Walking lanes / walking lines: Bodily alignments and passing through doorways

Abstract

There are very few studies that analyse the role of artefacts as shaping joint locomotion in public places. By video-recording pedestrians passing through doorways in a mall, we have observed how openings and doors contribute to mobile formations such as walking lanes or files. Doors play a major part as a focus for common direction. Doors occasion a modification of speed and a re-arrangement of spatial proximity between pedestrians during the process of passing through. We argue that mobile formats such as walking together in public places are based on culturally-methodic dynamics of bodily orientation to others. They are also based on a conjoint orientation to apertures that afford entry spaces to doors through which pedestrians wish to pass. Physical-artefactual boundaries such as doors, sidewalks and lanes play a major role in shaping joint locomotion. We would like to focus on a particular case of locomotion driven by artefacts: the passing through doors shaped by serial arrangements of pedestrians in a following/followed format. We treat this case of mobile formation as a specific genuine form of aggregate in its own right, distinct from side-by-side walking and other forms of mobile file.