3 WALKING AS PRACTICE
T: Walking complements the understanding of my own practice. 16 Old ways of walking, once dormant to most and now reactivated, can be tools to practice with the landscape. I’ve become more invested in the idea of the ‘professional walker’. What even is a professional walker? Without bodily constraints, everyone walks. Yes, a physiotherapist can be, in ways, considered a professional on walking, but not a professional walker. Yet, professional walkers did exist in the past. Usually also troubadours, they walked from town to town, telling stories and spreading news. In some cultures they were, and still are, nomadic travellers on foot, storytellers and network creators. 17 Walking the same routes, over and again, is almost like tracing lines on a paper that follow each other but never completely overlap. As we weave through the neighbourhood, we become knowledgeable, and internalise minute details about positions, changes, temporalities, without the need of a teacher, or a cartesian map, physical or digital. Walking as iteration means that every day we learn, synthesise and forget something new, and it is in that sense that I think of eventually new professional walkers. Walking like this creates a map of oscillating lines, a map of vibrations, that I imagine as rhizomes of brain cells .18 I argue that this type of map is very different from the cartesian logic of knowing a territory. It is a map made of walking, like Guy Debord’s Discours sur les Passions de L’amour of 1957 or Richard Long’s 1984 A Seven Day Circle of Ground . When I imagine the map that we have been walking daily in Providence’s East Side, I begin to animate our constant weaving – one more block, one more street, one more park. Both Lisbon and Edinburgh are topographical cities, and so is Providence. 19 We live on Mount Hope’s hill crest, a threshold between the wealthier neighbourhoods to the east and the traditionally African American community on Mount Hope to the west. Walking westwards is a steep slope exposed to the prevailing southwest winds and cut by strip malls and the noisy I95 highway. Walking eastwards is a gentle slope to the Blackstone River, along which there is a long and heavily used boulevard. 20 Going downhill to this side one feels a microclimatic protection creeping up our bodies: warmer in the cold winter for it is wind shielded, and cooler in the hot summer afternoons for it is facing east. More humid in general as we walk down the valley and synchronised to micro-seasonal surface drainage, blooming and then blossoming, tender light and shade. When we began walking everything was a surprise, but as months went by, we became professional walkers of this neighbourhood, or so I like to think. Our bodies turned into fine- tuned moving weather stations with thermometers, anemometers, and hygrometers. We don’t usually use our bodies as such, but we can. Fieldwork professionals, hikers, sailors, the military do it, and so can we. I always assumed I was a landscape architect without such wonderful capacities, undoubtedly useful in landscape surveys, but I do have them by walking. My topographical and geographical knowledge of this neighbourhood is rather deep, without ever having studied any of the maps where that information lies. And this, I would argue, is as valid a form of practicing.
16 Practicing here is not necessarily regarded as proposition, but more as ways of knowing, an ethics and an aesthetics of contemplation. 17 In Europe these walkers were also pilgrims in times where most villagers did not leave town. In Africa, for example, they still exist. The Tuaregs are a culture of desert travellers who come to the city gates with their products and stories. They travel mostly on camel, but the logic is the same.
18 This reminds me of Eric Fischer’s Geotaggers’ World Atlas , a data visualisation project through which he creates city maps with the help of geodata from digital photos we take with our phones, and then drawing lines between different photo locations. Eric Fischer. Geotaggers’ World Atlas , 2015. online: https://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/05/14/ eric-fischers-marvelous-maps/. 19 The perception one gets in topographical cities is obviously very different from flat cities. I lived in Berlin, a plateau city, and I was constantly lost. After a year I still carried a small map with me. And going on top of a former bunker after a few months of getting lost, both spatially and in translation, was revelatory. (And the only reason I don’t get lost in New York is the grid.) Providence’s hills are not as pronounced as in Lisbon or dramatic as in Edinburgh, but they organize the city: universities on College Hill, residential on Mount Hope, the State on Smith Hill, the huge Italian American communities traditionally on Federal Hill, now also a busy hub. 20 Blackstone Boulevard reminds me of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century public spaces built for one to see and be seen. These were spaces of social encounter with rigid rules of behaviour. Blackstone Boulevard is in many ways similar to Lisbon’s Campo Grande, both from the late nineteenth century.
F: I think that knowing by walking is a fascinating exercise. Especially because it is not actively searched for, but it happens. You are confronted with the reality and therefore with new knowledge. Whether cities are planned or grow spontaneously, they end up captured as figure- ground plans. This representation is rather meaningless if one cannot know it experientially. It is via walking, this other possibility, that the city is understandable on a more profound level. You can then understand why a particular neighbourhood is situated precisely there. You need layers and layers of walking to reach that profound level of understanding. In Edinburgh for example, there are streets where there isn’t a single house or flat for sale, possibly because whoever lives on those streets understands that they have reached the perfect setting. In a windy and cold city, a protected and sunny street is highly prized. It becomes an impenetrable fort and we, as immigrants, will not have easy access to these places. We almost need three or four generations to secure these places for our families. These hierarchies of the city are only known when you walk them. During this period, both in Edinburgh and Lisbon, but especially in the latter, I rediscovered a renewed attention to vegetation. The capacity to know that, say, in the fourth week of February the magnolia in my neighbour’s garden will blossom. The capacity to steal with the eyes someone else’s tree. In Lisbon I became acquainted with Monsanto’s green corridor, an ecological fringe that took forty years to fully protect thanks to the work of the recently late Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles. 21 New vegetation was established and planted recently along this corridor, precisely at a time when the summers in Portugal are becoming increasingly torrid, a situation that has led to a fire management crisis. As a landscape architect, the observation of
21 The protection of this place has meant a decade-long ideological struggle where success was eventually achieved, even if not in full, since the corridor has several extractions and cuts. It was a fierce struggle between an ecological thinking and a corporate one; fierce not in the sense of being violent but persistent. Ribeiro Telles was a well-humoured but resilient man and that is at the base of the protection of this place.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 42
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