Walking Dialectics proximity, intimacy and place in the city’s new metrics francisca lima and tiago torres - campos
A new pandemic lifestyle puts walking back on the map, quite literally. Walking has become for some the only possible daily routine, a newly acquired central habit, a desperate need to escape. First, anxious, quick walks around the block, which then led to more distant and confident strolls. To many of us, walking became a way of accessing new places in old cities, of redesigning the cities we took for granted in new maps, slower cartographies made of bodies moving under the promise of a new, human-silent yet nature-thriving spring. Walking unfolded new senses of place, circumscribed by health-bound metrics of proximity and intimacy, or the lack thereof. We began to avoid passing too close to our peer human companions, but we let ourselves come perhaps closer than ever to wet stone walls, blossoming trees, bustling birds and squirrels. Where our former walking led us through the shorter routes possible with the certainty of an internal compass, the new pandemic walking serendipitously took us to new city frontiers. Two landscape architects, friends and colleagues, enter in a dialogue across the Atlantic. Their conversation reflects on their walks as a form of spatial investigation, a dialectic of proximity, intimacy and space. They dedicate this reflection to their walking companions Miguel, Luis and Lotus.
1 WALKING AS DISCOVERY
Tiago: Even though Mount Hope, the neighbourhood where I live in Providence, Rhode Island, is roughly a fifteen-minute drive, or a twenty five-minute walk away from downtown, it feels extremely residential and, in a way, a preamble to American suburbia. Walking in these neighbourhoods is not necessarily an experience linked to discovery, or at least, it hasn’t been until very recently. People do walk: they jog, power walk, dog walk, walk around the block to put their kids to sleep, or to visit a neighbour; they mostly walk along pre-established routes that feel safe. But walking is never an act of discovery, one doesn’t set out to the neighbourhood with the intent, at least explicit, of finding something new. It is a distinct experience from, let’s say, Lisbon, where both you and I come from, where we do wander the old and crammed streets and get lost in the city for a while. The same can be said of many European cities, like Edinburgh for example, where I lived for a few years, and where you still reside. My pre-pandemic experience in Providence quickly adapted to the logic of commuting to work, albeit privileged, since I could either walk downhill in good weather or catch a bus in bad weather. (In the US walking to work is a luxury, whereas riding a bus is often frowned upon.) The neighbourhood was a territory to cut across from home to RISD’s Downtown campus by the river. With Covid’s spring lockdown and the experience of working from home, I got used to a different daily routine that usually ended with a walk to get out into the fresh air. That experience was odd at first since we didn’t necessarily know where to go, where to walk to. (I speak in the plural here since my walks are always together with my husband Luis and our dog Lotus.) We decided to wander deliberately aimlessly, a way of walking that is totally alien to the sort of logics one walks around here. Others were doing the same. People who never actually walked the neighbourhood were suddenly stranded and they too began to weave around the neighbourhood with their daily walks. These weaving walks of discovery got progressively longer as New England’s spring, famous for its lavish blooming, kicked in. We got fitter – one does get fitter at walking – and braver too, a combination of good weather with the recognition and crossing of boundaries and thresholds. Mini daily victories whenever everything else seemed to be falling apart. Always without a conventional map, sometimes a little lost, but never completely out of control. A direct relationship between our bodies and the neighbourhood, where the map is constantly redesigned through open dialogues, negotiations and bodily limits.
Francisca: Our experience during the lockdown was similar and although Edinburgh is a European city with a well determined centre, unlike the American cities, it has also offered us new discoveries. The experience of having only one hour to escape a life indoors, imposed for the protection of all, opened new options. How is that escaping hour used? Where do we
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 38
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