Controlling walking in Stockholm during the inter-war period

Self Cite

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.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging the system: Pedestrian sovereignty in the early systemisation of city traffic in Stockholm, ca. 1945–1955

Emanuel

2021

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The struggle over pedestrians: Defining the problems of walking in the 1960s and 1970s

Männistö-Funk

2023

This paper considers the negotiations around walking in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s as a symbolic struggle. Quickly changing urban environment and high traffic fatality numbers brought pedestrians into the focus of public discussions during this era. Two major groups making claims over pedestrians were the traffic safety organisation Talja and its successor Liikenneturva as well as the traffic policy association Enemmistö. Traffic safety actors highlighted pedestrians’ responsibility as a traffic mode among others, but also framed them as reckless and weak. Traffic policy activists used pedestrians as a lens to the unfairness of the car-centred traffic system and urban environment. Both tried to steer away from the simple antagonism between cars and pedestrians, but with little success. Whereas pedestrians were difficult to govern, due to their non-vehicle flexibility, they were also difficult to advocate for. The struggle ended in a compromise that rendered pedestrians invisible.

Pavement publics in late nineteenth-century Stockholm

Emanuel

2023

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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.