“I'm on Autopilot, I Just Follow the Route”: Exploring the Habits, Routines, and Decision-Making Practices of Everyday Urban Mobilities

Abstract

Much urban and transport policy is based on a series of assumptions relating to predefined journeys informed by rational decision making. For example, the dominant focus of urban pedestrian policy is how the built environment is the primary influence on a person's decision to walk, with these decisions being made at a specific time and place somehow outside the practice of walking. Little attention is given to the importance of the processual and experiential dimensions of walking itself. This paper considers the ways in which journeys into, and through, the city unfold. Specific attention is drawn to how forms of habitual performance, such as practical knowledge and embodied habits and routines, assist in engaging with everyday urban movements. In the context of in-depth research conducted in London, the paper explores the habits and routines of urban pedestrian mobilities such as the daily commute, and in so doing, highlights the complexity and ongoing reconfiguration of these journeys beyond analysis informed by ‘rational’ intention. In contrast to much transport research that conceives of habit as an external force that somehow obstructs more positive sustainable travel behaviour, discussion focuses on the significance of how everyday urban walking unfolds. It is argued that this form of engagement makes it possible to understand habit as situated and part and parcel of the sequentially organised and occasioned performance of journeys on foot. This, in turn, enables the transformative potential of habitual behaviour to be realised. Throughout the paper consideration is given to specific narratives of everyday urban mobilities; the significance of how such practices are actually ‘talked about’; and how these accounts matter in engaging with the experiential dimensions of urban movement.