‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

John Horton,Pia Christensen,Peter Kraftl,Sophie Hadfield-Hill

doi:10.1080/14649365.2013.864782

John Horton, Pia Christensen + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.864782

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Abstract

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.

Highlights

In this paper we consider the importance of ‘walking . . . just walking’ for many children and young people’s everyday lives
We read her work as having implicit critical bite: how could so social and cultural geographers have written so little about everyday walking? In this paper, we develop this sensibility by highlighting the kinds of rich social and cultural geographies which become apparent when walking practices are a focal point for qualitative research
We highlight some ways in which this walking was of constitutive importance for children and young people’s social and cultural geographies, through its characteristic sociality, narrativity, playfulness and taken-for-grantedness. We argue that these walking practices prompt critical reflection upon the key approaches to walking previously outlined, being inadequately described in most studies of independent mobility, and overlooked by new walking studies

Summary

Introduction

In this paper we consider the importance of ‘walking . . . just walking’ for many children and young people’s everyday lives. This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people’s everyday lives, experiences and friendships.

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