Walking develops in a dynamic relationship to its socio‐material environment. A historical perspective helps nuance the multiplicity of interrelating factors that influence the practice. This article focuses on walking in Stockholm between 1880 and 1939, a period of great change to the city’s streets and movement within them. Through a detailed coding of 466 photographs, depicting more than 3,000 pedestrians, we examine micro‐scalar elements, such as the use, material, and demographic of the pavement, to allow us to plot developments in the socio‐spatial character of walking over time. The results reveal stable patterns as well as both gradual and rapid change. The intensity of pedestrians remained over time as did the sociality of streets. With increasing automobility, however, pedestrians were increasingly found on pavements rather than roadways. A slightly skewed gender balance also remained across the studied period, though men’s and women’s more specific street use varied substantially. Meanwhile, the presence of children in streets and their independent mobility declined radically. Some of these patterns also varied across different types of streets. These findings are discussed in relation to urban automobility, wider societal trends, and their relevance to walkability studies and present‐day efforts to increase walking.

Since the dawn of automobility, cars and children’s play have made for an uneasy combination. Their strict separation reflects wider binaries within modernist planning. Play streets subverted the modernist ideal, allowing for the coexistence of cars and children, and sparked much debate around safety, urban space allocation, and the role of mothers. Emerging in Copenhagen in the 1930s as an alternative to playgrounds in poor and densely populated neighbourhoods, play streets in the post-war period were transformed into an element of traffic integration, absorbed into modernist planners’ schemes of citywide differentiation. This article spotlights the ambiguities within this, drawing on Danish newspaper articles, archive sources, and City Council debates to trace discussions around play streets, their role in the eyes of various stakeholders–from mothers to (predominantly male) urban planners, from police officers to landlords–and their (meagre) implementation during the period 1930–1970. It shows how, despite efforts to provide children with dedicated places for play, they often preferred spaces not purposefully designed for them, such as the street, with many stakeholders acknowledging this fact. Struggling to reconcile cars and children’s play, play streets appeared as a pragmatic approach, which later became increasingly contested.

Conceptualizations of scaling sustainable practices tend to focus on the uptake of new technologies and practices, whereas the scaling or maintaining of convival practices with a long history has received less attention. In this article, we explore mainstreaming of cycling along three contemporary paths: the spread of e-bikes, bike sharing, and bike kitchens. We develop an analytical framework for assessing mainstreaming of sustainable practices and its impacts on conviviality - exploring which new groups are reached and new forms of usage opened up, as well as the impacts on accessibility, adaptability, and socio-ecological relations. Our analysis shows that the spread of e-bikes and bike sharing are associated with a certain loss of conviviality, while bike kitchens explicitly aim to maintain conviviality. The mainstreaming paths also widen and deepen the practice and notion of cycling. We conclude by reflecting on policy implications and how strategies for more convivial mainstreaming can be organized.

Many cities in the Global North that aspire to be at the forefront of sustainable urbanism have adopted Sharing City agendas. In the development of socially inclusive cities, grassroots sharing initiatives have been seen as key in disseminating more sustainable forms of provisioning. This article examines a case where ambitions to accommodate grassroots sharing initiatives failed, namely in the renewal of the sustainability and sharing-branded area of Masthuggskajen in Gothenburg, Sweden. In order to analyse the interactions and power relations between governance bodies and grassroots sharing initiatives, and how these are shaped by spatial dimensions, we explore the opportunities for grassroots initiatives to influence sustainability goals in the development of high-profile urban districts. Our findings suggest that while areas branded as sharing economy districts acknowledge the potential of grassroots initiatives, high rents precipitate the displacement or co-optation of non-commercial actors, thereby preventing deeper transformation. In more peripheral areas, grassroots initiatives are more likely to thrive, but often fail to reach beyond a critical niche. In order for grassroots sharing initiatives to influence the meanings and practices of sustainability, this spatial paradox, we argue, calls for political solutions at both the local and national level.

The ‘compact city’ implies a return to the urban morphology of the nineteenth-century city, one in which most people walked, predominantly for utilitarian purposes. This article, however, details a leisure practice—the bourgeois promenade—as it unfolded in Stockholm. Employing a diverse set of texts and visual sources the article seeks to understand how this genteel urban practice was enabled and performed in the midst of a growing working-class population with which they shared the streets. It suggests that new street lighting and smoother pavements redirected vision from the ground to the people around, opening up for walking practices that foregrounded the visual over other senses—one being the bourgeois promenade. It further highlights the multiple rhythms of the promenade and the upper middle class’ efforts to create hierarchies of walking on city pavements and in urban parks. In sum, the article shows that leisure mobility was central to the very idea of nineteenth century urban life. Meanwhile, its exclusive character cautions against the one-sided imaginaries of strolling and consumption in today’s endeavours to recreate the compact city.

This article presents a case study of pavement regulation and usage in nineteenth-century Stockholm, probing how urbanites’ interactions on and access to pavements were contested and negotiated, in the process shaping the publicness of streets. Utilising press coverage, it moves beyond a focus on infrastructure and political discourse, to capture urban dwellers’ perspectives, claims and interactions. The article shows that, in favouring circulation, Stockholm's pavement regulations expelled or made subsistence-driven activities illegitimate. Pavement circulation also secured undisturbed, anonymous walking and the ability to maintain a distanced attitude towards others – to be private while in public. Yet pavements featured as a prominent public space not only because it was ordered and controlled, but because urbanites of all sorts fought for access. Next to allegedly “modern” usages, city pavements remained home to age-old but marginalised street practices, as well as middle-class women who had begun to claim their equal right of use.

This special issue brings together articles on the history of walking in European cities and urban hinterlands since the late nineteenth century. Taken together, they reveal how the conditions to walk changed as cities and streets were rethought and rebuilt for motorised mobility, and they highlight the role of labelling and defining pedestrians in order to legitimise change. The anticipation and making of car cities entailed locally specific yet similar versions of marginalisation of walking. Discursive othering (vocabularies, rules, etc.) and material ordering (through designs, etc.) of pedestrians combined to make walking the "second" mobility and produced street modernities. Using the articles as interpretative inspiration, we claim that in the twentieth century, what we refer to as mechanical equality grew in importance at the expense of embodied equality. We propose that un-marginalising walking requires the revaluation of - and hence a more thorough understanding of - the bodily qualities and mundane practices of walking.

This article probes the duality of marginalisation yet omnipresence of walking in cities. Using innovation in traffic light technology in Stockholm as a case study, it seeks to understand the attempts to regulate and safeguard pedestrians in the first decade after the Second World War. The article argues that traffic lights and other technologies were part of experts’ efforts to make urban mobility “systemic”, linking streets with vehicles and road users with the aim to optimize traffic. In doing so, their approach to pedestrian control was ambiguous. On the one hand, experts wanted to fit pedestrians into the emerging city traffic system: make them predictable, while also seeing to their safety. On the other hand, their designs and corresponding legislation often accepted pedestrian sovereignty, and walking was not systemised in Stockholm during the period studied here.

This article offers an analysis of different approaches to control walking in Stockholm in the inter-war period. Various social actors engaged in controlling pedestrians through legislation, police monitoring, educational campaigns and traffic control technologies. But the police, municipal engineers, local politicians and road user organizations differed in their aspirations to privilege motorists over pedestrians. While the inter-war period saw a shifting balance between pedestrians and motorists in Stockholm, the transition in terms of legitimate use of city streets was incomplete. Moreover, taking pedestrians’ viewpoints into consideration, what many observers and motorists understood as rebellion against traffic rules or simply bad manners, many pedestrians found to be the safest way to cross the street.