La igualdad jurídica de los Estados

The act of walking is described within social sciences as one of the ‘most basic of human activities’ (Lorimer HI"", "J). This essential aspect of moving on foot is probably what drives diverse disciplines to investigate it. Walking is present in a myriad of human situations in mobility practices and everyday activities such as going to buy groceries, promenading, popular celebrations, religious processions, political manifestations, etc.

Giving an account of how walking has been researched, then, is challenging. For example, we find studies on walking in areas such as transport research focused on decision-making, route choice, behaviour change and walking patterns (Alfonzo HII[, Papadimitriou, Yannis, and Golias HIIJ, Tight et al. HI"", Millward, Spinney, and Scott HI"P, Kang et al.

HI"a); in urban design, focused on space walkability and the perception of the built environment when moving by foot (Mehta HIIg, Ewing and Handy HIIJ, Adkins et al.

HI"H, Johansson, Sternudd, and Kärrholm HI"c); in health research, focused on walking as exercise and its health benefits (Siegel, Brackbill, and Heath "JJ[, Lumsdon and Mitchell

"JJJ); or in psychology focused on its cognitive and emotional benefits (Johansson, Hartig, and Staats HI"", Oppezzo and Schwartz HI"X, Yang HI"[), among many others.

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In the last decade the interest in walking has increased. Many groups have emerged to share thoughts, literature and experiences on walking both through the city and rural areas.⁵ New books on walking addressed to the general public have come to light (Solnit HIII, Le Breton HIII, HI"H, Gros HI"X, Vallejo and Pailliè HI"[, Elkin HI"c). This enthusiasm is also expressed by public ‘concerns with how people can be encouraged to adopt more sustainable modes of transport such as walking and cycling’ in cities (Middleton HI""b, JI). This issue nourishes many policy debates, especially in the context of the challenges global warming presents in terms of re-thinking and reorganising our ways of moving. It also responds to concerns about improving life quality in cities, making

‘cities for people’ (Gehl HI"I). Furthermore, it fits political debates about the right to the city conceived as ‘a right to change ourselves by changing the city’(Harvey HIIg, HP), which means to engage in practices that permit to participate in a common urban life. In Latin America, for example, groups of activists attempt to position walking within public debates about how we live and move in cities.⁶

This interest in walking across society resounds with the growing academic interest in the subject. In the case of social sciences, it has specifically grabbed the attention of disciplines such as human geography and anthropology. Some works address walking as a qualitative research method (Kusenbach HIIP, Thibaud HIIg, Myers HI"", Kohler HI"X, Yi'En HI"X, Bates and Rhys-Taylor HI"a); others take it as a research subject in itself (Thomas HIIX, HIIa, HI"I, Ingold and Vergunst HIIga, Middleton HIIJ, HI"I, HI""a, HI""b, HI"c, Shortell and Brown HI"Xb, Brown and Shortell HI"c, Tironi and Mora HI"g). Geographer Hayden Lorimer (HI"")—looking to make sense of the continuity and diversity of works

5 See for example: Ramblers – at the heart of walking http://www.ramblers.org.uk/go-walking/about-group-walks.aspx; (on Facebook since 2010) Caminar como práctica anarquista, ética, estética y de pensamiento

https://www.facebook.com/Caminar-como-pr%C3%A1ctica-anarquista-%C3%A9tica-est%C3%A9tica-y-de-pensamiento-215074992182846/; (on Meetup since 2015) Stgo Caminatas Rutas Patrimoniales https://www.meetup.com/es/Stgo-Caminatas-Rutas-Patrimoniales/members/?op=leaders;

6 See SampaPé in São Paulo: http://www.sampape.org/; La Liga Peatonal in Mexico: http://ligapeatonal.org/; or Red Latinoamericana de Peatones: http://peatonesmedellin.org/

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on walking—talks about early pedestrian studies which conceived walking as a functional mode of transport: a way to reach a destination point. Lorimer contrasts these earlier approaches with what he considers to be the ‘new walking studies’ that ‘figure pedestrianism as practice’ showing a ‘preference for a cultural interpretative frame’ of research ("J).

The great achievement produced by social sciences has been envisaging walking as a social practice. Social disciplines have challenged the usual taken-for-granted definition of walking to be a locomotive and physical activity by introducing complexity to the analysis:

walking is more than just putting one step in front of the other. Among the works that have been seminal for the current growth of ‘new walking studies’ we find Marcel Mauss (["JP[] "JaP) and his work on bodily techniques; Walter Benjamin (["JgH] "JJJ) who retrieved the now well-known figure of the flâneur from Baudelaire’s work; and Michel de Certeau (["JgI] "JgX) and his ideas on walking in the city as an everyday practice that creates resistance and allows appropriation within urban space. More recent contributions have consolidated the consideration of walking as a social practice. Many of those have engaged in some form of empirical work that was missing previously (Thomas HIIX, HIIa, HI"I, Ingold HIIX, HIIa, Lee and Ingold HIIc, Ingold and Vergunst HIIga, Middleton HIIJ, HI"I, HI""a, HI""b, HI"c, Vergunst HI"I, HI"", HI"a, HIIg). These contributions have greatly strengthened and opened-up novel possibilities for researching practices on foot, helping to spark further academic interest in walking.

While these works agree to conceive walking as a practice, each of them defines it slightly differently depending on their own research interests. One of the most provocative postures is Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst’s (HIIga, ") who argue that walking permits us to respond to the presence of others which makes it extremely social: ‘Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms

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and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others’. They take this consideration further by turning around the idea that walking is an activity that takes place in social life. Instead, they assert that ‘social life is walked’ and, therefore, ‘walking around is fundamental to the everyday practice of social life’ (Lee and Ingold HIIc). They seek to place ‘the social in the actual ground of lived experience’ based on the idea that ‘it is along this ground, and not in some ethereal realm of discursively constructed significance, over and above the material world, that lives are paced out in their mutual relations’ (HIIga, H).

I particularly value Ingold and Vergunst’s effort for thinking social life considering walking fundamental to it, which means to conceive bodily movement as the motor of social life.

Moreover, this conception triggers questions in relation to my research: if walking is an essential movement for social life, what kind of societies, what kind of lives, emerge from practices of walking that are shaped by unequal socio-spatial conditions? What are the implications for social life of the limitations some groups face in their walks? What does it mean for a city when some of its dwellers can choose when, where and how to walk while others cannot? These questions point at the role of moving and relating to each other in the city by foot (see chapter a).

Other authors within these ‘new walking studies’ mostly understand walking as an activity or practice that is social because it is socially organised and unfolds as part of social life, allowing people to create relationships with others and with the world around them (Edensor HI"I, aX, Middleton HI"I, [ac, Lorimer HI"", "J, Shortell and Brown HI"Xb, [).

For example, Tim Edensor (HI"I, aX) conceives of walking practices as enmeshed in social and cultural life. He defines walking as an ‘irreducibly social and cultural practice that is learned, regulated, stylised, communicative and productive of culturally oriented experiences’. Similarly, Shortell and Brown (HI"Xa, "), in the opening of their book on

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urban walking, state that everyday mobility is a ‘ubiquitous part of urban life and culture’

and, specifically, that walking is a ‘significant social activity’.

By either considering walking as a socially produced practice or as a fundamental movement for social life, all these authors help foreground walking as a research subject within social disciplines. Having understood walking as a social practice in this way leads me to explore literature that had dealt with defining social practices. Specifically, I am interested in determining how to describe walking.

Keeping this in mind, I next review some of the propositions of ‘practice theory’ in sociology. I assess how it fits with my work and why I decided to adopt a more phenomenological conception of practices to investigate everyday walking and urban inequality.

2.1.1 Assessing the Adequacy of Social Practice Theory in Exploring Walking Sarah Pink (HI"H, "c), in reviewing the main ideas of ‘practice theories’, suggests two uses for the word ‘practice’ in social sciences: ‘As a descriptive term that refers to things people do’, and as a theoretical tool for creating categories for sociological examination. The latter corresponds to these theories. Although they cannot be considered as unified, given the diversity among scholars’ propositions, it can be said that they depart from the basis of considering ‘that social practices form the context in which social orders are established’

(Schatzki HIIH, aI); therefore, practices are fundamental for the constitution of the social.

Pink (HI"H, "c) explains ‘the development of practice theory in terms of the work of two generations of practice theorists’. She indicates that the first generation, whose work was prominent in the "JaI’s-gI’s, was led by scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. While they consider practices are fundamental for social life constitution, they

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‘admit the existence of a phenomena outside of the realm of practice’, those are major processes that ‘constitute “external forces” which structure people’s daily conduct’

(Nicolini HI"a, "II). In the case of Bourdieu, for example, as Ingold (HIII, "cH) shows, he states the role of embodied and practical involvement in the ways people feel and think about the world, which Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’, a concept that had huge impact for social theory and research. It implies that it is through the practical activities of life that ‘people acquire the specific dispositions to attend to its features in the particular ways they do’

(Ingold HIII, "cH).

However, there are some problematical issues in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus that Brenda Farnell (HIII, PJa) summarises saying that while it explains the role of practical bodily involvement for social practices, ‘it lacks an adequate conception of the nature and location of human agency’. The concept of habitus alludes to overarching ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu "Jaa, aH) leaving out individuals’ agency. The consequence of this belief, following Davide Nicolini (HI"a,

"II), is a division in the analysis of the social between entities such as the economy, class, religion, etc., and the ‘mundane social intercourse’, assumed to be ‘made of different ontological stuff’.

Scholars of the second wave, while inspired by the first generation, go further in the understanding of social practices to be the core of social life (Schatzki "JJc, HIIH, Reckwitz HIIH, Shove, Pantzar, and Watson HI"H, Hui, Schatzki, and Shove HI"a). They do not agree with this ontological differentiation between more structured processes different in nature to more mundane activities. They understand that ‘even the most ordinary “micro” situations and discursive interactions are extremely complex and intricate’, as much as those macro and structured social entities (Nicolini HI"a, "II). These ideas allow me to consider pedestrian practices and socio-economic inequality in the same

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level of analysis. It is not the case that socio-economic inequality is the structural setting in which urban walking takes place; instead, through walking practices urban inequality does not only reproduce itself but is constantly occurring as a lived experience for the pedestrian.

Second wave practice theory scholars have attempted to describe the elements that comprise social practices. Silvia Gherardi (HI"a) gives an insightful overview of their definitions. For example, Andreas Reckwitz says practices are ‘bodily and mental activities, objects or materials and shared competences, knowledge and skills’ (Pg); Elizabeth Shove, in turn, has ‘identified them in competences, meanings and materials’ (Pg); and in the case of Theodore Schatzki—to mention some relevant authors—he considers that ‘the elements that comprise a practice are linked to each other through five main mechanisms:

practical understanding, rules, teleoaffective structure, general understanding and social memories’ (Pg). Therefore, to give an account of practices, it is argued, researchers should look at these features.

While practice theories could provide insights for defining some elements in my fieldwork observations, their understanding of practices is too constrained to define ‘the practice’ in itself. It seems to me to operate as a formula made by elements needed to be completed in order to, then, grasp the practices we observe. Pink’s (HI"H, HI) criticism of practice theory scholars points to the fact that in their analysis ‘they inevitably situate the individual practitioner in a way that is subordinate to the practice itself’. This, she follows, is not always compatible with ethnographic research, which is the nature of my own research, as ‘the study of practices, when undertaken ethnographically, cannot but also be the study of individuals as they are engaged in practices’ (H").

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Indeed, I am not proposing here to study ‘the practice of walking’ in Santiago as a set of rules and actions, as practice theory would define it. While I could observe rules, skills and competences, they were quite subjective and difficult to generalise. Walkers have many casuistic rules and competencies they apply depending on changing situations. Instead, I direct my attention to the specific ways each research participant walked and created relationships through the encounters with materials and beings that made up their walks.

This means considering their personal lived experience which ‘invites us to ask further questions, such as how does the individual performance of practice intersect with, for instance, biography, memory, discourse, sensory experience, materiality, sociality or the weather’ (Pink HI"H, H").

Individual performance and experience became, then, the analytical unit of my work, giving account of bodies, senses, perceptions and knowledge of places that I could access by sharing the experience of walking with people. I think that constraining my analysis to the elements proposed by practice theories would have stopped me giving attention to the context and places to which everyday practices are constitutive, and are constituted by.

Therefore, while I shared the theoretical propositions of practices as ‘the site’ of social life (Schatzki HIIH), I turned to more phenomenological conceptions of practices that allowed me to pay attention to what bodies do in their environments and to the lived experience of walking.