Abstract
This short but significant manuscript gives new meaning to the word pedestrianism. Blomley’s long-awaited third book picks up where his others left off in conceptualising the connection between legal knowledge, human conduct and social forces. One target of critique here is left-leaning, social-justice-oriented scholars who operate with “a priori framing” (p. 2) and ready-made concepts like ‘urban space’ instead of examining how space and relations within it are made up over time. In critiquing pedestrianism, Blomley shows how claims about the rights of pedestrians to use public space (such as in pedestrian charters across Australia, Canada, Britain and continental Europe) conceal the political possibilities of human conduct that does not flow efficiently. Blomley thus turns the conventional critical association between public space and democracy upside down. He places emphasis on practices such as occupation of sidewalks and begging, showing how these become the objects of regulatory attempts to live and make move.
The idea of movement is at the heart of pedestrianism. Pedestrianism is a logic that animates the planning and regulation of urban space in numerous ways. Efficient, orderly flow becomes the only accepted form of movement. All obstacles must be minimised, carefully placed, or taken away. Blomley’s argument here is a subtle critique of scholarship that suggests walking out and about in the city is radical in and of itself.
Blomley identifies these critical but somewhat naïve positions as ‘civic humanism’. He argues that there are three forms. The first form is public space scholarship, which suggests that the sidewalk is a space that should be used for public culture and political life. This position fails to realise how the sidewalk itself is already designed to facilitate flow rather than the gatherings that public culture and political life require. The second form is urban design scholarship, which holds that, if set up properly, sidewalks can facilitate neighbourhood engagement. Yet this stance places too much emphasis on space itself as being able to create a place of meaning. Drawing from de Certeau, the third form is the mobility literature that suggests walking in the city is a political act. This literature is typical of pedestrianism insofar as Blomley conceptualises that moving in accord with already-built space is a “choreographed urban encounter” (p. 28), rather than resistance. Being pedestrianist, then, may not be as radical as suggested and may enable legal governance of urban space.
Indeed, this logic of pedestrianism animates nuisance policing and the making of space. In terms of nuisance policing, all persons or things that clutter the sidewalk are defined as out of place under the ordinances and by-laws enacted to regulate flow. In terms of the making of space, Blomley shows how municipal employees conceive of their work as civil engineering or administrative pedestrianism aimed at maintaining the flow of people and things on sidewalks. All space is designed for orderly flow and all persons and things that do not assimilate are removed because they “compromise circulation” (p. 8). Blomley analyses the charts and techniques that municipal officials use to measure and plan for density of human mixing at certain speeds and the consequences for pedestrian flow therein. He also presents a history of the sidewalk, showing how its material form was made up over time and accompanied by a range of ordinances and by-laws. With numerous early 20th-century examples from the US, Canada and elsewhere, Blomley shows it was not only stereotypical nuisances that were subjected to the regulatory logic of pedestrianism, but also mundane issues such as the amount of space merchants could take up with their displays and canopies.
Blomley is careful not to depend too much on the public/private dichotomy that has been the bane of urban studies. For instance, private merchants or bodies can be regulated for impeding public flow, but public gatherings and protest are also construed as against the common good when they take up sidewalks—the terms are highly malleable for regulatory purposes. Blomley therefore displaces the public/private dichotomy as the ultimate referent of urban studies, focusing instead on a contingent set of flows, logics, knowledges and practices. He also examines court rulings regarding the use of sidewalks, which he refers to as ‘judicial pedestrianism’. Here, the focus is on how judges interpret persons and things impeding public flow and dole out forms of punishment in response. Just as the material form of pedestrianism (the sidewalk) has become embedded in cities over time, Blomley shows how the logic of pedestrianism is subtly implanted in law. Both are “hidden in plain view” (p. 106) around us, and what Blomley analyses are the taken-for-granted processes that make the city intelligible as a space for pedestrian traffic.
Overall, the goal in Rights of Passage is to show that a focus on monolithic processes like neo-liberalism is inadequate for explaining how sidewalks are made up and regulated. As Blomley notes rather than simply facilitating the privatization of public space, pedestrianism is aggressive in promoting and defending the rights of the public to the sidewalk (p. 109).
Yet granting ‘the public’ rights to the sidewalk means that some persons and things must be construed as nuisances if they do not conform to how sidewalks make us move.
Pedestrianism also animates demands for social justice and Blomley shows how these claims fail to recognise that championing mobility in the city creates as much governance as it undoes. Never quite satisfied with existing conceptual language, Blomley argues that critical urban studies does not need some ultimate referent such as public culture or public space—nor would becoming an obstacle in the face of pedestrianism provide a collective response, although there are political openings in such conduct (p. 111). Instead, Blomley advocates working within the terms of pedestrianism (for example, public, nuisance), recasting them in ways that undermine the logic of pedestrianism from the inside.
Blomley has provided a new set of conceptual tools for urban studies scholars to use in future empirical analyses. However, I feel that another chapter explicitly addressing the idea of ‘new pedestrianism’ in urban planning theory would have been appropriate. Those who do engage in civic humanism, as Blomley calls it, might be searching for more direction at the end. Blomley stops short of postulating some overall strategy for change or platform for social justice. Those engaged in civic humanism might also be left wondering about Blomley’s plan for resistance in spatial terms, as the conclusion is conceptual and incorporeal. Nevertheless, Blomley’s work is meant to raise questions and “hold pedestrianism up to scrutiny as a particular, pervasive and important legal knowledge” (p. 111), rather than replace existing tropes with new ones.