2 WALKING AS METRICS
T: I will circle back to something you mentioned about the discovery of some of the values of living in the suburbs, or at least in neighbourhoods that are peripheral to the logic of a centre. 7 The suburbs offer de-densification, which became highly (or even more) attractive in the pandemic. It offered a higher capacity for noticing the silence, which in turn has become a new tool to measure space. Silence is no longer a barrier – ‘It’s silent over there, therefore I won’t venture any longer’ – but can be converted into escape – ‘It’s silent, therefore it is safer to walk since there will be nobody to cross paths with.’ When I think of these new metrics, a fundamental difference between European and American suburbia comes to mind: property lines. In Europe, each private lot is usually surrounded by a wall, high fence, or thick green hedge. This sense of privacy, which is not completely isolated but still segregated, is mostly cultural, even though Europe is very diverse, and in the case of the Mediterranean the plot’s closure is also linked to a centennial presence of the Moorish in the territory and protection against the heat. Surely, in the US we can also find that. When the European colonisers took the Americas from the indigenous communities who already lived here, they were reinventing old and diverse models of settlement. But in New England there is a prevailing Anglo-Saxonist puritan inheritance through which the private is less of a physical barrier, even though it is still clearly marked on the ground. The profile of the suburban street is not from wall to wall, but from doorstep to doorstep, including front gardens, sidewalks, strip lawns and road lanes. And the wealthier the neighbourhood the older the street trees. 8 Walking down the street feels less like being inside a trench and more of a choreographed succession of gardens, which allows for both a closer contact with seasonal change and the intimacy of the gardens’ caretakers. The pandemic changed the walking metrics. It added a new circumscription to our uses of space defined, not by interpersonal distances, but health and safety protocols. 9 The so-called Covid sphere with its two-metre radius tries to isolate our intimate and personal space from our social space. 10 It puts into question Tim Ingold’s wise co-thought that ‘[n]ot only … do we walk because we are social beings, we are also social beings because we walk.’ 11 You also mentioned how the pandemic created ways of walking in defence, defined by choreographies for fear of contamination, according to which we don’t walk towards but away from each other. Walking becomes a choreograph of measuring distances: who is coming from where, who passes first, who changes sides? An alien logic to our social nature, which we have, nevertheless, internalised in record time. Is this fear as strong as our desire to live socially? (As a white man walking in a predominantly white neighbourhood, this walking fear I refer to here is radically different from the experiences African Americans constantly have while walking. 12 ) To those of us who think of the city as an everyday walking practice, 13 the Covid bubble with a moving axis becomes a tube. The former comes from health protocols, while the latter is associated with movement. The city can, then, be imagined as a series of intersecting Covid tubes, but whoever is inside never actually touches the others. Talking with you at this crucial moment for humanity – the imminence of a vaccine – I wonder whether our bodies getting virologically apt to resist will be followed by our minds getting fit to fight against the fear from walking socially again.
7 As someone trained in European schools, I always regarded urban sprawl as a territorial problem that should be addressed by densify- ing life in the urban perimeters. I still think that it is something necessary if we are serious about living sustainably on a planetary scale.
8 Unlike most European countries, the vast majority of public space in the US is maintained by private associations, usually named ‘Friends of’. At the scale of the street, each household is responsible for taking care of the sidewalk strip in front of their private plot. In my walks in Providence, I noticed a direct relationship between the age and quality of street trees and the wealth of the neighbourhood. Street trees are privately planted and maintained. The city has the Providence Neighborhood Planting Program, which supports tree plantation in streets, but it comes with financial strings attached, namely private responsibility to take care of the tree in the first two years. 9 In his 1963’s theory of proxemics – defined as “the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space” – anthropologist Edward T. Hall describes four interpersonal human distances, or distances between people: the intimate (1,5ft or 0,45m), the personal (4ft or 1,2m), the social (12ft or 3,6m), and the public (25ft or 7,6m). Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension [1966]. New York: Anchor Books, 1982. 10 Health guidelines find variations in different countries, but they largely fit within the interval between the WHO’s initial recommendation of one meter (3ft) and three meters. As we got to know more about the virus’ spreading behavior most recommendations settled midway. We now have to maintain around us an invisible bubble with two meters in radius, or roughly six feet. This bubble, which has now been sprayed on public parks, taped on the ground, and painted on the walls, activates new metrical strategies for us to move and use public space. Beyond the more obvious subversion of our public space codes, these metrics affect our intuitive social interactions with nuance, from a newfound discomfort with proximity to complex spatial paranoias. 11 Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, ‘Introduction,’ in Ways of Walking: Etnography and Practice on Foot , Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds. New York: Routledge, 2016. A recent article in The New York Times also describes how plants cultivate a sense of social life in community, albeit in a radically different way than humans, or animals more generally. See Ferris Jabr, ‘The Social Life of Forest,’ in The New York Times , 2020. online: https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/tree- communication-mycorrhiza.html. 12 See, for example, Garnette Cadogan, ‘Walking While Black,’ in Literary Hub, 2016. online: https://lithub.com/walking-while- black/. 13 I understand walking here in the way Michel de Certeau describes it as “an everyday practice.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 40
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