Abstract

Bike lines, temporary street closures, piazzas doubling as tribunes and skateparks, restored wetland trails: affluent municipalities and developers in cities on all major continents have embraced pedestrian-centred urban design as a hallmark of liveability. Yet how do designers, experts and consultants commissioned to deliver tangible, transformative strategies imagine the pedestrian themselves at the centre of it all? This talk develops the concept of pedestrianship to examine the epistemic work and moral economy associated with pedestrian-oriented revitalisation schemes.

Perhaps more than anyone else, the Danish architect Jan Gehl has been widely hailed for his contributions toward making cities more livable. In this talk I reveal a history of how Gehl developed a series of trademark methods for observing and assessing the behaviour of people in public space—a toolkit that forms the basis for the services provided by Jan Gehl Architects, an influential urban design consultancy the Dane co-founded in 2000. This is a multi-sited investigation encompassing places where pedestrianship has been developed, implemented and promoted, taking us from Sienna and Copenhagen to New York and Kyiv, among other places.

I show how expertise focused on mundane aspects to pedestrian choreography, such as measuring how many people sit, stand or walk on a particular street or square at a particular time of day, has gained a heightened significance in the context of neoliberal downtown regeneration. Pedestrianship is therefore a class-based, racialized imaginary—infrastructure even—of the revanchist city: making cities unliveable for many as the flip side of making them liveable for the few.