Willingness to walk - pedestrianism in the city of Aalborg, Denmark

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses pedestrianism within the contemporary city. We do so by referring to two empirical studies of walking in the City of Aalborg, Denmark. The approach is a mix of qualitative and quantitative empirical documentation, focusing on what we term the “willingness to walk”. Exploring what motivates pedestrians and how car-drivers consider modal shifts to walking, we argue, may be seen as discussion of willingness to walk. This may not be simply understood as instrumental acts of moving from A to B but rather as existentialist expressions of “floating life”. To walk under the theoretical auspices of floating life means to be attentive to the mundane, embodied, and multi-sensorial qualities of moving physically by foot in the city. In the paper, we explore pedestrian practices in light of particular routes in the city, as well as in relation to the placement of parking garages in the city’s mobility network. The purpose is to discuss how to approach and balance the development of car-free city centers within the conceptual idea of walking lines, framed as diagonals. From the data, we find that the willingness to walk from the car park to the main destination is on average 416 meters. Moreover, our data indicates that people are willing to walk 1.5 times the average distance if parking is appreciably cheaper and a free spot seems guaranteed.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilities
• walking
• planning
• urban design
• cities

Acknowledgments

We want to thank former City Architect Peder Baltzer Nielsen for the opportunity and time dedicated to providing us with his expertise and in contributing in-depth knowledge to the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This paper is based on the empirical work of two student groups in the Mobilities and Urban Studies master program in the fall of 2020 (all authors except the corresponding author were students at the time of the data collection). The project was carried out under the curriculum activity “Analyzing Contemporary Mobilities” in the first semester master of the program. The case material has been re-analysed and the co-authoring process between students and supervisor has been one of mutual collaboration. This research has been completed during the COVID-19 pandemic from September 2020 to December 2020. Keeping this in mind, the mobility of people as well as the research outcomes have therefore been affected by government regulations.