Just walking: Creative methods towards pedestrian equity

‘Walking Publics/Walking Arts: walking, wellbeing and community during COVID-19’ was an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project exploring how adults across the UK experienced walking during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role of creativity in walking activities. Employing a range of methods, from a large-scale survey to walking interviews and artist commissions, the research identified the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic.

The interdisciplinary research team, working across performance and visual arts, cultural geography and sociology, share an interest in creative walking practices, as scholars and practitioners. Our use of the term ‘walking’ does not presume bipedal mobility; walking is not just undertaken on foot and can include all sorts of technologies which help disabled people and anyone with mobility issues to move around. Walking can be undertaken indoors as well as out, and we also include imaginative walks – walks of the mind rather than the body.

Our research builds on the existing evidence base for the general benefits of both walking and art on physical health and mental wellbeing, locating this within the context of the pandemic. Quantitative research, our own included, indicated that during COVID-19 some people walked more frequently, but some people walked less (Gov. UK, 2021; Stewart and Eccleston, 2020 and 2022). Engagement with walking activity was unevenly distributed before and during the pandemic, and access to walking continues to be dependent on many variables, including opportunity, environment, health, and perceptions of safety (Twohig-Bennett and Jones, 2018; Friends of the Earth, 2020). The concept of pedestrian equity – or ‘just walking’ – within and beyond the pandemic, has yet to be fully addressed. Our use of the term ‘just walking’ signals its doubled meaning and the implicit tension between walking as a supposedly simple act and walking as a question of equity and justice. Through knowledge co-creation with artists, in partnership with environmental and arts organisations, we were able to better understand how walking and creativity in combination might more equitably support walking by addressing systemic barriers and subverting walking ‘norms’.