Going for a

Walk
A Study of
Mindful Walking
in the City

Sophia Helf
2015
Index
Introduction 3

Argument 5

Case Study 1: 8
Psychogeography

Case Study 2: 11
Walking as Mapping

Case Study 3: 14
Street Photography

Analysis 18

Conclusion 21

Bibliography 23
Introduction
Sometimes I try to imagine a map of the world that
shows every walking step I have ever taken. It would be
a curious document.- Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of
Walking, p. 39

I have always been an avid walker. Much of my youth

was spent roaming the streets of San Francisco, explor-
ing neighbourhoods I was unfamiliar with and delving
into the hidden nooks of neighbourhoods I did know.
This rambling never felt pointless; rather, I felt that as
I walked, I created my own personal map of the city
and learned to love it as a constantly shifting, changing
thing. In a sense, my time spent walking through San
Francisco brought the city truly alive for me.

Upon my move to London nearly four years ago I took

it upon myself to walk as much of the city as possi-
ble. Certainly this is a much more difficult endeavour,
as London is ten times the size of San Francisco, but
every neighbourhood I have lived in, from New Cross
to Hackney Central, I have learned the streets of by
heart. It has always felt natural to me that to truly live
somewhere one must come to know the area well, and
what better way to do so than by walking through it?

In her essay entitled The Solitary Stroller and the City,

Rebecca Solnit says that Walking the streets is what
links up reading the map with living ones life, the per-
sonal microcosm with the public macrocosm; it makes
sense of the maze all around. (Solnit, 176) This idea
rings incredibly true for me and is the basis of much
of the research I have undertaken for this dissertation.
This research has grown to include the history of city
walking, the psychology behind it, various artists and
authors attitudes towards it, and how it has changed in
the modern day with the advent of industrialisation and 3
modernism.
Through this research I have developed these questions
that I would like to explore in this work:

How does walking city streets, not just as a means of

getting somewhere but as an activity in and of itself, af-
fect peoples perceptions of the city they live in?

How have artists and writers explored such mindful

walking in their respective cities?

How can the everyday walker that is, people who

walk not because they want to but because they must be
encouraged to pay attention to where, how and why they
walk?

This dissertation explores the act of walking in the city,

seeking to answer these questions and generate new ones.
I hope to leave the reader with both an understanding of
the various facets of city walking and a desire to explore
it on their own time.

4
Argument
'Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern
for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take time. [...] Is
there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You
don't know how to see.' - Jacques Perec, Species of
Spaces, p.50

Discussions of walking in the city have always been

nuanced. Whilst walks through nature have always held
an honourable, robust sort of glory, walking in the city
is seen as something seedier, more volatile. The phrase
'the streets' tends to conjure up images of danger and
violence, something to be avoided altogether; walking
through the city is seen not as a recreational activity but
a necessary one, such as a trip to the launderette or the
corner shop. (Solnit, 2006) Yet city walks need not hold
such a stigma: there lies much to be discovered about
ourselves, others, and the space around us in the streets.

Walking in the city has a surprisingly rich history. For

much of human civilisation, streets have been used not
just as a means of getting from one place to another but
as a place in and of themselves. Just like the buildings
around them, streets were used as meeting places and so-
cial hubs; in European and American cities in the mid- to
late 1800's, pleasure gardens, markets, and squares played
host to 'the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.' (Sol-
nit, 178, 2006) People had space to walk, talk, court, buy
and sell, meet up with one another; they were able to live
their lives richly within the streets. Harriet Lane Levy's
autobiography 920 O'Farrell Street, which details her life
in San Francisco, describes the Saturday nights in which
every type of person in the city would head out for a
walk: 'The outpouring of the population was spontaneous
as if in response to an urge for instant celebration [...] We
walked and walked and still something kept happening
afresh.' (Levy quoted in Solnit, 179, 2006)
5

Walking through the city first saw itself elevated to an art

form in the form of the Parisian flneur, or 'ambler.' First
mentioned in Charles Baudelaire's work The Painter of
Modern Life, the typical flneurwas a well-dressed,
well-to-do Frenchman who spent the majority of his days
strolling idly through the streets of Paris to pass the time.
(Crickenberger, 2005) He observed the ebb and flow of
the crowd in a detached manner; his knowledge of the
past commingled with his keen observation of the present,
acting as the link between routine and perambulation.
(Crickenberger, 2005). He would, in a sense, read the
streets as he walked. Yet as the covered arcades of Paris
(the flneurs preferred place of rambling) were deserted
in favour of department stores, the act of flnerie soon
dwindled out, becoming a thing of the past.

The disappearance of the flneur and his rambling

ways was, in fact, a sign of things to come. In his essay
Non-Places, Marc Aug argues that much of contempo-
rary space can be described as supermodern space that
is designed for ubiquity of use. No events outside of those
designated for a supermodern space can occur; interaction
and social activity are relegated to only what is required.
(Lucas, 175) A prime example of such a phenomenon is
an airport: one arrives at it, checks in, goes through se-
curity, makes a few purchases at one of several shops,
waits for ones plane, and leaves.Anything outside of this
structure of use would be considered out of the ordinary.
(Aug 1-6) With this definition in mind, one can find myr-
iad examples of supermodernism in the modern-day city:
in shopping malls (look, buy, eat); in motorways (drive,
choose an exit); even, argues Raymond Lucas, in tourist
destinations (go, look, photograph). (Lucas, 175) All is
streamlined, simple, easy to navigate and use.

However, such hypermodernity can result in poorly-ex-

ecuted urban planning that considers the city itself to be
a separate entity from those who inhabit it. Instead of
being built with the local community and the areas past
in mind, many regeneration efforts are constructed with a
tabula rasa approach that is, they scrape the past clean 6
and replace it with something entirely new. (Lucas, 170)

Urbanist Martn del Guayo argues that such homogenisa-

tion of urban life that is, the over-predictability and
and banalisation of things, events, and people prevents
us from experiencing an urban life that enriches ourselves
and allows us to learn from others. (del Guayo, 2013)
We thusly lose the sensory and emotional richness of our
experience of the city we do not live in it, but merely
exist in it; the city is a living, changing organism yet at
the same time impersonal and cold.

In her essay The Solitary Stroller and the City, Rebecca

Solnit posits that Walking is only the beginning of citi-
zenship, but through it the citizen knows his or her city
and fellow citizens and truly inhabits the city rather than
a small privatised part thereof. (Solnit, 176) Indeed, by
walking through our own city we not only learn about the
areas surrounding us but also inscribe ourselves upon it:
our knowledge of the streets become one of thousands
of others layered onto one another, giving the city life, a
past and a present. (de Certeau, 100)

Today walking through the city is often seen as a chore,

something that must be done; city streets are places we go
through and not to. It is thusly all too easy to write off the
act of mindfully walking through the city as something
silly and even dangerous, yet every city has an entire
world waiting to be discovered in its streets. By taking
our time to walk through them and getting to know the
areas around us, we begin to live in the city, rather than
just exist in it.

7
Case Study 1: Psychogeography
Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step, as if to
take root there again. Walking is an invitation to die stand-
ing up. - Frdric Gros in Rebecca Solnits A History of
Walking, p. 178

The word psychogeography is a strange one. Its meaning

is simple on the surface, yet the concept it describes is quite
vague and difficult to pin down. Reduced to its most basic
terms, psychogeography is the study of the ways in which
a geographical environment affects individualss emotional
and mental states:in a sense, it is the merging of geography
and psychology. (Coverley, 2010)

The basis of psychogeography was born of the Letterist

International, a post-World War II movement rooted in
Dada and Surrealism that consisted of a motley group of
authors and thinkers. (Lemaitre, 2014) In 1953, Letterist
thinker Ivan Chtcheglov published the essay Formulary
for a New Urbanism, which argued that A mental disease
has swept the planet: banalisation, and that the cure for
such banality was to create an urban environment based on
its inhabitants emotional engagement with the surround-
ing architecture. He further proposed that readers take part
in a continuous drive, an ambient drift through the city;
this proposal later became the cornerstone for the theory of
psychogeography. (Coverley, 2010)

The concept of the drive was initially a playful, childish

one; the Lettrist International journal Potlach published
several psychogeographical experiments that consisted
more of loose exeriments than serious thought on the sub-
ject. For instance, Potlach #1, published in June of 1954,
proposed to readers the following:

Depending what you are after, choose an area, a

more or less populous city, a more or less lively
8
street. Build a house. Furnish it. Make the most
of its decoration and surroundings. Choose the
season and the time. Gather together the right
people, the best records and drinks. Light and
 conversation must, of course, be appropriate,
along with the weather and our memories. If
your calculations are correct, you should find the
outcome satisfying. (Please inform the editors of
the results.) (Not Bored, n.a.)
As a concept, psychogeography did not yet exist; if any-
thing, Lettrist International used the concept of the drive
as a platform for their other ideas rather than studying it
as an idea in and of itself. It was Guy Debord, a thinker in
the Situationist International, who took it upon himself to
apply a more rigorous approach as to how the drive could
be used.

The word psychogeography was first properly defined in

Debords 1955 essay entitled Introduction to a Critique
of Urban Geography. In it, Debord states that Psychoge-
ography could set for itself the study of the precise laws
and specific events of the geographical environment, con-
sciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals. (Knabb, 2010) Debord considered psycho-
geography to be a science, something to be tested and mon-
itored and measured; to him, previous Lettrist experiments
were only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the
urbanist and architectural breakthroughs that he believed
psychogeography could lead to. (Coverley, 2010)

As a whole, the Situationists like the Letterists but with
a more political, anti-capitalism slant treated the drive
mainly as a political manoeuvre. Like Chtcheglov, they
believed that the modern city was becoming increasingly
banal, full of pre-established routes and swift, thoughtless
movement; walking through the city could therefore be
seen as a subversive act, one that went against the monot-
ony of everyday life and challenged notions of how the
city worked. Debord suggested that a proper drive be con-
ducted with two or three people and last about a day, al-
though exceptions (longer walks, occasional use of taxis, 9
etc.) could be made. (Coverley, 2010) Such conditions and
limitations could permit the drawing up of the first surveys
of the psychogeographical locations of the modern city.
(Knabb, 2010)
Yet for all its theoretical pomp, psychogeography had few
concrete manifestations it would seem that many people
were too busy writing about it to actually partake. Studies
that were undertaken were considered mundane to the point
of uselessness; Abdelhafid Khatibs Attempt at a Psycho-
geographcial Description of Les Halles was, according to
Coverley, little more than a particularly unreadable form
of travel guide. Furthermore, there was the question of
psychogeographys legitimacy as a practical tool: its lack
of measurable effects and its stark combination of objec-
tive fact and subjective emotion saw a sharp drop in psy-
chogeographical thinking. By 1960, the concept was all
but abandoned. (Coverley, 2010)

This is, of course, not to say that psychogeography has
never been used or explored since. Quite the contrary: in
recent years it has made a comeback. Yet it no longer func-
tions as a singular school of thought; rather, it has dispersed
into various manifestations and uses by writers and artists
alike. It even has its own festival: the yearly Conflux Festi-
val in New York City brings people together to re-imagine
the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an
opportunity for civic engagement. (Conflux, 2013)

Psychogeography, although a failure as a movement,
took the simple act of walking and turned it on its head,
making it playful and thought-provoking. Self-professed
psychogeographers encouraged people to treat city streets
as places to explore, to experiment with; cities were not
simply stacks of brick and concrete but host to a plethora
of emotions and thoughts.

10
Case Study 2: Walking as Mapping
The opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walk-
ing, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organises a
here in relation to an abroad, a familiarity in relation to a
foreignness. - Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Every-
day Life, p. 130

The history of mapping is a long and rich one. The oldest

maps were based more on time taken to get somewhere
than actual space; measurements were marked in hours
and days rather than metres and kilometres. As time passed
and cities grew, maps became spatial, based on objective
geometry of space rather than subjective itineraries. (de
Certeau, 1984) Today, they are all but ubiquitous: we can
find them on our phones, on street corners, at the entrances
of buildings. They are tools for when we want to find out
where something is, or when we want to locate ourselves
within the great sprawling mass of the world.

In his essay Walking In The City, Michel de Certeau tells

us of the difference between place and space. Place, he
says, is a group of elements and their physical distribution
(i.e., the city), while space is such place combined with
the movements and activities that occur as a result of place
(the city filled with people moving through it). In short, he
says with emphasis, space is a practiced place, a physical
space put to use by the activities within it.

In this sense, one can consider a plain map of a city to be

a representation of a place: it is a geometrical representa-
tion of the locations of buildings, subway stations, parks
and so on; it is based on the citys shape. It is only when
one puts it to use annotates it, personalises it, creates
ones own iterations of it does it become a proper rep-
resentation of a space, one that has been engaged with, is
alive. Many artists and writers have partaken in their own
versions of map-editing and map-making via walks in the
11
city, either their own walks or others. These maps may be
actual physical representations of places explored, itiner-
aries, photographs, sounds, alterations to the area walked
what unites them is that they all happen within the place of
a city, turning it and its map into a space.

A rather literal interpretation of the space vs. place dichot-

omy occurs in Esther Polaks project Amsterdam RealTime.
Ten people of varied ages and professions were each giv-
en a GPS tracker which tracked their movements around
the city of Amsterdam, something that Polak referred to
as their diary in traces. (ORourke, 140, 2013) As they
moved through the city, day in and day out, their move-
ments were traced in real time onto a video projection on
a plain black background, slowly sketching out a map of
Amsterdams streets as time passed. This created a strict-
ly physical map of Amsterdam, yet when Polak gave each
participant a printout of where they had gone over the
course of the project, they brought an emotional side to the
project by recounting reasons why they went places and
what they did on the way. (ORourke, 2013) Polaks pro-
ject utilised individuals experiences of the city to ...create
new visualisations of these tracks and see what new kinds
of experiences of space these visualisations bring about.
(ORourke, 141, 2013) By utilising peoples mental maps
of the city of Amsterdam, Polak was able to create not just
a map of its streets but of how and where people moved
within them: by looking at the map one learns not only
about Amsterdam as a physical space but about the lives of
several people who live within it.

12

Amsterdam Realtime, 2003

Seven Walks, a project undertaken by Belgian artist Francis
Als, focuses not on the city in its entirety but the con-
versation between spaces within it. Over the span of five
years, Als took it upon himself to get to know the city of
London by undertaking seven differently themed walks,
all with simple yet strict instructions: A walk in South-
east London on the sunny side of the street always and a
walk in South London on the shady side of the street al-
ways, or sixty-four individual Coldstream Guards move
through the Square Mile of London. (Artangel, 2013)
Although simple, each walk was rigorously documented
in various mediums drawings, photographs, notes, and
so on which were then presented collectively as a final
work. One could say that Seven Walks is strictly a map of
Londons space it documents the activities and life that
thrums within Londons streets, not the streets themselves.

Guards (still) (2005)

Polak and Als take radically different approaches to

mapping, yet both approaches involve the use of walk-
ing (both the artists and others). Despite being radically
different, both projects show that by walking the city we
are able to create our own personal map of the place or,
indeed, the space that we live in.

13
Case Study 3: Street Photography
The irresistible urge to create an image is dictated by
a quest to recover the elements that originally provoked
some intense feeling. Robert Doisneau, Paris, p. 344

The tradition of street photography is a relatively unusual

one. It sets itself apart from other types of photography
with its element of instantaneity and its photos that have a
life of their own, giving us insight into the chaos of life on
the streets. Whereas landscape and portrait photographers
take their time setting up shots, aiming for perfect compo-
sition and light, street photographers set out into the world
in search of an opportune moment to capture.

A crucial element of street photography is, of course, the

street. The street may not be the actual sidewalk pho-
tos are taken on subways, inside restaurants, on the beach;
essentially, anywhere the photographer can get photos of
subjects who were unknown to him and, whenever possi-
ble, unconscious of his presence. (Westerbeck and Meye-
rowitz, 35, 1994). The street photographer does not create
his subject; rather, he heads out into the world to search for
it, waits for it to come along. The street itself is the subject
first and foremost, yet we also learn about the photogra-
pher himself through what and how he chooses to photo-
graph. We see the city as he sees it.

In the essay The Solitary Stroller and the City, Rebecca

Solnit compares the act of walking in the city to the act of
primordial hunting and gathering, the urban walker being
on the look out for particulars, for opportunities, individ-
uals, and supplies... (Solnit, 174, 2006) One can compare
this to the practice of street photography, with photogra-
phers setting out on the hunt for a good shot Solnit does
mention this, referring to a photographers camera as a
sort of basket laden with the days spectacles. (Solnit, 189-
190, 2006) Indeed, walking the streets is an absolutely cru-
14
cial part of street photography; it is only by doing so that
the successful street photographer can immerse himself in
the livelihood of the city and, subsequently, photograph it.
Perhaps one of street photographys most famous perpetra-
tors is native New Yorker William Klein. Whilst working
for Vogue, Klein was financed to make a photographic di-
ary of sorts about his hometown, a place which he loathed;
however, despite his lack of photographic knowledge, he
felt that once I had a camera I could say what I wanted
about New York, about America. (Dazed, 2013) However,
several editors who saw the photos considered them far too
grungy and Anti-American to publish. (Dazed, 2013) His
photos of 1950s-era New York City were grainy, blurry,
messy; he documented not the beauty of the streets but the
misery and lack of hope that permeated the city at the time.
Klein shot photos indiscriminately, snapping as often as he
could, and by doing so created an entire spectacle of New
York City, gave viewers a feeling for the incessant hurried-
ness of city life. The layouts of his photo books emphasised
this, giving the viewer the sense that you yourself are a
conspicuously uncalled-for presence, hurried in and out of
bitter districts in which you have no business. (Kozloff,
36) This is not just New York but William Kleins New
York, his basket of spectacles: as we look at his photos,
we walk the streets with him, feel the sense of urgency
with which he both walked and photographed.

15

Big Face in the Crowd (1955) and Pray, Sin, New York
(1954), both by William Klein
Robert Doisneau was a photographer who took perhaps
the exact opposite approach to photographing his home-
town. Born and raised in Paris, Doisneau initially trained
as a lithographer before abandoning the practice entirely
to spend his time photographing the city that he so loved.
His photos focussed on everyday life in Paris through the
1940s to the 90s, capturing moments of tenderness, ab-
surdity, and the marvels of daily life. (Doisneau, 8, 2010)

Doisneaus method of photography was not so manic or

hurried as Kleins; he took his time rambling the streets
of Paris, his eyes peeled for a situation he thought worth
photographing. However, Doisneau was opposed to docu-
menting situations he found distressing or depressing; his
lens was an idealistic one, capturing only moments that he
felt that he wanted to remember: I might have collected
millions of images, methodically, but it would have cost
me countless days without pleasure. (Doisneau, 8, 2010)
His photo book Paris is interspersed with brief musings on
situations he once came across and Paris as it used to be
what one might consider a textual snapshot:

The Ghost train at the annual Foire du Trne.

The ride is noisily mechanical from the outside,
you can hear the screams, then suddenly: bang!
The door opens and out comes a car with its ter-
rified occupants. People pay good money to be
scared out of their wits. (Doisneau, 300, 2010)

In this sense he portrays Paris through a set of rose-colour-

ed glasses, painting Paris as a city of effusive character
and joy. Just as Klein does, Doisneau walks the streets fill-
ing up his basket of spectacles; yet he does not hoard his
spectacles indiscriminately, but rather waits patiently and
plucks them from the city streets one by one.

Doisneau himself says that ...the technique of an aimless

stroll without timetable or destination works like a
charm, flushing out pictures from the non-stop urban spec-
16
tacle. (Doisneau, 1, 2010) Klein and Doisneau have both
spent uncountable hours walking through their respective
cities, coming to know not just the layouts of their streets
but the thrum of life within it.
 Les Halles (1968) and Les Les Tabliers de la Rue de
Rivoli (1978), both by Robert Doisneau

Although they are only a miniscule representation of their

respective photographers work, the set of photos present-
ed in the previous pages give a look at the way that Klein
and Doisneau went about photographing where they lived.
As mentioned before, Kleins photographs were hurried,
hectic; whilst Doisneaus were taken with care and a sort
of tenderness. The fruits of their city walks are revealed as
their film develops, and with it we come to learn about not
just Paris and New York but the men who photographed
them.

17
Analysis
For me walking has to do with exploration, a way of ac-
commodating myself, of feeling at home ... Setting foot in
a street makes it yours in a way that driving down it never
does. - Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking, p. 17

Psychogeography, walking as mapping, and street pho-

tography all have one common thread: they use walking
as a means to come to a better understanding of the city.
Walking is elevated from a utilitarian act to an explor-
atory one; its potential for exploration and observation
is used to reveal a side of the urban landscape that one
might not usually see.

For the sake of an organised analysis it would make sense

to come back to the questions asked in the introduction.
Firstly: How does city walking affect walkers percep-
tions of where they live? How do our perceptions of the
city change as we take our time to walk through it, paying
attention to what is around us?

Certainly this is a difficult question to answer in its entire-

ty, as it would be impossible to ask every single person
who enjoys walking as a hobby to give their thoughts on
the matter. However, through various forms of research,
one thing does become apparent: walking the city streets
strengthens the emotional ties to the city through which
one walks. The entire ethos of psychogeography was
based on this fact; psychogeographers wandered the city
guided purely by their emotions, taking note of which
places made them feel sad, happy, nostalgic, and so on.
Likewise, the work of street photographers William Klein
and Robert Doisneau quite clearly shows how they react-
ed emotionally to their respective cities (Klein unhappily,
Doisneau much less so). Esther Polaks Amsterdam Re-
alTime gives us an example of how even simply seeing
the routes we have taken can elicit an emotional response:
18
when participants in the projects were shown where they
had walked, they all revealed personal connections to the
places they had been.
Secondly, how have artists and writers explored the act of
city walking? What methods have they used; how have
they recorded and shared their experiences? There are
myriad answers to this question and, in a sense, the three
cases studies presented do answer it to an extent. From
the research undertaken it seems clear that two main ways
that creative practitioners have used walking stand out:
firstly, as a medium in and of itself, and secondly, as a
means of going about other creative acts, and of inspira-
tion.

It could be said that the Lettrists were the first to treat city
walking not as an act, but as an art medium: their psy-
chogeographic experiments invited people to use the city
streets as their canvas, their walks as mark making. Am-
sterdam Realtime is a rather literal interpretation of this:
its participants various walking routes created a map of
Amsterdam over a length of time. Most others have used
walking as a jumping-off point for inspiration, document-
ing not their actual movements but what they saw and
experienced as they walked. Psychogeographers charted
their emotional reaction to the city around them; Klein
and Doisneau photographed the people and places that
they saw. Francis Alss Seven Walks could be consid-
ered a combination of both walking as mark-making and
walking as content-gathering: his piece includes not only
routes he took but also what he saw, heard, and experi-
enced along the way.

To list every single art piece, essay, and experiment in-

volving city walking would be tedious and unnecessary,
but it is clear that many people have seen city walking as
both a way to make art and a way to inspire it. What is
particularly intriguing is the fact that city walking is so
simple as a concept, yet yields so many different interpre-
tations, analysations, and ideas. Five people could be told
to head out for a walk in the city and to make a creative
piece about it, and in all likelihood each person would 19
return with something completely different.

Lastly, how can the average walker be encouraged to pay

attention to how, where, and why they walk?
This question is perhaps the most curious, the most diffi-
cult: there is no one right way to get someone to do some-
thing we want them to. Certainly the benefits of walking
in and of itself are easy to promote it gets us exercising,
it calms us down. Yet getting people to pay attention to
the way they walk is another matter entirely.

A common thread running through all three case studies

seems to be the act of approaching city walking as a form
of exploration and of play that is, people go out walking
because there were interesting things to do, see, and learn.
Robert Doisneaus photography demonstrates this look-
ing at his photos, one can clearly sense the sheer joy that
he took in rambling the streets of Paris, camera in hand,
looking for yet another playful scene to capture. The
maps of both Francis Als and the psychogeographers,
too, are an example of this: why go for a normal walk
when you can give yourself an arbitrary rule to make it
more interesting, such as walking only on the shady side
of the street or walking a path in an unusual geometric
shape?

With this in mind, one could perhaps frame city walking

not as something that one should do, but that one can do;
an activity rather than an obligation. Certainly it is easy to
say that city dwellers owe it to themselves and others to
take their time learning the city streets, but such pressure
is unnecessary: people respond much better to the idea
of play. Were a manifesto of some sort to be proposed, it
would likely be something along the lines of Take to
the streets! Go somewhere new! Find
something silly! or thereabouts.

Yet a manifesto would at the same time constitute a

movement, a group of people thinking all the same and
city walking is a different experience for each person, an
endeavour to be undertaken at ones discretion. Let us
leave it as it is; tell people of its joys and then let them 20
discover it for themselves. For as these three case stud-
ies make clear, city walking is an individual act, one that
must be undertaken and sexplored independently.
Conclusion
I walked everywhere in the balmy days and nights of
May, amazed at how many possibilities could be crammed
within the radius of those walks and thrilled by the idea
that I could just wander out the front door to find them. -
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, p. 171

The conclusion I have drawn from my research is a rath-

er open-ended one, one that leaves me with just as many
questions as answers. Yet I do not find this to be a bad
thing at all; were my research wrapped up neatly and my
questions answered simply, I would have felt that I had
not explored the subject nearly enough.

As a whole, I have come to realise that city walking is an

entirely personal endeavour. No two people will walk the
same route, see the same things, feel the same way about
their experiences. One person might photograph what
they see; another might photograph it; still another might
make a map of where they go. One person may come to
realise after some time walking that they actually quite
hate the city they live in, or love it, or feel ambivalent
about it. It is all up to the walker to decide how and why
they go about walking, and what they make of it.

I have also found that walking mindfully in the city ena-

bles us to learn about where we live and make emotional
connections to the places we go. Many artists and writers
have explored this so many, in fact, that it was a chore
narrowing down which ones to include in this essay.
There are endless ways to walk a city and even more
ways to go about documenting it; one cannot walk the
city wrongly. A city is vast, and there are many things
to be learnt from within it about the city, ourselves, and
how the two relate.

Finally, I realised (although frankly I did already know

21
this) that city walks are simply a wonderful way to spend
ones time. There is much to be seen, much to learn, plac-
es to explore the city pulses with adventure and is right
at our fingertips. I noted very happily that not one au-
thor, artist, or designer that I studied made what could
be considered poor use of their time walking the streets.
Even William Klein, who absolutely loathed New York,
managed to squeeze something positive out of his experi-
ences.

It is widely known that modern cities are being built more

for motorised transportation and ease of use, walking
falling by the wayside as something that people generally
have to do. Yet there is no need to take a preachy tone,
imploring people to get out there and reclaim the city,
for it is already ours: it always has been. We learn this
and appreciate this when we walk it.

22
Bibliography
Books and Essays
Francis Als (2005). Seven Walks, London 2004-5.
London: Artangel.

Michael de Certeau and Steven Rendall. The Practice of

Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California, 1984. Print.

Merlin Coverley (2010). Psychogeography. Harpenden:

Pocket Essentials. Print.

Robert Doisneau (2005). Paris. Paris: Flammarion. Print.

Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008). Ways of

Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Surrey:
Ashgate. Print.

Ken Knabb (2007). Situationist International Anthology.

Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Print.

Max Kozloff (2010). Life is Good & Good for You in New
York. New York City: Errata Editions. Print.

Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck (1994.) Bystand-

er: A History of Street Photography. London: Thames and
Hudson Ltd. Print.

Duncan Minshull (2000). The Vintage Book of Walking.

London: Random House. Print.

Karen ORourke (2013). Walking And Mapping: Artists

As Cartographers. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Print.

Georges Perec (2008). Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

London: Penguin Classics. Print.
23
Will Self (2007). Psychogeography. London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, Ltd.

Rebecca Solnit (2006). Wanderlust: A History of

Walking. New York City: Verso Books. Print.

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25

All text Sophie Helf 2014 - 2016.