Care-in-motion: Rethinking walking, health and the planning of urban environments for new parents

Urban environments create possibilities and constraints for care, yet many cities have not been designed ‘care -fully’ . As ‘super’ carers, parents rely on environments that support everyday caregiving, but their needs remain largely overlooked in urban research. During the transformative and vulnerable time of early parenthood, walking becomes a key mode of care-in-motion: an embodied, affective, and relational mobility practice that reshapes how parents engage with urban space. By exploring walking through this lens, we contribute to debates on how cities can better support everyday geographies of care. Larger-scale empirical research on walking as a reciprocal practice of care for new parents remains limited. This study addresses that gap using a national mixed-methods online survey of parents with young children in Aotearoa New Zealand. We present new parents' walking practices as a local, responsive, and relational form of care-in-motion—shaped by emotional, spatial, and socio-material conditions. Across two overarching themes we explore how (1) local walking acts as an emergent holistic health practice; and (2) how walking acts as a form of local care mobility for new parents. We expand existing notions of care infrastructures to include mundane micro-structures that interact in walking with young children, such as shaded footpaths, safe crossings, and engaging routes. This study offers empirical support for more inclusive, relational approaches to mobility justice, and proposes a parent-centred urbanism that values care-in-motion. In doing so, it reframes walkability as a mobility practice through which care, health, and connection are co-produced. • Walking is a key care-in-motion practice supporting parental health and wellbeing. • We argue for mobility to be considered as embodied, relational, and affective. • We provide empirical evidence on new parents' walking behaviour. • Local walking offers a malleable care practice attuned to parents' needs. • Planning for care-in-motion promotes more just and responsive mobility.