Middleton displaces urban walking from the policy language of sustainable transport and from abstract celebrations of pedestrian life toward the embodied, material and technological complexity of everyday movement. Walking is treated as a socio-technical assemblage rather than a homogeneous behaviour: bodily senses, habits, street materials, technologies, temporal routines and spatial conventions combine differently across ordinary journeys. Methodologically, the article draws on in-depth interviews and walking photo diaries with participants in Islington and Hackney, producing an empirical account of how people actually negotiate city streets. Its strongest contribution is to show that pedestrian experience cannot be reduced to distance, accessibility or mode choice because urban movement is continuously mediated by sensation, materiality and practical convention. This creates a precise bridge between urban policy and social theory: evidence about walking must preserve the lived heterogeneity that infrastructural metrics tend to flatten. The pedestrian becomes an situated sensing body rather than an abstract unit of mobility.
