Places for Public Discourse: Walkability and Protest in the United States

Social movement scholarship on the emergence of protest has limited engagement with urban scholarship on the spatial production of social relations. Spatial characteristics related to urban form may determine where and how often people gather to protest. This study examines walkability as an urban design feature that may increase protest frequency. Using the 2020 George Floyd protests in the United States, I conduct an empirical between-city case study through a series of negative binomial regressions. I pay particular attention to protests which take place in the public forum, defined as sites which, for symbolic and traditional reasons, are likely to be favored by protestors. Walkability is found to be associated with higher protest frequency both at the citywide and census tract level. Moreover, among cenus tracts, this association holds true in separate analyses of public forum and non-public forum sites. These findings give empirical credence to longstanding theories about the importance of spatial factors in shaping urban social movements and suggest that movement scholars should account for built environment factors when predicting protest. I call attention to several theoretical pathways which, through future research, should be tested as potential causal factors underpinning the relationship observed in this study.