In Praise of Walking
The new science of how we walk and why it’s good for us
Shane O’Mara
Having read it
★★★★★
Pretty good read and certainly has some suggestions for helping society; small changes all add up to positive effects, for individuals and society. Plenty of insights as well, about how humans can walk and the goings on internally that allow walking. Good stuff and chapter 5, ‘Walking the City’, is definitely brilliant stuff. In fact, that whole chapter deserves quoting and certainly preached to those, so say, ‘in charge’ throughout the world.
A good passage
Walking upright makes our minds mobile, and our mobile brains have marched to the far horizons of our planet.
[...]
Walking is good for the body, good for the brain, and good for society at large.
A second good passage
But we are not just minds immobile in the vat of our skulls: we are minds in movement, and we find movement intrinsically rewarding and motivating. So, the developmental move from crawling to walking illustrates in a deep way the theme of deep cognitive mobility as necessary for us to fully understand and participate in our physical and social worlds. The experience of walking, of moving, is an experience of the brain and mind moving through the world. And this movement in turn changes our experience of the world because the mechanism of brain and mind are more fully engaged by movement.
A third good passage
In other words, walkable cities have ‘aggregation effects’. Walkability makes it easier to have business, social or just accidental meetings and social interactions, because spatial proximity makes all of this possible. It has even been suggested by economists that the more car-bound you are, the less economically productive you are.14 These benefits – social, economic, health and otherwise – are easily achievable when we are able to do what comes naturally: walk.