Walking Cities: Poetics, Politics, and Architectures of Urban Walking
The title of this doctoral thesis encompasses multitudes. It accommodates the indeterminacy of the subject performing the action... I am referring, of course, to that everyday and seemingly trivial action that constitutes the main theme of this research and permeates it in its various forms: walking. This refers to urban walking in its complexity: walking as an aesthetic, playful, political, and revolutionary practice; but also walking to imagine other possible architectures, walking as a perfect metaphor for conceptual and physical displacement. In a way, this displacement has been recorded here. That is, the journey through the different lines of this research has left behind trace-signs that can be followed in the reading of this doctoral thesis.
Returning to observations about the title, "Walking Cities: Poetics, Politics, and Architectures of Urban Walking" attempts to condense into a few words a diverse, multidirectional, and open research. The first part of the title is retained in English to manifest a double meaning. On one hand, its most obvious interpretation is “walking cities,” though it is not very clear who is carrying out this ongoing action. In any case, indeed there is someone walking, and that walking body is also the body writing, the same one that has gathered the results of an experiential research approach, often deeply connected to specific urban contexts. How can we practice specific cities while paying attention to the poetic and political potentials of urban walking? It is not easy to define in a few words what a city is. Calvino wrote that “sometimes different cities succeed each other on the same ground and under the same name, being born and dying without having known each other, incommunicado with one another.”¹ This plurality manifests itself once we stop considering the city as a static reality and move to the realm of perception by each of its inhabitants. That is, cities are the cities one traverses, inhabits, and builds. It is impossible to encompass the urban phenomenon, and this impossibility is measured not only in terms of space but also in terms of dynamism: an elusive urban flow that does not stop. In short, a city is also an abstraction or an ungraspable multitude.
In “Walking in the City”², a text frequently cited in theoretical studies on urban walking, Michel De Certeau points out a distinction that is easy to overlook: the distinction between the city-concept that appears in urban discourse and theoretical approaches, and, on the other hand, a city-experience that emerges in the everyday and concrete spatial practices of its inhabitants. His interest lies precisely in these everyday practices. A clear differentiation is established between discourses about the city and the experience of cities themselves. In this regard, it is necessary to be aware that, on more than one occasion, we will oscillate between these two realities: that of discourse and that of experience, dealing with an abstraction when speaking of the city or the urban phenomenon. And indeed, what city is being referred to? Are we talking perhaps about the European metropolis, also an abstraction in itself, a tourist city in the Mediterranean, or a bustling urban center in northern India? Perhaps abstraction can only arise from the cities one has walked through... although it is difficult to maintain this idea of presence at a time when so many images of remote urban realities are consumed daily. Despite the deceptive abstraction of the city concept, James Donald has defended the use of the term in articulating discourse, as a category of thought, provided we are aware of its limits:
“Why reduce the reality of cities to their material reality, or their material reality to a matter of bricks and mortar? (...) The city is an abstraction, aiming to identify what, if anything, is common to all cities... the city we experience - the city as a mental state - is always already symbolized and metaphorized.”³
Starting from this observation about the city concept, it is worth noting that this thesis also mentions specific and practiced cities, such as Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam. In fact, the second part of the thesis presents case studies for a site-specific research model from the city and based on urban walking. In these, theoretical effort is accompanied by the experience of traversing and inhabiting specific urban environments and how this experience can guide the research. There is a certain parallelism between walking and conducting a doctoral research: in both cases, there is an element of drift, with the constant possibility of deviating, getting lost, and finding in the process what was not initially sought. Both, in short, require a certain openness of body and intellect to contingency.
We have already talked about the city, but what about the walker who enters it and does so without a clear purpose? Walter Benjamin noted that getting lost in a city is a skill that, like all others, must be learned and trained:
“Not being able to orient oneself in a city is still not a big deal. But to get lost in a city, as one gets lost in a forest, one must practice. The names of the streets have to speak to the lost person just as the crunching of dry branches does, and just as the streets of the city center must reflect the hours of the day with the same clarity as a clearing in the forest.”⁴
Thus, the city speaks, communicates with the wandering walker because it is this very person who is in a position to listen to its secrets, its subterranean stories, its restless pulse. In the aforementioned text, De Certeau also analyzed the relationship between the city and walking bodies in terms of speech and language, though not so much from orality as from walking as a form of writing. There is, therefore, an analogy between steps and words that can lead us to reflect on a specific literature linked to urban walking, as we will see later in the methodological notes.
The second meaning that the title of this doctoral thesis might allude to is precisely that of a city walking, literally, in the image of walking cities. How can we imagine cities that move and transform just as we do? Some architects like Constant Nieuwenhuys or Claude Parent have conceived cities designed for continuous movement, architectures of becoming, ever-changing scenarios for urban nomads perpetually in search... because there are places that can only be reached by walking. In 1964, Archigram launched the idea of a walking city in their project “Walking City,” developed by Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, and Frank Brian. Broadly speaking, the project consisted of a proposal for a nomadic city with infrastructure capable of moving, and therefore, not being geographically anchored to a single location. This city becomes its own mobile geography as the surrounding landscape changes with its passage. It is, therefore, an urban geography entering into symbiotic relationships with multiple landscapes. The city is no longer a nucleus to which or through which one moves, but a nomadic body that also surrenders to movement. “Walking City” is a radical architecture project⁵ that challenges our way of understanding urban life. In this changing city, there is no need to remain in a specific location; instead, it is possible to lead an urban life while simultaneously being nomadic, where work and play also move to the same rhythm. Throughout this research, I have moved numerous times and relocated for work just as often. Perhaps I would have liked to inhabit Archigram’s walking city to find sensations of continuity in permanent change. Or perhaps we can become our own walking city, embracing multitudes and changing contexts, composed of pasts and futures, the weight of memories, and the wings of the imaginary: fragments of the cities we have walked through and architectures in which we have not set foot yet.
Download full thesis here 🔗
- Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Barcelona: Ediciones Minotauro, 1983. p. 40.
- De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” In: The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 1: Arts of Doing. Mexico City: Ibero-American University / Technological Institute of Western Studies. 2000. pp. 103-115.
- Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999. p. 8. Cited in: Wolff, Janet. “Gender and the Haunting of Cities (or, The Retirement of the Flâneur).” In: The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, edited by Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, pp. 18-31. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. p. 26.
- Benjamin, Walter. Infancy in Berlin circa 1900. Madrid: Abada Editores, 2015. p. 5.
- Cf. Radical Architecture. Catalog of the eponymous exhibition at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art. Junta de Andalucía, Department of Culture, 2003. pp. 2-5.