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Walking has attracted increasing interest in the social sciences and humanities. Yet only rarely have studies in those disciplines considered the subject of traffic, leaving governing and regulations to traffic specialists and engineers. Primarily using conceptual reflections but intersecting these with an analysis of historical traffic regulations in Estonia as they are related to contemporary framings, this article introduces the pedestrian as an element of a traffic system who is governed to control her body in legally prescribed ways. Directing attention also to language, as the vignette from Estonia shows the existence of a particular word "liikleja" for the ways in which pedestrians are seen as being subject to the traffic system as disciplined elements of the traffic machine. The article describes such perspective as "traffic discourse" which is contrasted with the more holistic view of pedestrians present in walking studies ("walking discourse"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to critically assess the study of post-socialist cities with respect to comparative urbanism. Even though comparative urbanism has challenged the division of the world into largely incommensurable regional containers, where some regions are sources of theory while others remain in the periphery of thinking, post-socialist cities have remained doubly excluded: neither centre nor periphery, neither mainstream nor part of the critique. This article introduces three ways in which post-socialism has and could be perceived: as a container, as a condition and as a de-territorialized concept. It is argued here that seeing post-socialism as a de-territorialized concept that would apply to particular aspects of cities and societies rather than territorialized units in general would allow cities regularly seen as post-socialist to be incorporated into global urban theorizing, while distinctive local histories and experiences still remain analytically present. The article cautions researchers against area-based imaginations of urban theorization, instead arguing in favour of an approach that sees cities first and foremost as ordinary while some aspects could be claimed to be post-socialist. Tallinn is used here as a site from which to draw examples for this mainly literature-based conceptual analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi-sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states --emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co-production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]