Delaying moving away: Place, mobility, and the multimodal organization of activities

Abstract

In mobile activities alternating between staying at a place and walking to the next place, such as guided visits, the initiation of walking away is a powerful practice to achieve closing of conversational sequences and courses of action. This was demonstrated in a previous paper (Broth & Mondada, 2013): in this follow-up paper, we elaborate on the options that can be responsive to walking away, by focusing on actions that co-participants make in order to momentarily stop it, occasioning a delayed departure/closing. Delaying walking away may be done, accountably, either as a continuation of the previous course of action, or as an initiation of a new course of action related to the present local position of the participants. The study is based on a large corpus of visits to different places and for diverse purposes, in French, Swedish and English. It also shows how trajectories of walking, their projections and their obstacles, are exemplary embodied practices revealing fundamental features of sequential organization e crucially related to the progressivity of talk, actions, and activities.

Accessibility and Connectivity Criteria for Assessing Walkability: An Application in Qazvin, Iran

“…The urban structure has been shaped from the interaction between human behaviors and built environments [26,53,54]. More particularly, urban morphology as part of the urban structure reflects the city's layout, entailing the spatial analysis of street patterns, buildings, and open spaces [35,55].…”

“…Moreover, the city center is shaped by other minor centralities corresponding to neighborhood centers [88,89]. It is recognized that neighborhoods are influenced by the interaction between place and people and that they are well connected with the remaining urban areas [47,53,90]. Based on aerial photography of 1919 AD from Qazvin and the interpreted historical information [91], Figure 3 shows the neighborhood boundaries, center, and gates before the recent urban growth and transformation.…”

Distributed Perception: Co‐Operation between Sense‐Able, Actionable, and Accountable Semiotic Agents

“…66 Unlike when sighted people walk together (Broth and Mondada 2019; Mondada 2017), sighted guiding of visually impaired people relies on a tactile connection that reconstructs the two agents into a new assemblage. However, it would be wrong to theoretically redescribe them as one agent.…”