Walking can be considered as a tool to experience, analyse and represent space in relation to subjectivity. Looking beyond its value as an everyday life activity, artists, philosophers, writers, architects and activists have seen its value as an aesthetic, political and relational practice. We trace this legacy of walking within the emergence of an alternative architecture and urbanism connecting movement, site and subjectivity, suggesting that this is rooted in those artistic practices and civic actions of the modern era that, starting in the nineteenth century, took up walking as an ontological, aesthetic and political knowledge tool. Revisiting some of them, we will ask what the role of walking might be in enabling a more intense experience and more precise reading of the city, how this might change the way we plan and build the city, and what the promise of walking is for future architectural and urban practice.
In his book Walkscapes, Francesco Careri suggests that the production of space began with human beings wandering in the Palaeolithic landscape, following traces, leaving traces.1 A slow appropriation of territory was the result of this incessant walking. Taking ‘walking’ as the beginning of architecture, Careri proposes an alternative history: one not concerned with settlements, cities and buildings, but with movements, displacements and flows. It is an architecture that speaks of space, not as contained by walls, but made of routes, paths and relationships. Careri suggests a common factor in the system of representation found in the plan of the Palaeolithic village, the walkabouts of the Australian aborigines and the psychogeographic maps of the Situationists. If, for the settler, the space between settlements is empty, for the nomad, the errant, the walker, this space is full of traces: they inhabit space through the points, lines, stains and impressions, through the material and symbolic marks that are left in the landscape.
Nomads were perhaps the first alternative urbanists, starting to organise space by tracing routes and paths. This sort of ‘urbanism’ is based on a particular logic: planning with the unknown, planning through experiencing, planning not place, but displacement. Not merely a functional means, walking became an aesthetic frame to discover the world. World literature is full of travel narratives dating back to antiquity, but one could say that walking became a truly aesthetic experience only within modernity. Portraying Paris in the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, showed how the modern city provides the ideal physical and cultural context for the experience of displacement, discovery and wandering.2 Writing about walking as a way of experiencing the city, they identified the emergence of a new urban subject, who walks across the modern city with its numerous facades, streets and displays as if crossing an unknown landscape, not crossing forests, but walls and streets among crowds. They recognised walking as a psychological and cultural experience, a product of the quality of the urban space and the subjectivity of the city dweller. Baudelaire identified a particular figure to express the dynamic physical and cultural condition of the modern city: the flâneur. He is a new type of city user, produced by the crowded condition of the modern city.
So he goes, he roams, he seeks. What is he looking for? With a sure aim this man I have depicted, this solitary person gifted with an active imagination, who is always traversing the vast desert of humanity, has a goal more elevated than that of the pure stroller [flâneur], a more general goal, quite apart from the fugitive pleasure of the moment. He searches for something we can call modernity, for there is no better word to express the idea in question. For him it is a matter of disengaging fashion from a poetic content founded in history, and instead finding the eternal within the transitory.3
With the flâneur, walking becomes a structural practice of modernity, concerned with seizing the ‘eternal within the transitory’.
Walking as aesthetic practice
The Dada artists, and after them the Surrealists, also celebrated this aesthetic quality in their organised visits to the city and its outskirts. This was the first time that art rejected the gallery to reclaim urban space. The ‘visit’ was one of the tools chosen by Dada to achieve that transition. Starting in 1924, they organised trips to the open country, discovering the dreamlike, surreal aspect of walking. They defined déambulation as a sort of automatic writing in real space, capable of revealing unconscious zones of space, the repressed areas of the city, in direct correlation with repressed areas of the psyche. The Surrealists continued this practice, organising group visits and meetings in particular urban places. They sought ‘places that had no reason to exist’ and, at the same time, they were also interested in the terrains vagues of creativity. Their narratives, and other aesthetic productions such as found objects, art installations and poetry, described the city in a new way.4 In 1950, the Lettrist International developed the Theorie de la dérive. For the Lettrists, the dérive was different from déambulation; it was not just physical and psychological, but also political and ideological: a deviation, a way of contesting.
The Situationists pushed the dérive and its subversive dimension further: it became a method to discover and to validate an alternative city, another architecture, not built through axes and frames. It was a way to disorganise and fragment the city through the experience of ‘drifting’, which would allow the psyche to reconstruct it in different ways. Dérive was defined by Guy Debord as not only an artistic but also a scientific practice: psychogeography, ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’.5
The Situationists directly attacked modern urban planning. They championed the pedestrian over the car, criticising the car-produced city and its specific urban forms: parking, highways, suburbs. They criticised the obsession with utility and function and, implicitly, the idea that form should be determined by function: the key principle of modern architecture and urbanism. Contemporary with, and in opposition to the Athens Charter, which stated the principles of modern urbanism, they proposed a New Urbanism, which encouraged the symbolic destruction of modern urbanism and its principles, recommending instead an unmediated approach to the city, through life experience and the invention of new urban practices within the everyday:
The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants.6
For engendering ‘situations’, walking was an everyday life practice that opposed the principles of modern urbanism. It was not cars, but pedestrians, walkers, wanderers, who were able to construct situations. In 1957, Constant Nieuwenhuys designed the camp of nomads of Alba as a model, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn drifted into a ‘construction of situations’, experimenting with playful creative behaviour and creative environments. ‘Constructed situation: A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.’7 Nieuwenhuys developed this idea of constructed situations almost literally and reworked the Situationist theory into the realm of architecture, proposing a nomadic city: The New Babylon, a city in which human activity and culture do not relate to use anymore but to uselesness: ‘The new forces orient themselves towards a complex of human activities that extends beyond utility: leisure, superior games. Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends’.8
Such a city also creates other types of user, whose activity is continual movement and play.
Walking as a way of being in the world
Contemporary with the Situationists, philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote, in his book Practice of Everyday Life, about walking as an everyday life practice, a practice difficult to define and represent in terms of urban practice, because it is at the same time a fundamental ontological experience: ‘a way of being in the world’.9 For de Certeau, the walking body moves in the city in search of something familiar. He invokes Freud, saying that walking recalls a baby’s moves inside the maternal body: ‘To walk is to be in search of a proper place. It is a process of being indefinitely absent and looking for a proper place’.10 De Certeau writes of ‘the spatial language’ of walking, but criticises the way it is representated in the urban cartographies of the time, as they do not represent the act of walking, which is no simple movement, but ‘a way of being in the world’.
Difficult to represent also is the banality of the everyday. Walking is one of the most banal experiences, located at ground level of our urban dwelling condition. But it is exactly in this difficulty that the power of walking as critical practice lies. It is owing to the street and the banality of everyday life that walking offers a radical way of conceptualising the city: a way of knowing to challenge the systematic, rationalising and functionalist ideas of the city imposed by the urban planners and managers. Because of its direct contact with the lived environment, walking is both a mode of being in the city and a way of knowing it. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of power, de Certeau finds in walking a form of resistance to distanced and privileged ways of visualising the city as a unified whole.11 Unlike Baudelaire, de Certeau refers to walking as a mass practice: the ‘“wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear while exaggerating others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order’.12 It is the ‘forest of gestures’ produced by the walking of the many that opposes the immobility of the city.