Far from the “dreaming spires”: staging active travel in suburban Oxford, UK

Abstract

ABSTRACT Active travel (“walking and cycling”) is promoted because of its benefits to environmental sustainability and public health and wellbeing. Neighbourhood design, including provision of infrastructure for walking and cycling, can increase social cohesion and can positively affect sense of belonging and pride in the community. This paper investigates the experience of residents living in a suburb of the “Cycling City” of Oxford, UK, who endeavoured to walk and cycle for local journeys. We generated in-depth qualitative insights into regular active travel activity, first through biographical interviews, followed by micro-ethnographic mobile methods with members of the local community to observe and understand how everyday activities on foot or by cycle are performed and experienced. Jensen’s “Staging Mobilities” framework is used to reveal how active travel is “staged from above” and how it is choreographed within the neighbourhood, “from below”. By adopting this framework, we demonstrate how moving beyond the collection of “hard” data of movements between origins and destinations, to a more situated approach generating tacit knowledge from the ground up, can provide a more informed understanding of the broader social and cultural conditions under which active travel operates. This can help policy makers develop both physical and social infrastructures to support active travel so that it may contribute more effectively to increasing community wellbeing as well as contributing to sustainable development goals.