The forgotten role of pedestrian transportation in urban life: Insights from a visual comparative archaeology (Gothenburg and Toulouse, 1875–2011)

Abstract

This paper explores consumer logistics in urban settings by focusing on the evolution of pedestrian transportation. It accounts for how people carry things in the city and how this is related to the frames of the city and other means of transportation. The methodology combines archaeology, observation, and statistics, and rests on systematic coding of photographical archives. It analyses two streets, one in Gothenburg, Sweden and one in Toulouse, France, over four distinctive periods: before World War I, the wars and interwar period, the 1950s-1960s, and the present. Both dramatic and discrete changes are found, such as the simultaneous proliferation in the use of pedestrians' bags and motorised types of transportation. The paper identifies geographical, technical, and cultural differences, while yielding surprising similarities between the two cities. The paper concludes that the neglected issue of consumer logistics need to be brought into the contemporary discourse on sustainable cities.

Mundane intermodality: a comparative analysis of bike-renting practices

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Time-space complexity and the opening hours of commerce: a study of four European cities

“…We can observe the expansion of the consumer society and a development of hypermobile consumers where "the worker or flâneur citizen of the early 20 th century was progressively replaced by an explorer/consumer cluster with increasing loads" (Cochoy et al, 2015(Cochoy et al, :2281, but where some lack the capacity to consume from the choice of articles and shops, or even to afford the costs of transport to the low-price standardised products outside the city centre. Mobile consumers move around, transporting personal goods on their shoulders in backpacks, which became fashionable during the 1980s, and commercial bags with logos in their hands (Cochoy et al, 2015, see also Brembeck et. al.…”

Understanding Urban Mobility and Pedestrian Movement

“…Similarly, an elderly person typically moves differently to a young one, as does a native to a tourist and so on. Even within a particular scene, e.g., a shopping district, logistics are different for the successfully laden pedestrian and those still browsing [19].…”