ABSTRACT
The man with the camera is the marketing manager at Riverbank Development Älvstaden Utveckling, a municipal development company in Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden. The other man is the environmental manager. As part of my study of the redevelopment of half of the run-down and re-used industrial area by the street Gustaf Dalénsgatan, close to the harbour in Gothenburg, into an upscale residential area, New Kvillebäcken, I asked these men to take a walk with me on the site in the midst of transformation. Walk-alongs, as sociologist Margarethe Kusenbach (2003) named the method of interviewing people on foot, help researchers learn more about how people relate to their local environment. 1 Walking interviews have often been used by researchers interested in what place means for ‘ordinary’ people – such as the residents of a specific neighbourhood (Kusenbach 2003; Carpiano 2009), political activists (Anderson 2004) and Cittàslow members (Pink 2008) – or ‘vulnerable’ people – such as children (Cele 2006), undocumented immigrants (O’Neill and Hubbard 2010; Holgersson 2011) or displaced people (Holgersson forthcoming). However, in this chapter I will argue that we need to walk with ‘powerful’ people as well.
