Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space

Abstract

As an inescapable part of our everyday lifeworld, walking is an embodied practice with specific lived qualities. It is also a mode of experiencing place and the city, and in this context is an aesthetic and insightful spatial practice. Through everyday walking we develop a sense of (and for) place. The everyday practices of walking vary in their purpose, pace and rhythm, and nurture more or less creative and more or less critical relationships to urban space. Walkscapes are rhythmic. Walking practices are constitutive of ‘place-ballets’, as defined by David Seamon, choreographed wholes of multiple place rhythms. As such, they impact on the rhythmical continuums of urban places, influencing and suggesting their tempo. Through a review of the literature and illustrated by fieldwork, this paper takes a phenomenological stance on walking. It starts by unravelling aspects and attributes of its character and continues by focusing on the experience of walking in the city and its relationship to sense of place. It explores walking both as purposeful activity and as creative and critical spatial practice. It distinguishes between three modes of walking: the purposive, the discursive and the conceptual. All three are inherent temporal practices of place. Finally, the paper introduces walking as a temporal and rhythmical practice, part of a wider group of place-rhythms that characterize urban places. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for the urban design discipline. It explores walking as a temporal practice to be designed for, one that may induce creative and spatially critical responses to urban places, and one that needs closer attention when design is concerned with placemaking.