Walking the city – a case study on the emancipatory aspects of walking

Abstract

Starting from the assertion on the subversiveness of walking, this text attempts to show how the emancipatory potential of one of the most everyday forms of movement can manifest itself in concrete social life at the level of its practicing. Through a case study, we aim to show why walking is of central importance when it comes to possibilities of re-appropriating public space, time and the body. The article first presents specific guided urban walks and contextualises them in terms of their content and the potential that walking offers for its perception and understanding. As the results show, through the specific interaction of the body with time and space, walking has the capacity to emancipate their currently neglected aspects – due to the slow pace and by enabling a multi-sensory experience of space, walking can be understood as a form of manifestation and demand for the qualitative.

Keywords:

• Walking
• urban walks
• the right to slowness
• multisensory spatial experience
• flâneur

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Britain, for example, walking demonstrated two different ways of understanding and fighting for the landscape: one that saw it as a division of economic units and private property was contrasted with the other that focused on the paths as the connective tissue of the whole. ‘Trespassing’ later developed into a mass movement in which walking, as a way of connecting fragmented space, was a political statement and an instrument for its restoration (Solnit 2000, 162-163).

2 It is worth pointing out that in her thematisation of the flâneur, Elkin (2016) is not only looking for the female version of this otherwise male-dominated figure, but is rather attempting to redefine the concept itself: ‘A female flânerie – a flâneuserie – not only changes the way we move through space, but intervenes in the organisation of space itself,’ (288).

3 As Levesque describes, a terrain vague stands for ‘an indeterminate space without precise boundaries … a place … outside the circuit of the productive structures of the city, an internal, uninhabited, unproductive and often dangerous island, simultaneously on the margins of the urban system and a fundamental part of the system … the counter image of the city, both in the sense of a critique and a clue for a possible way to go beyond’ (Levesque in Edensor 2008, 126).