Marquart and Schicketanz demonstrate how go-alongs and ride-alongs convert mobility from an abstract transport variable into situated urban evidence. Their studies in Berlin and Leipzig accompany commuters and children through actual routes, allowing safety concerns, environmental stressors, remembered incidents and route-specific advantages to emerge at the moment they become spatially relevant. The paper’s iconic idea is that travel behaviour cannot be adequately understood from retrospective questionnaires alone because the route itself prompts perception, memory and ad-hoc response. The methodological operation is therefore co-presence in motion: researcher and participant encounter traffic, noise, crossings, pollution and social situations together, producing knowledge embedded in the sequence of urban experience. The authors also resist methodological isolation by combining mobile interviewing with participatory mapping, smartphone tools and group walks. The paper bridges transport planning, health geography and participatory urbanism, showing how local experiential knowledge can become an input to infrastructure and mobility policy without being reduced to generic satisfaction metrics.
URBANISM MEETS ART