A new website aims to offer a wide network of walking routes from British train stations, and is calling on hikers to add their favourites. Our writer accompanies the founder on a ramble to Bath Spa station Source: ‘You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train’: the man connecting rail-based walks |
A City Full of Stories: Anna Phillips on her work with Academy of St Martin int he Fields’ SoundWalk project Source: Planet Hugill: A City Full of Stories: Anna Phillips on her work with Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ SoundWalk
With its medieval Old Town and baroque monastery sitting alongside a modernist ensemble recently awarded World Heritage status, Kaunas is the perfect place to unravel the architectural paradoxes of the Baltic states. Source: How to plan an architectural walking tour of Kaunas, Lithuania’s capital of culture
Focusing his lens down below onto the streets to document the daily lives of street hawkers in Nigeria, Chukwudi Onwumere’s images explore the intersection between informal trade and public space
Source: Road Runners – Art Photography Awards 2022 Winner | | Interview by Gregory Eddi Jones | LensCulture
pedestrian acts
By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.
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