Strata-Walks is an experimental, interdisciplinary series of walking practices and participatory cartographic events that reimagines how we perceive, navigate, and make meaning of places. Developed by the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit — a collective of artists, writers, and educators — the series uses the metaphor of stratigraphy to explore the complex layers that form a landscape: physical, social, historical, sensory, emotional, political, and speculative.

At its core, Strata-Walks invites participants to slow down, pay attention, and map the many unseen or overlooked “strata” of a site — whether urban streets, campus blocks, or cultural corridors — through guided prompts that encourage noticing everything from architectural histories to smell and soundscapes, non-human life, personal narratives, and imagined futures. These walks can be solo or collective, adapted to different mobility practices, and aim to turn simple perambulation into an act of making knowledge about place.

The creative outcome isn’t an object but an event: a set of relational experiences, participatory maps, and layered narratives that reveal intricate ties between bodies and environments. Strata-Walks functions as public pedagogy and relational art, dissolving boundaries between walking, sensing, thinking, and mapping in diverse contexts.

HPU Strata-Walks with Brock University Sculpture Students — Walk #3This walk was part of a sequence of directed strata mapping exercises led with sculpture students from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Participants were asked to seek out objects and phenomena along the route that could be conceived as sculpture — things that might be exhibited or thought of as artistic forms — and to photograph and reflect on them as part of their engagement with the place. This task reframed ordinary urban features (signage, surfaces, textures) as potential artworks, prompting deeper attention to how sites accumulate meanings and forms.

HPU Strata-Walks Memphis (Windows & Doors)In this iteration of a Memphis strata walk, the focus was trained on windows and doors as urban strata — key architectural features that both frame views and mediate entry and exit. By attending to patterns, repetitions, and the materiality of these elements, the walk explored how thresholds in the built environment reveal histories of use, transition, access, exclusion, and change. The visual rhythms of openings also became a way to think about gentrification, circulation, and social narratives embedded in the city’s façades.

HPU Strata-Walks Memphis (Signs & Signs)Another Memphis walk centered on signs — both commercial and civic — as rich strata of text and symbol in urban life. Participants observed and documented the various signs encountered (advertising, wayfinding, graffiti, institutional markings), considering how they communicate systems of meaning, authority, belonging, and identity in Midtown Memphis. Through these strata, walkers tuned into the layers of messaging that shape everyday experience and the politics of place.

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As found on the Walkinglab website.