‘Walk this way’: Public health and the social organization of walking

Abstract

Recently, public health has turned its attention to walking as physical exercise, with an assumption that increased levels of walking will improve population health through direct physiological effects on the walker, and through the beneficial environmental impact of more ‘active transport’ in a car-dominated transport system. Although there is evidence to support these assumptions, this paper suggests there may be limits to the effectiveness of current policy initiatives because they do not adequately attend to the social organization of walking. Walking is simultaneously experienced as biological reality and as intricately socially constructed. This paper draws on the small literature on the sociology of walking and data on leisure walking as an example to explore how the cultural politics of walking might contribute to an understanding useful for public health. It is suggested that an adequate conceptualization of walking needs to take into account the ways in which it is both socially embodied, relating to the ways in which we learn to move our physical bodies in appropriate ways, but also embedded, in that it relates to the movement of bodies through and in relation to particular material and social environments, with particular ideological effects.