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Inimkond seminar series will conclude this semester with a talk by Urban Studies researcher Tauri Tuvikene, taking place on 6 December at 16:15 in room A-325.

Citizens in Urban Walkscapes: Practices and Laws of Walking in Tallinn

Walking has attracted increasing interested among social sciences and humanities and yet, only rarely have those studies considered “traffic” as a regulated sphere, leaving governing and regulations to traffic specialists and engineers. While social sciences and humanities approach walking as the way to experience city—either as landscape practice, flânerie or pedestrian tactics—transport discourses foreground questions of risk and safety, leaving little place for the perceptual, experiential or radical issues of walking. Thus, crossing street is often allowed only on green light and at certain spaces, pedestrians are asked to cross streets quickly and directly and not to “loiter”, and in Estonia everyone must wear a safety reflector on all street environments. While pedestrians frequently violate norms, they are all still part of the almost industrially organised and mechanised system—traffic. Using insights gathered during the research in Tallinn, including interviews with traffic regulators as well as video walk-alongs with pedestrians and work with historical traffic regulations, the paper introduces the pedestrian as a “body-driver”—a “driver on foot” (Demerath and Levinger, 2003) who is governed to control his or her body in legally prescribed ways. The fully attentive, law-abiding and responsive pedestrian is a persistent subject within not only contemporary regulatory thinking but throughout traffic regulations history in Estonia and beyond. Not turning to usual alternative conceptualisations within urban design and sustainable mobilities, the paper founds new imaginations of pedestrian freedom within poetical walking and “loitering”.

Tauri Tuvikene is an Urban and Mobility Studies researcher at Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University currently working on his postdoctoral research project “Urban Walkscapes: Socio-Material Assemblages of Pedestrian Practices and Regulations in Tallinn, Estonia".

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