go, what do we do? Every time we left our building door, a spontaneous decision was made: left, right or ahead? A decision that was not considered before the lockdown. The layering of these daily decisions that lead us to different places allowed the development of a mind map of the places that were forbidden and the ones that were aspired for. The last ones were thinly explored up until that point, but were since then intensely sought for, wandered, gazed, felt. The suburban streets of outer neighbourhoods of Edinburgh composed this newly permitted area of exploration and offered a de-densification that allowed strolls to be less fear-impressed. It has also allowed us the new experience of walking for walking and not necessarily to reach a destination. Even if before the first pandemic lockdown Edinburgh was always walked and walkable, the trajectory was mostly operational and the park a daily necessity to reach the University Campus. The design of this park – the Meadows – with green grass and majestic trees – Acer sp ., Ulmus sp . and Maple sp . – follows a nineteenth century’s public park style with framed views to Arthur’s Seat, with links to nearby urban territories and where the life of the University of Edinburgh pulsates in normal times. This space of encounter lost its importance, lost its encounters, and the focus turned to places unseen until that point – each small garden, small plant, new blossoming tree in a forgotten alley became a centre of renewed interest, enjoyed differently each day and with a new attention to detail. In this period, I started reading forgotten books I had at home. One of them was Summer by Albert Camus, which quickly directed me to his other book, The Plague . 1 In the first chapter of the latter, Camus describes the city of Oran, where the drama unfolds and which he describes as a ‘neutral city’ where spring “is only announced by the quality of the air, and season changing only detected via the sky.” 2 Everything else is neutral. The city turned its back to the landscape and therefore “became soulless,” Camus writes. 3 What I have experienced in Edinburgh was the precise opposite. I experienced seasonal change in each day differently and intensely. It was also an experience shared in couple. A new routine shared in the micro social scale of the household – in our case the micro scale of a couple. In The Plague ’s first chapter Camus states that “[t]he men and women either devour each other rapidly in the so-called act of love or give themselves to a long habit between two.” 4 For me one of the consequences of the pandemic was this long strengthening of a habit between two people – a habit of small discoveries. We discovered the successive limits of the city and the park as limit – very specifically in the Blackford Hill park. A park away from the University Hub, away from the Meadows, but that links the suburban city to the outward southern Scottish landscape. Edinburgh is a city that, unlike other cosmopolitan places, didn’t go through a strong fragmentation process – what Thomas Sievert would call the Zwischenstadt. The limits of the city are often very clear and Blackford Hill park is one of these clear limits. It is topographically rich, a high hill with a 360º view to the city on one end, and an embedded stream on the other where one feels kilometres away from the city. Sensorially, the experience was also extreme, from the cold and windy hilltop, to the warm slopes and again the cool and breezy stream. After the first lockdown period I have been in Lisbon – our hometown – where the experience is once more totally different. The climate, the vegetation, and the limits are extremely different. You cannot read the limits. The city is too wide to perceive this.
1 Albert Camus. A Peste. Porto: Livros do Brasil, 1947
2 Ibid, my translation, 11 3 Ibid, my translation, 13 4 Ibid, my translation, 12
T: Also, because Edinburgh is a product of its partially built green belt, which conditioned its size and avoided too much urban sprawl, whereas Lisbon continued to grow.
F: Exactly. In Lisbon we have the Monsanto Park, which instead of being the city’s limit, is limited by the city. It works like an island. This place has become our aimed destination in our Lisbon walks – the place to decompress – however to reach it the experience is more disruptive than in Edinburgh. In Edinburgh we walk towards the limit through an intimately scaled fabric, even if homogeneous, whereas in Lisbon we need to walk through five thresholds and several moments of impersonal monumental scale before we reach the park. We need to conquer each barrier and overcome the fear of each limit to reach our aimed destination. It is a broken walk. Walking in Lisbon becomes, then, more intentional again. Wandering is less permitted or afforded. In Edinburgh we walk. We just walk. Not by chance, Edinburgh is considered one of the most walkable cities of the UK. 5 The destination however, both in Lisbon and Edinburgh, is equally rewarding. Another walking discovery in the pandemic for me is the silence. Just like Rob Walker has stated in ‘The art of noticing’, one of the ways to discover the city creatively is to “follow the quiet”. 6 Walker wrote this book in the spring of 2019, one year before the Covid-19 pandemic, and if for him following the quiet was a clear way to discover the city, this principle has become clearer for a wider group of people since March 2020.
5 In 2017, Edinburgh was considered UK’s ‘most walkable city’. online: https://www. livingstreets.org.uk/news-and-blog/press- media/edinburgh-is-most-walkable-city. 6 Rob Walker, ‘The art of noticing: five ways to experience a city differently,’ in The Guardian (2019). online: https://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2019/may/09/the-art-of-noticing-five- ways-to-experience-a-city-differently.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 39
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