WALK AROUND PHILADELPHIA: an invitation to discover the city by exploring its edges.

Walk Around Philadelphia is an opportunity for adventure and discovery close to home. It provides a physical challenge & sense of personal accomplishment. It cultivates civic pride & a humbling sense of scale. Along the way are opportunities to ponder themes of social & environmental justice, infrastructure & ecosystems, commerce & incarceration, indigenous history & colonization, privilege & access, and of course borders & boundaries.

Along the city’s edge, one finds highways & waterways, ruined factories decaying & new housing being developed, a historic mansion alongside prisons. There are shipyards, scrapyards, graveyards and farmyards. Amidst beautiful parks are piles of storage units, and so much more.

The oddly-shaped boundaries sometime follow the curves of waterways and other times arbitrary-seeming straight lines drawn by surveyors. In some places, there’s no visual difference between either side; in other areas the contrasts are stark.

The project holds space for authentic connection between individuals who might otherwise not cross paths. Rare in our world are opportunities to walk side-by-side for long, uninterrupted periods of time, and the experience of setting out walking together is in many ways an inclusive one: One participant noted “How easily the numbers ebbed and flowed with people joining for parts of the walk and how accepting and welcoming everyone was when you “landed” in the group.”

On the other hand, there are real barriers to participation ranging from accessibility issues to financial circumstances. These are the barriers that Walk Around Philadelphia has begun to address and will continue to as more resources become available.