrian dexterity—a certain street wisdom—many of us lack. Indeed,
both designers and civic leaders have attempted to reduce opportunities for undesirable
interaction through the removal of comfortable street furniture, the elimination of pocket
parks, and the imposition and enforcement of antiharassment laws. Such moves highlight
the community tensions present in pedestrian environments.
AN ANALYSIS OF PEDESTRIAN ACTIVITY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
FOR CULTURE AND COMMUNITY
We have seen that the list of desirable characteristics of pedestrian environments includes
opportunities for freedom of movement; reasons to stop; and rich, nonthreatening, sensual
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environments. In much of the above work, pedestrians are treated more as navigators or
spectators. They appear less actively engaged than we will treat them. In this section of
the article, we hope to reorient that perspective to see pedestrians as vehicles of culture.
To reorient our perspective to see the pedestrian as a vehicle of culture, we will now
present our theoretical framework. After presenting this, we describe four qualities of pedestrian activity that facilitate this meaning-making activity: breadth of experience, identity
expression, pausability, and collaborative creativity. In the course of our discussion of these
facilitators, we will identify the interactive needs of pedestrians and note the consequences
of increased pedestrian interaction for culture and community.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL CULTURE THEORY: A FRAMEWORK FOR BEING ON FOOT
We take as our framework a micro theory of cultural production, “Epistemological Culture Theory” (Demerath, 2002), that explains how people generate and reproduce shared
meanings through everyday interactions. This theory is particularly valuable because of
the way it links individuals’ actions to the analysis of social structure. Being on foot is a
remarkable mode of being in that micro-level activity is both necessary and sufficient for
generating new meanings. Linked with the concepts of Epistemological Culture Theory
(ECT), we can then form a theoretical foundation for understanding pedestrian activity
as a medium for cultural insurgency.
This framework rests on interactionist, phenomenological, and functionalistdramaturgical perspectives. Our theory of culture places everyday interactions at the center of consideration, arguing that it is during these interactions that a culture’s meanings
are maintained, innovated upon, or changed (Fine, 1979; Snow and Anderson, 1987). Every
other significant locale for cultural activity—the mass media and macro-level institutional
practices, for example—depends on everyday interaction to situate and reinforce the creation of cultural meanings. Following phenomenological theorists (Berger and Luckmann,
1966; Wuthnow, 1987; Corsaro, 1997), we view culture as continually created and recreated.
Finally, we borrow from the analytical focus of functionalist-dramaturgical perspectives
(Durkheim, 1915; Geertz, 1973; Bellah, 1975) to explain why cultural performances are
appreciated for their own sake, beyond their instrumental utility.
ECT discerns three elements to the micro-level interaction enlisted in our everyday
cultural engagement: articulation, typification, and orientation. Articulation is the act
of instantiating a meaning (gesturally, verbally, or in writing) in lived experience with
enough uniqueness to distinguish it from mere repetition. People reiterate their experience
to reinforce meanings and membership in a culture or cultural subgroup. A meaning’s
significance can be intentionally increased by articulating the meaning. In the process of
articulation, people anchor meanings with typification and orientation. Typification is the
expression of a meaning using its central tendency or its boundaries. In being on foot, one
exposes oneself to an environment that is less clearly bounded, making pedestrians much
more actively engaged in boundary maintenance than are the inhabitants of homes, cars,
and workplaces. Orientation is the process of relating an experience to powerful meanings,
thereby increasing the meaningfulness of that experience. In moving through the world,
we engage by observing a constant stream of symbols and interpretable events. We orient
our articulations of these experiences by mapping them onto these referents.
When we think of the pedestrian environment as a stage for activity and interaction, it
becomes significant as a place to not only gather and tell stories, but also as a place to anchor
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and challenge our existing typologies. To see this environment as a rich site for generating
and maintaining cultural meanings, we are interested in the way these publics form. It
is through Habermas’s work that we are directed to the importance of social interaction
(and, by implication, as we will see, the importance of pedestrian environments) as a forum
for articulation. Meaning-making in the course of interaction is inherent to Habermas’s
concept of “communicative action” (1984) and the importance of the “public sphere” to
shared meaning (1989). Habermas’s discussion of how discourse is critical to establishing
meaning has implications for articulation. Concerning claims of truth, correctness, and
appropriateness, Habermas writes:
There are claims of validity which can be proven only in discourse. The factual recognition of these claims bases itself in every case, even that of error, on the possibility of
the discursive validation of the claims made. Discourses are performances, in which
we seek to show the grounds for cognitive utterances. (1974, p. 18)
Here, Habermas expresses the notion that it is in our communication with others that
our knowledge of reality is established, and our communicative performances are critical for that reason. Habermas’s notion of the public sphere emerges from this connection
between communication, knowledge, and “truth.” Habermas did not theorize the pedestrian environment, though it is one dimension of the public sphere where forums for public
communicative performances can function to resolve disputes of meaning and create consensus. The result of such public, open forums for communication performances is not only
culture, but a subjective sense of community.
ADDITIONAL FACILITATORS OF PEDESTRIAN MEANING-MAKING: BREADTH
OF EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY EXPRESSION, PAUSABILITY,
AND COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY
In our initial review of the literature from an environmental perspective we presented five
influences of pedestrian activity on the potential for interaction: mobility/permeability,
complexity, co-presence of others, common referents, and safety. Using the framework
presented above, we derive four characteristics of pedestrian activity that facilitate the
creation of meaning. That is to say that pedestrian activity affords certain aspects of
meaning-making better than do other postures or modes of transportation. These facilitators are: breadth of experience, pausability, collaborative creativity, and identity
expression.
BREADTH OF EXPERIENCE
ECT posits a fundamental motivation of people—and thus pedestrians—to be the pursuit of meaningfulness. Pedestrian existence gives us more opportunities for that pursuit
because it gives us more experience to perceive. To illustrate, if one were to compare 10
walks to work versus 10 drives to work, we would expect the walks to be more memorable
because they produce a greater range of experiences. The sights, sounds, smells, and kinetic
feelings we encounter walking are more numerous than those we encounter driving, which
gives walking more breadth as an overall experience. Because of that greater breadth of
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experience we will encounter more diverse perceptions as pedestrians, and our senses will
be more stimulated. Research in neuroscience suggests that such stimulation is positively
associated with the memorability of an experience (Wagner, 1998). Further, the breadth
of experience would increase our chances of encountering unique perceptions. This is important for the sake of our aesthetic fulfillment, since unique perceptions of anything are
critical for our aesthetic appreciation of it. As diverse examples to this nearly omnipresent
principle, jokes are less likely to be funny if we’ve heard them before, we can grow tired of
“looks” we ourselves have cultivated, and the weather is probably not a popular topic of
conversation in places where it varies little.
Indeed, relative to driving, the weather is more meaningful to us when we walk because
we often perceive it using more senses and more intensely. When walking, we can not
only see the weather, but also feel it, hear it, even, at times, taste it. Our appreciation
of sensory contact with the world is revealed in the appeal for many people of convertibles and motorcycles despite their higher maintenance costs and safety risks, or even the
popularity of picnics. Moreover, as we are put into contact with the weather more fully
while walking, we are made more aware of the relationship between our bodies and our
environment, and of what our bodies are capable of. As we dance between puddles and
sprint through a downpour, we feel empowered (even considering the fact that nearly all
of us are in less than ideal physical condition!). It can be an invigorating experience to
make it through a blizzard or up a hill, not only physically, but in terms of meaningfulness:
“Now that’s a hill!” “Wow, it is really coming down!” We emerge from such experiences
with a better sense of what a hill or blizzard can be, and what we can be in relation to
them.
The value of the breadth of experience provided by walking is a function of the value of
uniqueness for gaining meaningfulness. Without a unique perception we cannot improve
our awareness of what that thing is, and our sense of meaningfulness is stagnant. This
parallels our desire for novelty (Berlyne, 1970) and is reflected in a friend’s comment,
“When I lived in Palm Springs [CA] you used to just pray for rain. Anything different.
It was just the same thing every day. It was boring.” Even sunny and pleasant has its
downside, and inside a car the experience of weather is constrained. It may be difficult to
imagine that the weather in, say, Cleveland is preferable to the weather in Palm Springs.
However, is it not plausible that in terms of weather, life in Cleveland is richer and more
memorable than it is in Palm Springs? Harder, perhaps, but difficult experiences are often
more fulfilling than those that are easy. Usually, it is easier to drive than to walk, but it is
also less fulfilling, partly, we argue here, because it is less stimulating.
Pedestrian activity increases our breadth of experience due in part to the mobility and
permeability walking provides. Because of their mobility in medium-scale environments,
walkers are better able to explore, manipulate, and revisit anything of interest. Further, the
slower speed of the pedestrian increases her ability to experience within the medium-scale
environment. Although this would not be so with either larger- or smaller-scaled environments, most of our lived environments are medium-scaled, designed as they are for our
naturally evolved physical state. Until the automobile, our “in-between” environments,
such as roads, were also designed at that medium scale. The medieval streets of Toledo,
Spain, pictured in Figure 1, are an example of that scale. Tourists love to wander those
streets, partly for the reasons we posit here.
Our breadth of experience is increased by walking for social reasons as well. We become
more familiar with our social environment as well as our physical one during pedestrian
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FIG. 1. Pedestrian-scaled streets in Toledo demonstrate the breadth of experience cultivated in preautomobile urban environments.
activity. This stems from an increased opportunity for interaction during pedestrian activity. Social interactions, as discussed in the framework presentation above, are frequently
characterized by collaborative articulations of shared experiences (such as telling stories
about ourselves) that lead to increased familiarity with those experiences, and an increased
sense of the world’s meaningfulness for each interactant.
Because we can best collaboratively articulate shared experiences, such interactions will
tend to involve people we already know. Although a rich pedestrian environment facilitates
interactions generally, we will most often use that environment as a forum for interacting
with friends, not strangers. We are more likely to share experiences with those people, and
can thus collaborate on articulations of greater number and quality than we would with
strangers. That said, brief exchanges one might have with strangers about the weather, a
bus schedule, or a newspaper one is holding, can be especially fulfilling for the way one’s
understandings are reinforced across a gap of unfamiliarity (e.g., “Is it hot, or what?”).
Nonetheless, while I might enjoy a pleasant exchange with a stranger while walking, I might
also have the most important conversation of my week while walking with a friend. So,
pedestrian environments are valuable for the way they facilitate interaction generally and
facilitate interaction between familiar people most often. In general, the more interactions
with others we share, the deeper the ties we are able to develop, and a sense of community
(Putnam, 2000) and collective efficacy (Sampson, 1988; Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls,
1997) would be likely to follow.
In summary, there are three reasons why pedestrian environments cause a relatively
high breadth of experience: sensory contact, social contact, and mobility-by-scale. In the
end, pedestrian activity facilitates interaction in part through this breadth of experience.
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We are given more opportunities to interact and pursue meaningfulness because we are
given more experience to perceive, and more opportunities for interaction. Three additional
capacities of pedestrian environments further facilitate interaction and meaningfulness:
identity expression, pausability, and collaborative creativity. These capacities are also
closely related to the topic of how pedestrian environments facilitate a sense of community
by providing opportunities to collaboratively create and recreate shared understandings
in the course of everyday interactions.
IDENTITY EXPRESSION
By reading others we read meaning into the world. We see the world as meaningful partly by
observing symbols of identity. As we note the symbols displayed by others, we attribute
meaning to them. Perhaps just as significantly, displaying symbols of our own identity
assists us in attaching meaning to ourselves. Although there can be little doubt that cars
can display an identity, the clarity of that identity is limited. Does a convertible mean
you are a nature-lover, or a risk-taker? Further, the fact that car occupants are partially
concealed can cancel out the effectiveness of other symbols. (“Move it you! The light
is green! . . . Oh, sorry boss.”) This can lead to such phenomena as “road rage,” when our
inability to fully interact with one another while driving can lead to escalating frustrations
(Katz, 1999).
In pedestrian environments, then, there is greater clarity of identities. This is in part
because we know people by face, but also because there are greater possibilities for identity
expression on one’s person. The expression of identity is an act of articulation, but more
specifically, it is a typifying articulation. Typifying articulations can be defined as using
identity symbols to reduce the ambiguity and variability in one’s identity that others infer.
Our ability to typify ourselves is related to the likelihood of participating in collaborative
articulations. Others can choose to interact with you by estimating from your identity
symbols what your experience or knowledge is, what your values are, or what your social
structural position is in terms of race, class, or gender. They can calculate the likelihood
of being able to construct collaborative articulations with you, and can choose to interact
with you, or not, accordingly. Cars may vary in their symbolism (e.g., an old VW bus vs. a
sports car vs. a luxury sedan), and bumper stickers can be more powerful communicators
of the owner’s identity, but they are not as complete and organic as the person himself or
herself. As a result, negotiating the definition of the situation and its constituent identities
tends to be less constrained when on foot. Whether we are projecting our own identities or
monitoring those of others, symbols are more easily manipulated on foot than in a car: one’s
eye contact, voice, and mobility through space—swaggering, hurrying, pausing, relaxing,
and so forth—are better controlled and detailed when we are on foot than when we are in
an automobile. Further, as much as clothing and physical demeanor might help us, it is the
possibility of communication through speech that makes us more “identity empowered”
as pedestrians than we are as drivers. Indeed, the phenomenon of road rage has no correlate
in pedestrian space. We cannot excuse or explain ourselves to other drivers like we can to
other pedestrians.
Like other ethnographies of public spaces, Anderson’s Streetwise (1990) provides a variety of examples of how communication is used to negotiate identity between people
in pedestrian environments: on a sidewalk an African-American male chides an older
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European-American women for refusing his help (pp. 167–168); a young African-American
man describes how he held an elevator for a white woman, saying he tries to be “extra
nice” to whites to compensate for the fear whites sometimes display in the presence of
black men (pp. 185–186); and Anderson describes how black university students can use
their books and briefcases to gain trust (p. 188). We argue that the potential for identity
negotiation of these sorts is greater in pedestrian environments, and is empowering.
However, the rich may only get richer as that empowerment goes. Lofland gives examples
of the perpetuation of inequality through public interaction: “offering sexually loaded
commentary on a woman’s body, jeering at a cluster of homeless men, or verbalizing racial
or ethnic slurs” (1998, p. 56). The wide range of expressive opportunities on foot can become
a liability. Existing power differences between men and women, ethnicities, or people of
different physical abilities can be amplified in the pedestrian environment (Gardner, 1995).
Thus a lively pedestrian space may also be a harmful one. As a pedestrian, one may observe
how others act out unjustly or abusively.
Participating in public also provides lessons in trust and diversity. Lofland has pointed
out that it is in public spaces where we get much of our experience interacting with people
we do not know well and with whom we share few interests (1993, p. 153). Lofland argues
that public space interactions, such as negotiating a crowd (Goffman, 1963), or giving
“public aid” (Gardner, 1995), are where we learn we can interact with others without being
the same as them. According to Lofland, this leads to increased tolerance and civility.
We would agree, and add that the public spaces for which Lofland advocates are also
pedestrian spaces. This is another reason we argue that increasing opportunities for public
interaction is an important goal for communities, particularly those that lack public spaces.
Such communities are the norm in the United States, having been designed around cars,
not pedestrians. Thus, we would add to Lofland’s argument that one reason public spaces
facilitate tolerance and cosmopolitanism is that our identities in those spaces are expressed
more clearly, and the negotiations among them are more productive.
PAUSABILITY
Sometimes, a car is a creative expression of the owner’s identity; however, pedestrian
activity has another capacity that facilitates the interactions that are the building blocks
for culture and community. The opportunity to interact is one of two conditions needed—
along with shared experience—for the emergence of culture and community (Berger and
Luckmann, 1966). Opportunities for interaction increase with our ability to pause, or,
“pausability.”
Pausability is a combination of the ease of interrupting an activity and the ease of
resuming that initial activity. Pausing is far more convenient for the pedestrian than it
is for the automobile driver (or even for the bicyclist). This is evident in the frequency
with which pedestrians will wave on a waiting car at an intersection (despite the fact that
the driver may insist on deferring—sometimes, it would appear, to communicate to the
pedestrian that they are aware of their privilege and dominance in that situation and are
chivalrously choosing not to use it). The pausability of travel would appear to be inversely
related to its average speed, and to the human energy required to reach it (partly why
bicyclists tend to roll through stop signs with such great frequency).
The concept of pausability may help explain one of William H. Whyte’s (1980) research findings. Films of New York City pedestrian scenes showed that when pedestrians
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FIG. 2. The ability to pause on foot allows people to fulfill the potential of their interactions with each other
or with their environment.
encounter friends or acquaintances in even a heavy stream of foot traffic, they tend to
remain in the center of the sidewalk. Thus, rather than move to the side where they do
not block the flow, people prefer to stay where they are. What they are doing is clearly
maximizing their pausability. To move to the side would engender several sets of social
negotiations not conducive to resumption of walking.
COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY
Perhaps our greatest observation in this article is that it is better to think of pedestrians
as engaged in activities of establishing shared meanings than to think of them as “rule
followers”; pedestrians are not trapped in, but create, culture. To treat pedestrians as rulefollowers or rule-breakers—as many planners and engineers do—is to treat them as drivers
on foot. The result can be to eliminate one of the more fulfilling elements of pedestrian
activity: the capacity to participate in the design of one’s own pedestrian experience. We
observe collaborative creativity in three temporal modalities: (1) in the moment, (2) as
part of a collective, and (3) in reflective processes of design.
Walking itself is a creative act. Lofland (1998) notes that “whimsy,” “playfulness,”
and “unexpectedness” are among the possible characteristics of urban environments and
public interaction that people enjoy. We would add that playfulness is easier to engage in as
pedestrians than as drivers or passengers. Because pedestrian travel is slower and so much
less dangerous than driving, it is unregulated and we are freer to playfully violate whatever
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FIG. 3. Walking is often a creative and collaborative act.
norms exist, be it by jaywalking, curb walking, puddle jumping, or whatever one’s whim
may be.
The freedom of being a pedestrian allows us to be creative in how we walk, sit, or stand;
how we use the space around us, and how we interact with others with whom we share the
space. The result is not only empowering, but also aesthetically pleasing: our creativity
allows us to perceive the meaningfulness of space and our relations to it. As we interact with
the space around us creatively and collaboratively, we uniquely enhance our understanding
of what that space is, of how we can relate to it, and even of how we can relate to each
other through it. We perceive the act, ourselves, and the setting uniquely, but in a way
that enhances our understanding of what they are or can be, and this gain in perceived
meaningfulness causes aesthetic pleasure, or “knowledge-based affect” (Demerath, 1993).
When we do it with others, the shared understanding we emerge with and the shared
feelings we experience cause us to feel trust and a sense of community (Demerath, 2002).
Indeed, Heise’s theory of empathic solidarity (1998) argues that our ability to witness the
shared emotional responses of others is at the root of an emotional level of solidarity. Thus,
it is important to have opportunities to collaborate in our creative work, and our creative
interaction with the environment is one such opportunity that pedestrian environments
afford us.
Second, when we walk, we engage in processes of a creative collective of experiences
and mutual ordering. Our routes and paths are determined in collaborative acts as part
of an urban collective that create a spatial logic and pattern. That ordering our own
environments is fulfilling should be no surprise to anyone who has enjoyed the feeling
of mowing the lawn, tidying a desk, gardening, arranging furniture, or even the more
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extensive designing of a house renovation. An explanation for this response can be based
on the observation that we find security in order and boundaries (Douglas, 1966; Zerubavel,
1991) such that ordering activity increases our sense of control and reduces alienation. A
complementary explanation is provided by Knowledge-Based Affect Theory (Demerath,
1993): the creative act articulates in reality an image/idea in one’s mind, and implementing
it makes that image more meaningful. Simultaneously, this new design complements the
meaning of that space as it heightens our awareness of what the space is and can be; further,
the design can complement other meanings related to it as well, such as the meaning of an
act that takes place in that space.
An example of this might be path-making on college campuses. Making a path by taking
shortcuts across paved sidewalks can be enjoyed by students for the way the path reflects
their routines, their priorities, and their world. In addition, making the path can be enjoyed
for the way it increases their sense of power and control, which implies that their world is
more predictable and, thus, more meaningful than it would appear otherwise.
A close focus on pedestrians as units of study identifies them as traveling territories.
Because of the resources or “preserves” one always carries with one’s body—personal
space, social privileges, information, and artifacts—each other person constitutes both a
potential interactant and a potential threat. Goffman’s work focused heavily on spatial
orientation and customs of passing and interaction rituals. Interpersonal safety threats
are not easily addressed by design only. Instead, it has been the case that users themselves
collaboratively participate in making public spaces safe. Jane Jacobs describes this through
her concept of “eyes on the street,” as does Duneier (1999) in the informal but enforced
social order of a sidewalk by vendors, pedestrians, and police. These instances amount
to collaborative articulations of how public space should be used, which, in turn, create
shared meanings of tolerable conduct and a sense of order and safety.
Third, the collaborative capacity indirectly extends into the realm of civic participation in design, where citizens apply their pedestrian knowledge to public decisions about
transforming public space. People engaged in collaborative design extend the arena of
the shared experience of walking in that area into a broader forum. Brought together by
shared experience of place, pedestrians have an opportunity to jointly influence and reshape that place. In community-based design, people might exchange stories about a store
on the corner, a bird’s nest, a rainy day, or other experiences that characterize that place.
Collaborative design also constitutes the shared experience itself, where a meta-pedestrian
culture and community develops out of the collaborative efforts to affect that area (Sanoff,
2000).
We base our concept of collaboration on shared experiences and meanings. We do not—it
is important to note—advocate linkages based on “sameness” or closed narratives in either
language or material experience. Good examples of this are European experiments with
traffic calming, where exploration, accommodation, and a diversity of approaches have
been encouraged (Pressman, 1991). Further, we all know that differences in background
need not prevent the emergence of shared understandings of shared experiences. The
validation of Duneier’s ethnography by some of the very sidewalk vendors he studied is
proof alone that significant differences in race and class need not prevent the emergence
of shared meaning of common experiences.
Creative collaboration in design can also function to bring people together to realize
shared interests. Frequently, it extends into political activity, as the discourse of pedestrians permeates cultures, builds expectations, and becomes a force in reallocation of city
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priorities. Collaborative design of pedestrian environments can be inclusive and democratic
(Grozier and Roberts, 1973; Moore, 1991) as it inherently encourages a diverse expression
of problems and solutions.
Although there are many subjective benefits to collaborative design, some of the best
arguments for collaboration lie in examples of its omission—of imposed designs and environments. The enclosed spaces of elevated walkways in Minneapolis and St. Paul were
intended as solutions to the harsh cold of Minnesota winters. Nash and Nash (1994) studied the pedestrian behavior in these walkways, showing that pedestrian populations in the
walkways were less likely to represent diversity, environmental mastery, and participatory
activity than those found at street-level. At street-level, Nash and Nash found that definitions of behavioral appropriateness were more strongly generated by participants than
by officials. Participation in design is an ongoing process. It appears that conditions and
configuration of the pedestrian environment may either restrict or reinforce conditions for
such collaboration.
The more complex the experiences individuals are grappling with, the more appealing
it may be to participate in collaboration in any of the three temporal modalities of collaborative creativity we have outlined. This collaboration can aid in providing order and
understanding. As stated earlier, the more complex the situation, the better we feel when
we make sense of it. As more effort is required to make the experience meaningful and more
perspectives and information are drawn into the process, the rewards are greater. This is
an extension of the principle that the intensity of the affective response to articulation is
a direct function of the complexity out of which order is perceived (Demerath, 1993). This
point was derived from the relationship between complexity, order, and information value
in Information Theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; Moles, 1966).
That being said, instead of complicating our understanding to match our experience,
we can simplify our experience to match our understanding. From this perspective one
might prefer to seek out others who can collaboratively reinforce stereotypes that simplify
a complicated social landscape, rather than seek out culturally diverse collaborators who
break down old simple meanings to create new more complicated ones.
CONCLUSION
Studies of the built environment identify features that facilitate pedestrian movement
and vital public spaces. Nevertheless, these studies leave us with a relatively shallow understanding of the importance and power of the very activity their recommended changes
would promote. This article uses the lens of Epistemological Culture Theory to identify
four qualities of being on foot: breadth of experience, identity expression, pausability, and
collaborative creativity. The social benefits of being on foot derive from the social work
that this posture facilitates. As pedestrians, we contribute to culture through our ability
to experience, express, pause, and collaborate.
Future research on the emergence of culture and community will be enhanced if it
incorporates the concepts we have presented here. That is, we can better understand why
culture and a shared sense of community develop when we examine the degree to which a
person’s existence in or travel through space facilitates or controls his or her participation
in the creation of culture. Though this article has not proposed measures for these qualities,
such an empirical project bears promise for understanding how certain places and moments
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allow individuals to contribute to culture and feel involved in a community while others
do not.
These attributes of pedestrian transportation can aid us in better understanding the
relationship between the various modes of transportation, including bicycling, transit,
carpooling, and driving. One of the most significant appeals of car culture has been its
promise of exempting a person from the effort of locomotion. Indeed, this article has shown
that automobile culture enables people and communities to block out a range of meaningmaking activities. The four qualities of being on foot provide additional granularity in
understanding often-cited reasons of time, distance, or laziness as objections to walking.
Certainly, both excuses of time and laziness can also be understood in the lens of cultural
engagement and the desire for selective interaction. Despite urban planning enthusiasm
for redesigning cities to make them more walkable, much more work needs to be done to
understand the cultural resistance to, as well as the cultural benefits of, being on foot. In
our cities, clashes between people using competing transportation modes are refrains of
society-community debates dating back to Durkheim and Tönnies. It is our hope that this
theoretical work can be a contribution and a resource in these debates.
Note
1
Additionally, though not necessarily related to car culture, less complex environments are less expensive to
construct. Further, the standardization inherent in the “McDonaldization” of so many service industries (Ritzer,
1993) further homogenizes and simplifies our experience. One can be in a plethora of different locations around
the world, but the environment may look the same if one is in a McDonalds, Walmart, Texaco Minimart, a mall,
an interstate highway, and so forth, rather than a uniquely constructed restaurant, store, market, or road. We
feel that the cost-effective standardization that is inherent in large-scale design and production leads to the loss
of place, as noted by postmodern theorists such as Harvey (1989) and Jameson (1991).
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