Walking beyond the city? On the importance of recreational mobilities for landscape planning, urban design, and public policy

Walking engenders many descriptive, normative, and speculative debates. This article reviews work done in the interventionist realms of landscape planning, urban design, and public policy, where attention is increasingly being paid to walking (as a matter of fact) and its often-prescriptive corollary of ‘walkability’ (as a matter of concern). What patterns of critical engagement are seen in work on how, why, and where people walk? I explore how (a) the so-called compact city is seen as the only context where walking and other ‘soft’ modes of everyday mobility meaningfully occurs, and (b) scholarly debates on self-propelled movement seem to focus too narrowly on necessary or utilitarian activity. Recreational mobilities at various temporal and spatial scales thus tend to be overlooked or ignored altogether. Drawing on the interdisciplinary explorations presented in this special issue of Mobilities, a provisional agenda for research and practice is presented. Suggestions are made as to how one might approach the dense, compact city (as phenomenon and as normative impulse in spatial planning) in new ways by foregrounding walking as a widespread example of ‘discretionary’ mobility, i.e., as optional movement in space.