The queer politics of walking: 'public' space and the digital mediation of mobility

The concept of the walkable city, i.e. one which prioritises pedestrians, has gained attention in urban sociology, policy and planning, as well as in the public consciousness in recent years. Dominant approaches to improving walkability in practice are typically concerned with adapting the built environment to render it more "pedestrian friendly". The pedestrian centred in such approaches, however, is largely divorced from broader political, technological, and socio-economic processes such that a series of gendered, racialised, classed, sexualised, and ableist inclusions and exclusions become sedimented in the creation of increasingly digitally mediated "walkable" spaces.

Walkability is central to the creation of equitable and emancipatory public spaces; at a time in which trans-hostility and racist ideologies permeate the political and social spheres, being in public has taken on a whole new importance in the pursuit of social justice. And so, the starting point of this thesis is a desire to move beyond the narrow focus on the built environment and to prioritise the socially differentiated nature of walking to achieve mobility justice. Approaching walkability from a queer angle, this research questions how the inherently relational nature of walking shapes feelings of safety, comfort, and belonging for queer pedestrians moving through public spaces.

Engaging with a sample of 20 queer in/dividuals aged over 18, living in Southeast England, this research adopts a methodological approach involving autoethnography, walk-along interviews, and qualitative diary methods to explore how mobile non/more-than/human forms of public relationality coalesce differently in spatio-temporal contexts, in ways that mediate the possibility of queer mobility.

Erin Manning's proposition that 'walking alone does not exist' (2009:29) is taken seriously across this study, particularly when it comes to the role of digital technological transformations in shaping the very formation of the pedestrian. In the 'age of the algorithm' or perhaps the 'digital revolution', digital technologies are now intimately entangled in the co-creation of bodies and spaces. Of particular importance, here, is the ubiquity of wearable technologies which mediate affect and embodiment, inviting various forms of encounter and co-presence into our movements.

Attending to the algorithmic dis/organisation of sociality and the role of techno-capitalism in identity formation and mobility governance, this research proposes that our entanglement with the more-than-human plays a vital role in shaping the possibility of queer mobility. Foregrounding relationality, the idea of the pedestrian as a bounded, autonomous, human entity is critically interrogated and ultimately upended across this thesis, in favour of conceptualisations of bodies and spaces that attend to their co-compositional, affectively charged, and socio-politically imbricated becoming.