Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
…
15 pages
1 file
Sailing the Islands of São Paulo was an enquiry into São Paulo's fragmented urban space through an on-foot exploration. The project aimed at revealing unseen lines of fracture or tension in the continuity of the urban matter. The exploration took place in the context of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale in November 2013. The 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale proposed a reflection on the making and using of the contemporary city. Arquipélagos Urbanos invited all those interested to approach the city through the practice of walking as a tool to discover and reflect on urban transformations. Experiences such as the Transurbance practised by the Stalker collective in the marginal spaces of Italian cities show that when the urban space is confronted on foot, cities reveal themselves as uncharted and unpredictable territories. Within this uncharted territory, the practice of walking functions as a twofold method of direct exploration and place-making. The project focused on this very method as a way to deal with several questions regarding São Paulo today, such as bottom-up appropriation of public space, urban mobility, and the balance between planned and unplanned development. Methodology The project was designed in order to allow for the individual contributions to nurture interaction between the participants and provide multiple research perspectives to the subject matter. We used two forms of movement in space, which we called navigation and exploration. They both relied on walking understood as a form of investigation and not merely as a goal. The navigation mode consisted in walking as a group point-to-point. It happened mostly in silence to keep concentration and pace, and to allow for the use of individual observational skills. Once an island of urban matter had been reached, on the other hand, the group entered exploration mode. Some of these island stops had been designated in advance, some were recognised as the project unfolded. During exploration mode, the participants explored the area and collected documents according to the thematic cell they had been assigned to. In both modes the group behaved as a social structure, an ephemeral, yet coherent organism. We developed the project methodology preemptively, and we could count on the collaboration of Marie-Anne Lerjen, a Swiss researcher in urban walking, who provided important feedback and advice drawn from her multi-year experience in the subject.
2017
Urban walking has been subject of study in many different fields and there is an increasing interest on it in recent times. Despite this fact, research within this subject is sparse in the field of outdoor education. This study addresses contemporary practices of urban walking as a participative investigation of social environments and urban nature. Drawing in the concept of psychogeography and in a post-qualitative methodology, it aims to reflect on how outdoor experiences and walking in urban contexts can contribute to address issues of democracy and urbanisation, politics of space, urban nature and social memory. The research took place in São Paulo, Brazil, between March and June of 2016, with a group of 5 participants. We followed 6 underground rivers of the city using audio guides and the psycogeographical dérive. The walks resulted in two walking-based narratives and two interviews, in addition to narratives and photographs from participants, and a personal diary from the researcher. The findings address topics related to embodied perception of landscape, politics of space and the contribution of walking practices for an imaginative exercise about cityscapes. These findings may be useful for further research and practitioners who are interested in investigating walking practices in educational contexts.
Ángulo Recto Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural, 9.2, 2018
In an approach to the city that refuses to be confined to its merely physical features and includes an interdisciplinary perspective, it is crucial to find mechanisms to study its multiple dimensions and experiences. This paper proposes a reflection on the existing research in fields such as Architecture and Urbanism, discussing the importance of specific methodologies for the analysis of territory. This discussion builds on an example of research about the connections between a city and its waterfront, the case of Lisbon. Here, the main methodology is based on in situ observation and its subsequent systematization, finally configuring a graphic and visual approach to the study of public space. This methodology can be applied to other urban realities not only for the analysis of public space but also for its design.
Istanbul, a city ruled by various civilisations and governments, is quite important both historically, geographically and rich in culture. Cultural activities and spaces within which these activities took place, influenced the city's building stock, its landscape and organization. New buildings were constructed on top of the foundations of demolished ancestors. Traces of this foregoing layering, visible on the physical environment, has also spreaded to daily life, stories, imageries, culture, etc., while transforming them. These layers are not heterogeneous systems within which the latter covers the former completely in a chronological way; but, heterogenous formations consisting of various densities and dominancies. This process-based "becoming", explained with the notion of palimpsest, is one of the fundamental characteristics of the city of Istanbul. Walking act that can potentially foster dérive and détournement practices, depends on semiotics of the city as well as its physicality. The communication elements of the city and its contents such as color, typography and imagery, can be very decisive in terms of drifting (dérive) and twisting (détournement) intentions of city resident. In order for "transforming" cities by walking, residents have to be encouraged for making "discoveries". City planners and relevant units should take into consideration that open-endedness, flexibility, transformability, vagueness and openness to surprises can increase the awareness of the user about the environment, by ensuring the permanence of the reflexivity between the city and the pedestrian. The purpose of this paper, is to discuss the potentials which could make this awareness a useful tool for transforming the city.
"This paper addresses the theme of walking as a means of contesting and constructing narratives of place in the context of the Brazilian city. Walking the city has an established place in urban and cultural theory and constitutes a key approach to interrogating the spatial and ideological division of the city and the effect of this division on the categories of place and placemaking. From the critical dérives of the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau’s use of walking as a form of resistance in urban space, pedestrian actvity has been theorised as potentially transformative. As part of a major project documenting the role of walking in the context of the Brazilian city, we hope to use this paper to address how this body of theory can be applied to the idea of place in a range of Brazil’s urban environments. We are particularly interested in the ways in which walking and placemaking interact, in the political potential of this relationship and in the visual forms created by the actions of the placemaking pedestrian. In a country where notions of progress have been closely bound up with modernist urban planning, with its hostility to the street and totemic celebration of the car, the potential of walking as a form of resistance is quite clear. We will investigate a number of urban contexts. Brasília, with its downtown superhighways and vast open spaces hostile to the pedestrian, offers itself as a theatre for the exploration of walking as a form of resistance in urban space and as a site in which alternative narratives of place and placemaking can be constructed on foot. São Paulo stands as an example of a city where pedestrianisation and placemaking intersect. The arrival of the metro system and pedestrianisation of the old centre in the 1970s transformed the area as the poor gained easy access, hastening the flight of dominant socio-economic groups to Avenida Paulista, a neighbourhood perceived as safer and more car-friendly. We will investigate the visual and political effects of the new narratives of place that have arisen. In Curitiba the transformative potential of pedestrianisation has to some extent been realised by the actions of the former mayor Jaime Lerner who closed off areas of the centre to motorised traffic, thereby allowing citizens to explore and compose new constructs of place within the city. Walking the Brazilian city presents challenges to those accustomed to the norms of the European city space. Habitual practices of walking designated routes, to some extent familiar to citizens of divided cities such as Belfast, Sarajevo and Nicosia, are accentuated in the Brazilian context with its neighbourhood boundaries marked by economic inequality and racial difference. The hazards and trangressions connected to walking Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian metropolises will be explored. In all of these cases, we will examine the relationship between walking as a form of resistance and the alternative narratives of place arising from pedestrian activity. We will investigate the representation of these potentially transformative narratives of place, focusing on photography and the urban semiotics of the pedestrian placemaking."
Re-Imagining the City. Municipality and Urbanity Today from a Sociological Perspective, 2017
My intention here is to explore the potential of walking as a research method which appears to be particularly suited for approaching the lived experience of urban space. To develop this discussion, I reflect on the supposed benefits of using walking as a data-generating technique when attempting to investigate urban space as it manifests itself in the practical course of everyday life of city dwellers. Having critically examined the assumptions about the usefulness of walking, I uncover two methodological blind spots which proponents of the walk-along method have failed to successfully engage with. I argue that the walk-along method’s capacity to access spatially contextualized lived experience of urban environment remains, thus far, an unfulfilled promise, and examine the possibility of supplementing it with techniques utilized in the emerging field of reflexive methodologies, as well as qualitative GIS approaches in order to ensure that this promise is kept.
Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2016
I am a walker. I like to be in motion and feel the play between place and space, a sense of fluid identity, and the shifts in temporality that hold me close and set me free. I am accountable to my steps' duration as the time created unfolds. Rhythms pulse and change speed through repeated stepping—the stepping of living in an urban environment without a car as has been my adult predicament. I am also a dancer, and I consider walking an extension of my dance practice. Whether in New York or San Francisco, London or Tokyo, the city presents structural limitations that invoke a multitude of small choices, redirections, manipulations , modulations, and at times a sense of liberation. The overall environment through which my paths chart a unique map is a choreography not just through the city but a process by which both my body and that of the city provisionally take form. The materiality of the physical body and the city's architecture work together to contain, make sense of, and think beyond what is initially apparent. If there is an ideology (beyond the obvious politics of not owning a car) that dictates this dancer's goals, expectations, and actions in walking, it is that concrete meanings held in certain experiences start to loosen as thoughts flow and are then directed and re-embodied. This is the process of a dancer's “choreographic thinking.” Walking, from this perspective, is a way to move thoughts out of representation and into action.
2019
On the one hand, for decades there has been a growing interest in urban walking as an authentic physical, creative or subversive spatial experience. On the other hand, cities as well as different walking practices are more and more staged, are part of mediatized, as well as market-oriented city scenarios or artistic image productions. Thus urban strolling appears increasingly to be a theatre- or film-like experience. The text discusses the ambivalence and complexity of today's walking practices and re-evaluates their meaning ranging from resistance to consumerism, referring to the historical concept of the flâneur as well as to the current phenomenon of a post-heroic urban stroller. Examples from film, fine arts and literature from recent decades, illustrating paradoxical walking concepts, are used for analysis; a special focus is placed on Bertrand Bonello's film Nocturama, Albrecht Selge's novel Wach and Valérie Jouve's photo series Les Passants and Les Personnages.
SPECIFICS: Discussing Landscape Architecture, 2014
European Journal of Physical Education and Sport, 2016
Journal of Urban Technology and Sustainability
Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, 2014
The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 1997
The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, 2021
Acta Theologica
TURAN-SAM Uluslararası Bilimsel Hakemli Dergisi, 2022
Moral Psychology, 2007
International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 2009
Biodiversitas Journal of Biological Diversity
The Lancet Neurology, 2018
Journal of Crystal Growth, 2017
Pakistan Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 2021
International Journal of Std & Aids, 2020
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016