Leisure walking in the original compact city: senses, distinction, and rhythms of the bourgeois promenade

Abstract

The ‘compact city’ implies a return to the urban morphology of the nineteenth-century city, one in which most people walked, predominantly for utilitarian purposes. This article, however, details a leisure practice—the bourgeois promenade—as it unfolded in Stockholm. Employing a diverse set of texts and visual sources the article seeks to understand how this genteel urban practice was enabled and performed in the midst of a growing working-class population with which they shared the streets. It suggests that new street lighting and smoother pavements redirected vision from the ground to the people around, opening up for walking practices that foregrounded the visual over other senses—one being the bourgeois promenade. It further highlights the multiple rhythms of the promenade and the upper middle class’ efforts to create hierarchies of walking on city pavements and in urban parks. In sum, the article shows that leisure mobility was central to the very idea of nineteenth century urban life. Meanwhile, its exclusive character cautions against the one-sided imaginaries of strolling and consumption in today’s endeavours to recreate the compact city.