Session B.
Surveying, Observing, Experiencing.
Walking as an Approach to Understanding Territory
Co-chairs: Dimitra KANELLOPOULOU (AAU-CRESSON / ENSA Paris-Malaquais) & Magali PARIS (LéaV / ENSA Versailles)
Central to the teaching of the spatial disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, planning, human and social sciences), walking has become –especially since the 1980s– an essential tool for approaching the concept of territory understood as a locus of action and tangible experience. In France and abroad, field observation workshops are becoming increasingly common as an educational tool aimed at redefining the way territories are approached. Celebrated by philosophers and writers at the beginning of the 20th century for its ability to connect our embodied experience with the inhabited world, walking is a unique means for observing and interpreting spatial dynamics: discontinuities, boundaries, fragments, enclaves, specific features of a landscape, etc. This mundane, everyday activity has been the focus of transport policies for over a century and remains a fruitful area of research for a number of professions involved in studying and transforming territories, particularly those professions that involve multidisciplinary approaches. Since the end of the 1990s, walking has become a way for professionals and citizens alike to advocate for new approaches to negotiating how public spaces are utilised and novel forms of collective use.
This session is open to critical, thought-provoking instructionally-focused papers, which examine the threefold function of walking as an object of research, a method of on-site investigation and an operational tool. We will explore the contribution of walking to the critical examination of territories from an interdisciplinary perspective (geography, sociology, urban planning, architecture, performing arts, etc.). We will also seek to identify the possibilities that walking opens up in terms of analysing spatial relationships using an iterative inter-scale approach (from the staircase to the neighbourhood square, from the railway station to the rural path). The session is open to all teaching methods (theoretical, methodological and analytical teaching, project teaching, introduction to research, etc.), from undergraduate to doctorate levels, as well as to both long-standing and more recent approaches. This session is devoted to the numerous ways in which walking can help us to come to grips with a slippery and complex concept, namely that of territory. The issues of atmosphere, emotion, sociability and imagination are all potential areas of exploration.
Selected Bibliographical References
Augoyard J.-F., 2007, Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Gans H.J., 2002, “The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View”, City & Community, 1(4), p. 329-339 [doi.org/10.1111/1540-6040.00027].
Ingold T., Vergunst J.L., 2008, Ways of Walking. Ethnography and Practice on Foot, Aldershot (UK), Ashgate.
Jacks B., 2004, “Reimagining Walking. Four practices”, Journal of Architectural Education, 57(3), p. 5-9.
Macauley D., 2000, “Walking the City: An Essay on Peripatetic Practices and Politics”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 11(4), p. 3-43.
Nicholson G., 2008, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy and Literature of Pedestrianism, New York (NJ), Riverhead Books.
Richardson T., Jensen O.B., 2003, “Linking Discourse and Space. Towards a Cultural Sociology of Space in Analysing Spatial Policy Discourses”, Urban Studies, 40(1), p. 7-22.
Senett R., 2006, “The Open City”, communication, Urban age conference, Berlin, 10&11 November 2006.
Stavrides S., 2020, Towards the City of Thresholds, Philadephia (PA), Common Notions.
Thibaud J.-P., 2015, En quêtes d’ambiances. Éprouver la ville en passant, Genève, MētisPresses.
Thomas R., 2008, Marcher en ville (BRAUP-CRESSON seminar).
Türeli I., Al M., 2018, “Walking in the Periphery: Activist Art and Urban Resistance to Neoliberalism in Istanbul”, Review of Middle East Studies, 52(2), p. 310-333.
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