In praise of urban walking: Towards understanding of walking as a subversive bodily practice in neoliberal space

Abstract

Focusing on the steps that literally and metaphorically guide us today, this paper takes walking as its main subject and establishes it theoretically as a form of subversive bodily movement. If contemporary sociological and humanistic treatments of walking show that this everyday practice has not been completely overlooked, the gap opens at the level of thinking it in relation to the dominant social order and its spatial and temporal manifestations. As we argue, in the hegemonic neoliberal context, walking has the potential to manifest itself as a practice that breaks with the existing logic of both space and time. Through the methodological application of the cat’s cradle game, we develop a theoretical argumentation to ground walking as a bodily practice that requires different space and different time. Emanating from the body, it opens to the space and time of enjoyment – a heterotopia erected in relation to the current neoliberal hegemony, but in the manner of a crack, a path that carries the projection of a possible alternative.