Mapping the city through walking or walking as ‘actuating territories’
The everyday practice of walking can become a way of mapping the street and the city as it is lived and experienced by those who live it. There is a specific history of the use of walking in architecture as a tool for analysis and as a way bringing space into being through occupation. In his book Walkscapes, Francesco Careri speaks of walking as man’s first intervention in his environment and he uses the ‘path-journey’ as a concept that breaks the usual causal link between a sedentary life and architecture as built-form. Instead he shows how walking transforms the landscape into a territory; ‘Before the Neolithic era, and thus before the menhirs, the only symbolic architecture capable of modifying the environment was walking, an action that is simultaneously an act of perception and creativity, of reading and writing of the territory.’ (Careri, Walksacpes, 2003).
Careri traces a genealogy of walking in contemporary culture that has its roots in art practice, starting from the ‘visit-excursions’ of the Dadaists, through the Situationist’s dérives to the Land Artists, specifically Robert Smithson who used walking as a way of symbolically transforming the landscape. Careri is a founding member of Stalker, whose work follows on from these practices. They use the method of collective walking to ‘actuate territories’, which for them is a process of bringing space into being. They use this method in the indeterminate or void spaces of the city, which have long been disregarded or considered a problem in traditional architectural practice.
The bodily practice of walking allows a mapping of urban space on a 1:1 scale and through actual experience; it is dynamic, meaning that those doing the mapping are a part of the map as well as the mapping process. It is a way of describing the ‘ground-floor’ of the city as opposed to the ‘bird’s-eye view’ favoured in traditional western cartography. This also allows for a more experiential quality, privileging chance encounters and close looking. Walking with others transforms a solo pursuit into a negotiation.
