Las teorías tradicionales

We have started to see the connections between walking and everyday life. No doubt, people walking in cities is one of the most common scenes of urban life. Perhaps most of us walk a bit, or more than a bit, every day with varied purposes. This link has been explored by theorists on everyday life, especially by de Certeau (["JgI] "JgX) in the chapter

‘Walking in the City’ from his book The Practice of Everyday Life. In reviewing specific academic work on walking, the relation between walking and everyday life also appears recurrently: ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (Middleton HI""b); walking as an ‘ordinary feature of everyday life’ (Lorimer HI""); ‘everyday walking practices’ (Matos Wunderlich HIIg); ‘everyday practice of walking’ (Augoyard ["JaJ] HIIa); ‘daily walking practices’

(Edensor HI"I).

The concept of everyday life has been largely discussed in the academic arena. Some definitions depict it as the pre-reflexive, taken-for-granted aspects of life’s reproduction;

this account of everyday life has emerged especially from elitist circles of intellectuals trying to understand a supposed ‘non-intellectual relationship of people with the world’

which they depict as tedious and banal (Felski "JJJ, "c). This understanding is shaped by anchored beliefs, ideologies, and social domination strategies (Highmore HIIH, ", Lalive d'Epinay HIIg, ""). In this vein, some activities are depicted as minor because they do not hold the prestige of other, hypothetically, more specialised activities. I do not engage here in depth with this debate. On the contrary, what is useful to my work is bringing to the discussion a particular understanding of what we call everyday life that puts at the centre the interrelated, organised and skilful doings of people in carrying out their lives no matter how minor or unimportant their activities are judged by society.

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Among authors that address everyday life accounting for its complexity and meaning, I focus on the writings of Henri Lefebvre (HI"X), Michel de Certeau (["JgI] "JgX), and Jean-François Augoyard (["JaJ] HIIa) as they share an interest in urban life. Moreover, the last two authors are key references in the study of urban walking, while Lefebvre (HI"X) opened-up the investigation of everyday life by breaking with a Marxist negative view of everyday tasks in terms of alienation (H[). Consequently, refusing to consign the tasks of everyday life to a sphere of minor importance, Lefebvre considers that all aspects of life are related to each other in the level of the everyday, which is the level of lived experience.

He understands the everyday as a 'common ground’, a totality from which social life emerges as ordinary and extraordinary, simple and complex, tedious and marvellous:

Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum of total relations which make the human—and every human being—a whole takes its shape and its form.

In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete:

friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc. (""J).

Even while Lefebvre’s definition of everyday life is a good starting point, it seems to me that he keeps conceiving the everyday as if it were a realm in itself, outlining that way an externality that may render investigation of practices confusing. In this regard, de Certeau (["JgI] "JgX) and Augoyard’s (["JaJ] HIIa) contributions are helpful. In their explanation of everyday life they avoid definitions and emphasise attending to what people do every day. Furthermore, their works reflect specifically on urban walking as a paradigmatic everyday activity.

De Certeau is greatly inspired in his understanding of everyday walking practices by Augoyard’s empirical research in L’Arlequin, a neighbourhood located in the outskirts of Grenoble in France. Some of the concepts de Certeau uses to describe walkers’ ways of

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operating in the city such as ‘appropriation’ and ‘rhetoric’ can be retrieved in Augoyard’s work. One fundamental idea both share is that in order to know people’s everyday life we need to pay attention to the micro-scale of human practices. For Augoyard (["JaJ] HIIa,

"cH-"cP), dwellers’ practices are ways of expressing their particular lived experience of the everyday. In that sense, practices are heterogeneous and creative:

Everyday existence expresses itself practically in the modes of inhabiting that express in turn an autonomous power of expression. This autonomy, which can be defined in theoretical terms by the notion of complication, is not an everyday delusion that would be superimposed upon the prosaic “usage” of the laid-out and developed space. Quite to the contrary, when recognised as expression, a lived experience of inhabiting has the power to deform these habitat situations one hardly chooses, to remove from them the unimaginable reality with which they are adorned. A collective habitat is perhaps even a matter of choice—yet, it is inevitable in present-day building production—about which everyday lived experience can manifest its buried and unnoticed powers.

Augoyard’s work relates urban walking and everyday life in a fundamental way as a result of his empirical research. As well as de Certeau, he dismisses the temptation of proclaiming ‘what’ everyday life is. Instead he deliberately advocates paying attention to

‘how’ it expresses itself through pedestrian narratives ("aH). His work consists, thus, in exploring the pedestrian modes of expression through the analysis of walking rhetorics that ‘would be the translation of both the organization of the styles proper to each inhabitant and the correlations among these styles within a shared space’ (Hc). However, it is difficult to figure out what he means by saying that the everyday expresses itself since that way of formulating it—it seems to me—gives the idea of an everyday that pre-exists people’s practices.

The interesting aspect in de Certeau’s (["JgI] "JgX) work is that he develops a theoretical perspective on everyday life that keeps practices at the forefront. One of his contentions is that everyday practices ‘depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures’ (XP). He criticises the

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idea that people’s procedures are totally restrained by social rules and limited only to reproduce social order. This is his contribution to a political perspective of the everyday.

The shift de Certeau presents, which concurs with Augoyard’s ideas, is the acknowledgement of practitioners’ agency: in their ordinary doings practitioners deploy an inventiveness which is one of the ‘very ancient art of “making-do”’ (PI). Through tricks and ruses they resist the rules and dispositions imposed by ‘subjects of will and power’

(xix). Using Augoyard’s words: they play out ‘the power to deform’. This game of powers is what de Certeau illustrates with his well-known concepts of ‘tactic’ and ‘strategy’ (see section H.[.").

De Certeau and Augoyard’s theoretical propositions about the inventiveness or creativity people play out in their everyday practices are relevant in my work since I make sense of how unequal conditions shape walking practices and, at the same time, how walkers recreate and take the most out of those conditions. Regarding walkers’ creativity and agency, Augoyard says in the conclusions of his work: ‘The study of everyday walks indicates, on the contrary, that there really is much more creative movement, configuration, and dynamic tension going on in the humblest acts of inhabiting than in the very process that produces the contemporary built world’ (Augoyard ["JaJ] HIIa, "ac).

It is necessary to acknowledge that these ideas of creativity and resistance around the everyday pedestrian have not been received without criticism (see Morris HIIX, Middleton HI""b, JP-JX). It has been argued that they potentiate a heroic characterization of the walker and a romanticized view of the everyday ‘reified as a pure, pristine realm, heroically unbowed’ (Latham HIIP, "JJg). David Pinder (HI"", caH) has called attention to the commonplace that considering walking as a ‘creative, elusive, and resistive practice’

has become. From my point of view, the positive critique of everyday practices has been fruitful in adding complexity to our understanding of them, but certainly a romanticized

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idea of the everyday urban walker may run the risk of neglecting differences among walkers and the privileged and less privileged conditions under which many walkers perform their practices which constitute the point of departure for my own work.

Summing up, grounding walking within the framework of everyday life opens-up the scope for considering people’s inventive ways of enacting urban spaces in the carrying out of their day to day lives. I have considered seminal authors who have researched everyday walking practices, retrieving from them a recognition of the creativeness as well as the political aspects of walking. I do this not without paying attention to the criticism about the risk these ideas run of romanticizing and homogenising the act of walking. In the case of Augoyard, for example, looking to define the figures of the pedestrian rhetoric, he does not pay much attention to walkers’ stories and lived experiences. Augoyard and de Certeau’s works miss differences among walkers and their ways of walking, many of them effects of social and economic inequality. In the specific case of de Certeau, he attends to power in his theory of everyday life through the well-known concepts of ‘tactic’ and

‘strategy’ (see section H.[."); however, de Certeau ‘does not discuss different social and spatial practices of walking, involving who is doing the walking, [and] how and why they are walking, under what circumstances’ (Pile "JJc, HHg-HHJ). To do so, I propose a micropolitics of walking, which I explain next.