Beyond the Flâneur: Urban Walking as Peripatetic Phenomenological Pedagogy

Abstract

This essay analyses a key motif in geographical scholarship: the most basic form of mobility achieved by an abled-bodied person engaging in acts of walking. By embedding “walking” firmly within a phenomenological tradition, the essay places “being mobile” qua walking within a field of enquiry that conceptualises an embodied form of mobility as both enabling and limiting. Building furthermore from a growing body of literature that has differentiated between “walking” as an active form of engagement and a host of different geographically relevant modes of being, the paper adds a specifically epistemological set of considerations in an attempt critically to contribute to existing literatures and to interrogate the embodied practice of walking. Key in this endeavour is the contribution mobile modes of existence make to the construction of knowledge about the social world. The paper concludes with a prolegomena that recasts walking in the form of a geographically informed pedagogical practice.