Contenu du sommaire : Marcher dans la ville

If walking is, and has always been, practiced anywhere, one can wonder about the emotion of this motion, about the space of the experience it creates, in literature. As a bodily gesture that favors seeing, but also touching, walking in the city is a solitary act that gradually entails unceasing comings and goings between the inner thoughts and the outside world, inhabited by passing strangers. In Baudelaire's, as well as in Pessoa's or Agee's works, some random choreography is established between the walker and the crowd, in the midst of the urban labyrinth. The passer-by becomes the interpreter of the singular prose of cities. The writing itself becomes alert to the city movements : the literary text imitates the sentences that the city produces and that the walker's steps learn to recognize.

In American literature, walking in the city appears as a new form of experience, based on a rediscovery of the minute elements of everyday life. When renouncing panoramic descriptions in order to explore the city at street level, novelists create some kind of co-incidence between the rambling movement of their words and the elusive, metamorphic, incommensurable environment of the city. They succeed in revealing the value of the most common forms of existence. In Paul Auster's work in particular, walking in New York reveals the art of translation that leads his writing to constantly admit its failure while ceaselessly renewing itself. Taking different forms in the Babel-like metropolis, the act of walking shows how the work of translation makes vision and imagination coalesce and favors a movement towards otherness. When becoming a dance, walking incarnates the involvement of words in the diversity of the world, in its most ordinary dimension.

The flâneur was born at the same time as the modern metropolis. This initially male only figure underwent progressive feminisation in the 20th century as women took possession of the urban space. To become “flâneuses”, women had to be able to observe the city in an autonomous way, become the artist's doppelgangers, and walk the city alone, exposing themselves to others' gaze and keeping themselves ready to interact with the unknown. If the conditions of a female flâneur are not always present in the city, they are even less to find in the predominantly working class suburbs marked by successive waves of immigration from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Can the female flâneur have a rightful place in deprived suburban areas where a stronger male domination has forced women to limit their outings and adopt more traditional female roles? This article looks at mobility of young female characters of Maghrebi descent in three novels by Faïza Guène, Habiba Mahany and Cloé Korman in order to explore the limits of female mobility in today's French suburbs which find their literary echo in contemporary “suburban novels”.

The article aims to show that the architect deserves to be seen as a walker able to communicate with the inhabitants of the place, able to shape the architectural solutions that meet their expectations. For the architect, walking, as a true “civic art”, is the participatory tool par excellence. It shows the different physical manifestations of socio-economic inequalities. The article proposes to follow no preconceived route. There is no linear path: we walk to a destination and to what diverts us from it; we have to get prepared to unexpected encounters. Playing with chance and the unexpected is indeed the only way to take the city by surprise. It is the only way to examine in depth the decisions made in terms of urban planning.

At the beginning of the 21st century, various researchers, writers, journalists or urban planners proclaim the renewal of walking, but their positive representations mainly refer to recreational outing (walking as a form of leisure) in contrast to utilitarian walking (walking as a form of displacement), which remains under-represented. This dichotomy actually appeared during the Renaissance when the State decided to take charge of the public road system, with the objective of improving vehicle traffic, while the aristocracy developed the art of promenade in private spaces. Then, romanticism illustrated by Rousseau converted rural areas in walking territories dedicated to human development through the search of harmony between body, spirit and nature. In the city, the social activity of the promenade became more and more popular and took place in public parks and gardens. This social activity of walking was soon associated with a commercial exploitation of city centers where people gazed at the many shop windows first of the “Grands Magasins” and later of the shopping malls. With the rise of a functionalist urban planning focused on the development of a mechanized transport infrastructure, “walking as a displacement” becomes completely subordinated, uncomfortable and inoperative. At the same time, a particular attention was paid to the extension of recreational walking trails where people could easily walk just for the pleasure of walking far from vehicle traffic. Thus, the challenge of walking development doesn't really lie in the management of leisure areas like green spaces, tourist and commercial centers, but rather in the planning of other parts of the contemporary city – including surrounding areas – which are generally lacking appropriate infrastructure to encourage sustainable development of eco-friendly transports (walking as a form of displacement).

The article focuses on urban walking and its management in urban policies. It aims at understanding what representations of walking these policies feed and what types of devices and dispositions they lead to. After having reviewed the reasons behind the renewed interest for walking, it shows how the walker is now the subject of a high valuation, and then it looks at what is expected from the reintroduction of this practice in urban life. The author is then able to examine the actual conditions of walking in cities, to trace the movement of pedestrianization of city centers, and to better understand how to think urban walking in contemporary settings.

Walking around the city often implies the mobilisation of various personal equipments, of bags and accessories providing autonomy and comfort to their users. Thus, studying urban walking requires to take into account the material dimension of pedestrian mobility and to pay a specific attention to the relationship between a given environment, objects and human beings. Indeed, it is important to consider that mobile agencies – born from the association of a pedestrian and the different items he or she carries – result from meaningful arbitrations made about the way(s) of being and moving within a public space. Focusing on such agencements' composition leads us to spread some light on social constraints, collective routines, personal preferences that really matter when it comes to travel through the city.In this article, we bring our attention to pedestrian equipments and to their mobile use during shopping trips. To do so, we bring together two types of research: a scientific research dedicated to the understanding of current mobility practices (sociological survey) and a conceptual and formal research conducted by students of a design school who have been instructed to develop the pedestrian equipment of tomorrow. These combined researches allow us to engage a reflection along three lines: the autonomy of equipped pedestrian, the coordination between passerby, the modularity of “soft” modes of transport.

Under the Leipzig Charter, European policies encourages “soft” mobility development for consumption activities in city centers. As part of a European research project on Consumer Logistics, we carried out a qualitative survey on the use of various equipments needed by the elderly and by young parents to walk and purchase in city centers. In the light of our observations, we try to understand how those specific populations need to manage large equipments in their daily routine. We pay attention to the way objects, persons and environments interact together in a dynamic perspective. In doing so, we notably underline the main role played by strollers and trolleys in shopping trips of young parents and senior citizens. We show that opting for “soft” consumption mobility (walking) requires some tactics and strategies dedicated to make adjusted sociotechnical agencements. Walking with a shopping trolley or a stroller involves psychomotor, cognitive and social resources. This is also part of a process that helps people to socialize and be together in the city.