City Walks Research Articles

Her City Weimar

The global Her City initiative provides a framework for gender-sensitive urban planning, which seeks to create inclusive and accessible public spaces that meet the needs of all residents, particularly women and girls, who have often been overlooked in traditional urban design. This paper presents the results of Germany's first Her City initiative in Weimar— a city rich in cultural heritage with a vibrant tourism sector that strongly influences its public spaces. It contributes to existing studies in this field by providing an innovative methodological analysis of Weimar’s public spaces through gender-sensitive, data-driven, and participatory processes, with the aim of identifying strategies for improvement. The Her City Toolbox was utilised and extended through a participatory citizen science approach with 18 young women and the collection of gender-sensitive data regarding public space usage. Data collected from two city walks, three workshops, open space assessments as well as measurements of people’s movements and stationary activities were triangulated to reveal five thematic fields that highlight how public spaces are failing to meet the needs of women and girls. These include (1) Facilities & Furnishing, (2) Representation & Appreciation, (3) Security & Social Control, (4) Mobility & Accessibility, and (5) Visibility & Appropriation. Collaborations with local stakeholders combined with communication platforms and media contributed significantly to the project’s impact. The paper concludes by emphasising the necessity of adopting a gender-sensitive, participatory, and data-driven approach to urban planning to address the diverse needs of all city dwellers.

Postcolonial city walks in Germany at the nexus of activism, education, and tourism

Abstract In various ways, postcolonial initiatives in Germany contribute to the formation of ‘national cultures of remembrance’ and to the debate about Europe’s responsibility for the negative effects of colonial expansion that can still be felt today. One approach, which the activist groups use in their educational and activist work, is that of the guided walking tour – a method that allows them to sensitize an interested audience to colonially contoured spaces in German cities. Interestingly, the postcolonial initiatives do not see themselves as providers of tourist services, even though they use the rather fundamental touristic form of the ‘city walk’. As this discrepancy in perception allows discussions about tourism in a more general, conceptual sense, this paper examines the tours at the nexus of activism, education, and tourism. Thereby, it asks what constitutes the walks and discusses their relation to urban tourism. To do so, the article first explains relevant concepts of tourism geographies and postcolonial studies and then connects them to insights gained from the qualitative and quantitative analysis of empirical data collected in a field phase in Germany in 2022.

How to assess the needs of vulnerable population groups towards heat-sensitive routing?

Heat poses a significant risk to human health, particularly for vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, older individuals, young children and people with pre-existing medical conditions. In view of this, we formulated a heat stress-avoidant routing approach in Heidelberg, Germany, to ensure mobility and support day-to-day activities in urban areas during heat events. Although the primary focus is on pedestrians, it is also applicable to cyclists. To obtain a nuanced understanding of the needs and demands of the wider population, especially vulnerable groups, and to address the challenge of reducing urban heat stress, we used an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. The needs of vulnerable groups, the public, and the city administration were identified through participatory methods and various tools, including interactive city walks. Solution approaches and adaptation measures to prevent heat stress were evaluated and integrated into the development of a heat-avoiding route service through a co-design process. The findings comprise the identification of perceived hotspots for heat (such as large public spaces in the city centre with low shading levels), the determination of commonly reported symptoms resulting from severe heat (e.g., fatigue or lack of concentration), and the assessment of heat adaptation measures that were rated positively, including remaining in the shade and delaying errands. Additionally, we analysed and distinguished between individual and community adaptation strategies. Overall, many respondents did not accurately perceive the risk of heat stress in hot weather, despite severe limitations. As a result, the heat-sensitive routing service (available in prototype form during publication) that has been created serves as a readily available and accessible source of assistance to combat the effects of heat stress in individuals' daily lives during periods of intense heat. The findings served as input for the calibration of heat stress-avoidant routing and supported the development of local heat protection plans without investing in large-scale adaptation of the built environment. It is crucial to involve the population, particularly vulnerable groups, in the development of the tool to ensure it meets their needs. This study employed a transdisciplinary multi-method approach, which considers practical framework conditions by involving the city administration.

Performing arts of embodied refusal amid anthropogenic climate change: the Salim Ali Biodiversity Park and Bird Sanctuary, Pune, India

Birds twitter, flap their wings or wade in the gurgling water of the Mula-Mutha river in a special place, named after Salim Ali, the world famous, award-winning ornithologist and ‘Birdman of India’ (1896–1987). Yet, bird habitat, migratory routes, species diversity and songs are affected by the slow violence of global warming and environmental pollution. Urban citizens or Punekars including artists, women, children and ornithologists refuse the brutality of this slow violence by enacting forms of activism that centre birdlife and affirm thriving more-than-human worlds. This co-authored piece focuses on the embodied performances of refusal at the Salim Ali Biodiversity Park and Bird Sanctuary, Pune, a rapidly growing city in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Activism takes the form of poetry, city walks, participatory mural art and other forms of resistance by the Save Salim Ali Sanctuary Action Group (SSASAG). Our co-authorship collective consists of an activist/ornithologist of the SSASAG, an internationally acclaimed mural artist, and an Australian geographer of Indian heritage who went on daily ‘nature walks’ while visiting family in Pune. We craft this piece as a continuation of our activist refusals of anthropogenic climate change and toxic environmental pollution, and to illuminate solidarity with the brilliance of human and more-than-human worlds in and beyond Pune.

Integrating refugee students into Ugandan higher education: Language, othering and everyday enactments of participation

This paper examines the everyday enactments of participation of refugee students in Ugandan higher education emerging from a research project (2020–2022). Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was used to determine how students responded to the dominant languages, further noting the acts of othering that occur throughout this process that impact this participation and inclusion. Data were collected from three public and four private universities beginning in 2020 and ending in 2021 through interviews with refugee students and administrative staff who worked routinely with these students. The findings reveal social spaces within universities that allow for participation that largely sit outside the formal curriculum. These include the networks of support for the refugees themselves, and their engagement with informal activity, such as city walks and galas. However, the catalyst that initiated interaction with these spaces emanated from their aspirations for the future and their sense of communicative capacity in relation to those aspirations. Recommendations include providing explicit communication to point them directly to events, spaces and opportunities that they can exploit to advance their integration process.

Urban walking as a practice of care: sensorial activism in Durban, South Africa

In this article, I explore how the sensory perception of urban environments translates into an activist practice of care. Based on a case study from my digital ethnography, I argue that activist artist and architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer’s performative “City Walks” are aimed at experimenting with, questioning and reframing perceptions of marginalised places in Durban. Re-interpreting and re-experiencing public attributions of meaning to locations through walking allows for a sensory re-appropriation of places labelled as poor and dangerous. Conceiving of sensing as an active process, I argue that sensorial ways of caring transcend boundaries of normativity, space and time in the city. I show how urban walking practices of care have the potential to partially realise future visions of spatial and social justice through sensory engagement with the city.

Narratives of Transnational Placemaking: Exploring Migrant Workers’ Hidden Histories through Memory-Guided City Walks: A Migrant Woman’s Narrative

Narratives of Transnational Placemaking: Exploring Migrant Workers’ Hidden Histories through Memory-Guided City Walks: A Migrant Woman’s Narrative

Everyday practice in the high density, volumetric Hong Kong: Ambiguity, intensity and life between interfaces

Increasing numbers of cities in densely populated urban areas are being transformed from vertical to volumetric. Elements such as skyscrapers, residential towers, elevated pedestrian bridges, and subways transform people’s vertical living into volumetric urban living. Drawing on calls for more research on everyday practice in the three-dimensional city, this study focuses on Mong Kok district in Hong Kong to examine everyday, volumetric urbanism in the densely populated urban context. The key focus is on the dynamic relationship between micro-scale spatial characteristics and people’s everyday actions. Using physical survey, observation, narrative city walks, test walks and questionnaire, this research investigates volumetric spatial formation and daily practices. The paper concludes that volumetric urban space is produced as interlaced stacks of interfaces, which are integrated within the three-dimensional urban fabric. There is ambiguity between space for circulation and for staying. Volumetric urban life is inherently associated with intensity of people’s varied everyday practices rather than verticality, which points to the “life between interfaces” as a critical dimension of volumetric urban living. The volumetric-ness accommodates and sustains vibrant high-density cities.

The Closer You Look, the Stranger it Gets’: Perm in Ivan Kozlov’s Literary Journalistic Walks

This article belongs to the field of Urban Literary Studies. It examines the cycle of city walks by Ivan Kozlov, a poet and journalist from Perm, which has been published since 2016 in online magazine Zvezda . Kozlov’s walks represent multimodal texts combining a photo report and a story. The verbal and visual narratives are closely intertwined, and photographs functionally act as equivalents to descriptions. Analysis of an extensive but comprehensive array of texts makes it possible to identify current trends in the literary and journalistic representation of the city theme in the 2010s. The subject of the analysis is a vision of or a look at the city realised in a cycle of walks. Relying on John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s interpretation of the gaze (vision) as a social and cultural construct, the author singles out cultural codes that determine both the selectivity of the look, and the order of interpretation of the seen in Kozlov’s walks. The associative fields which the author refers to during his walks are mainly connected with the motifs of the fantastic in popular culture and the visual aesthetics of urban exploration. The key semantic category of the vision of the city in I. Kozlov’s walks is defined in the article as the ‘strangeness’ of the city. Kozlov’s category of ‘strange’ is associated with the feeling of the ominous or uncanny, which emphasises the irrational aspects of urban space. The author’s poetic vision of the city reveals the actual complexity of urban space and its heterogeneity, which was described by such city theorists as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault. Using the conceptual apparatus of Lefebvre, the author argues that the city in Ivan Kozlov’s walks is revealed primarily in the aspect of space of representations, as a source of artistic inspiration, and spontaneous self-movement.

‚Places of Remembrance’: Spaces for Historical and Political Literacy. A Lesson Report

Purpose: The article shows the use of specific educational media in social studies in vocational schools to foster a differentiated historical and political literacy. Design/methodology/approach: Accordingly, the article examines a sequence of lessons taught by the author in a vocational classroom, fostering reflexive historical-political awareness of Germany’s post-war coping with the fascist constitution 1933-1945 and specifically of contemporary legal proceedings concerning the persecution and subsequent murder of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust. Findings: Teaching techniques comprise explorative learning through guided city walks, document analysis and expert visits, in-class-discussions, the and individual student-teacher-conversations and, particularly, contact with exhibits employed as educational media, originating from an art exhibition in public space covering various unsettling steps of exclusion against Jewish citizens before 1942. These materials turn out to bridge the gap from ignorance to learning by the acquisition of knowledge, demonstrating the use of artistic visual representations as educational media in the social studies classroom, especially while addressing students with little prior knowledge and understanding. Research limitations/implications: As a lesson report, the article draws on classroom observations. Practical implications: The approach presented includes various implications for classroom application.

Urban Childhoods and Subjectification: Perspectives and Practices of Children on their Way to School

The aim of the article is to reflect theoretically and empirically on the question of how growing up in a city and having an urban childhood is relevant for children's agency and identity. It argues that agency and identity are a product of social and discursive practices that children take part in (e.g. on their way to school and after school). Based on an ethnographic project on urban childhoods in a big city in Germany, the article outlines the framework of this study and describes some findings on the basis of interviews, city walks and observation protocols. The function of the empirical data and analysis is to give an impression of what comes into focus if we reconstruct the entangled (re)production of urban spaces, agency and identity.

A Pre-disciplinary Approach to Built Environments Education: Teaching Seattle on Foot

Educators increasingly pursue inter- and transdisciplinary pedagogies to facilitate a more holistic approach to the design, use, and interpretation of built environments. Through the presentation of one particular example of such efforts—an introductory, mixed qualitative methods, undergraduate course—this article explores three pedagogical principles central to its integrated approach: pre-disciplinarity, experiential and place-based learning, and instructional scaffolding. The course cultivates awareness of overlapping transdisciplinary themes of contemporary relevance beyond its immediate context, incorporating traditional lectures, curated city walks, small group discussion sessions, and a series of written reflections. Following a brief description of the class’s content and its successful implementation, the article demonstrates how such courses can yield meaningful experiences that promote critical engagement with the city and desirable lifelong learning for future design professionals and others.

Healthy ageing – creating of city walks by and for citizens

Abstract Due to demographic changes, effective preventive measures on local level should be developed. This paper presents a project for elderly people which aims at the promotion (1) of the identification with their housing area and (2) of their physical activity and (3) of the participation in local strategies for active ageing. The result of the project is a booklet which was done by participating inhabitants.

Smart utopia VS smart reality: Learning by experience from 10 smart city cases

20years after the appearance of literature evidence and the launch of the first, pioneering cases, the smart city domain remains ambiguous and generates an increasing argument with regard to its feasibility and potential. Indeed, today the smart city domain is being characterized by an emerging market that provides novel solutions for cyber-physical integration in the urban space; a competitive standardization arena that attempts to clarify the domain and homogenize these solutions; a growing network of city alliances, forums and market places that aim to bring together scientists, practitioners and city governments in an attempt to define a common urban future; and a promising international network of scholars that studies and evolves the domain. Nevertheless, a “common understanding” of what smart city is or could be missing and generates questions regarding whether a “smart utopia” - that is the outcome of the “wedding” of vendors and local governments - drives the above efforts and leaves out real community problems. The aim of this paper is to perform an analysis of 10 representative international city cases that claim to be smart. The analysis is based on a multi-method that combines literature evidence, official websites and reports, narrative city walks, and interviews with corresponding officials. The outcomes distinguish utopia from reality, introduce a pool of evidence that can justify whether a city can claim to be smart and depict a brief view of the future smart city.

Poznań i jego mieszkańcy XIX wieku w pamiętnikarskim dziele Przechadzki po mieście Marcelego Mottego

Artykuł prezentuje jedno z najważniejszych polskich dzieł pamiętnikarskich powstałych w XIX wieku – Przechadzki po mieście autorstwa Marcelego Mottego, zwanego „piewcą XIX-wiecznego Poznania” – w kontekście przedstawionego w nim obrazu miasta i jego mieszkańców. Autor w swych wspomnieniach na pierwszym miejscu postawił opowieść o ludziach, natomiast miasto, jego ulice i place jako teren kolejnych przechadzek są niejako kanwą narracji. Niezwykłe walory dzieła, takie jak komunikatywność, bogactwo języka, poczucie humoru, anegdota w przekazie, wraz z ogromem informacji na temat miasta i jego obywateli (wszystkich funkcjonujących w nim narodowości), w tym zwłaszcza warstw ziemiaństwa, inteligencji, mieszczaństwa sprawiają, że dzieło stanowi wyjątkowe źródło pamiętnikarskie, z którego głębi, ujawniającej się w każdorazowej lekturze, czerpią historycy, przewodnicy miejscy oraz wszyscy zainteresowani dziejami stolicy Wielkopolski XIX stulecia.

Remembering the Beatles' legacy in Hamburg's problematic tourism strategy

Since the late 1980s/early 1990s, Liverpool has been synonymous with Beatles-related tourism, investing in museums, city walks, and redeveloping the Mathew Street Cavern Quarter. Another, perhaps lesser known, site of Beatles' tourism that has slowly immerged in recent years is the Reeperbahn area of Hamburg, Germany. While a number of cities with a strong musical heritage have developed tourism and urban regeneration around their musical past, primary research and photographic evidence gathered in Hamburg reveals that Hamburg is a city of conflicting identities. The city's leaders want Hamburg to compete as a cultural and financial site of tourism and investment on a global scale. However, by examining the mytholization of ‘the Beatles’ Hamburg’ at the Beatlemania Museum, and the lack of investment in the surrounding infrastructure, research shows that this act of selective memory is driven by economic and ideological agendas in Hamburg's overall urban regeneration plans. Arguably, the multi-billion euro HafenCity project is to be the new vision and focus of Hamburg's regenerated image. This article does not argue for a ‘Disneyfication’ of Hamburg's Reeperbahn area, but attempts to highlight the missed opportunities for the city to support and cultivate its music heritage and struggling artisan/independent scene.

Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome Steven Mailloux (bio) An ancient traveler once remarked to his Athenian audience, “As I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, ‘To the Unknown God.’” Here St. Paul tells of walking through the city and being impressed by the religiosity of its citizens. They were so religious that they not only had altars erected to the whole pantheon of local and national deities; they even erected an altar to some god they might have overlooked. But instead of using this city-walk discovery to chastise the Athenians for their idolatry, Paul strategically exploits it as an opportunity to tell his hearers the Good News: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.” He states that he knows the name of their unknown god: He is the “God that made the world and all things therein. . . . [I]n him we live, and move, and have our being.” And now this God, the God, “commandeth all men every where to repent” and follow his risen Son, the embodied Logos.1 In this essay I discuss another site of city walks, of moving bodies through space, in order to explore the relation of rhetoric to narrative. More specifically, I describe walking rhetorics and narratives of embodied intensities as I travel back and forth between hermeneutic theory and interpretive practice, between generalizing about narrative rhetoric and doing readings of particular examples of such. Once again I am trying to illustrate something I call rhetorical hermeneutics: the use of rhetoric [End Page 125] to practice theory by doing history. In this case, I use some emplotted rhetoric to practice a bit of narrative theory (with Paul Ricoeur and Kenneth Burke) by doing mini-histories of embodied experiences of American travelers in Rome during the mid-nineteenth century.2 Following Ricoeur, I am thinking about narrative as the configuration of the temporal dimension of lived experience and experience as the temporality of living configured as narrative. Ricoeur writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (52). Narrative enables humans to grasp the nature of temporality, while narrative’s inseparable connection to temporality is what makes narrative meaningful.3 I want to illustrate concretely these somewhat abstract claims by using the records of American tourists in Rome to think about narrative rhetoric as embodied movement in space over time. I talk about literal bodies wandering through material circumstances as well as figurative bodies used imaginatively to move thought and feeling into new locations. In so doing, I am not attempting to replace Ricoeur’s hermeneutic focus on temporality but merely adding to it an emphasis on the spatial dimension of narrative. For many Americans visiting Rome in the nineteenth century, the city became an imaginative landscape for thoughtful feeling about art, religion, and politics. Often such rhetorical imaginings developed through the narrative placement of real and fictive bodies into Rome’s urban space and its historical time. For example, in his 1857 journal Herman Melville describes standing in the Coliseum and “repeopling” it with sculptures from the Vatican to bring stories of ancient gladiatorial spectacle to present life (111). He and other American visitors also repeopled the cityspace with specific historical persons (Caesar, Cicero, Paul) as a way of relating classical and Christian Rome to contemporary US culture. On February 26, 1857, Melville writes of walking from the Roman Coliseum to the Capitoline gallery. There he gazes at the statue of the Dying Gladiator and notes that it “shows . . . humanity existed [then] amid the barberousness of the Roman time, as it [does] now among Christian barberousness” (Journal 106). Almost exactly one year later, Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne was also greatly moved by this famous statue, though his response seems more aesthetic than ethico-cultural: “I was not in a very fit state to see it, for that most miserable sense of satiety—the mind’s repletion when too much rich or delicate food has been forced upon it—had got possession of me. . . . Still, I...

Overturning the Sudden End: New Interpretations of Catastrophe

Overturning the Sudden End: New Interpretations of Catastrophe

Disaster and Renewal: The Praxis of Shock in the Surrealist City Novel

Disaster and Renewal: The Praxis of Shock in the Surrealist City Novel

Archives as partners in identity-shaping processes through user involvement and dialogues - a Scandinavian point of view

The article outlines the experience of Scandinavian archives in applying a dialogue-based method in relation to users through Web 2.0 platforms and analogue meetings in a strategic combination. Interactivity, user involvement, and crowd sourcing are keywords in the process, which seen from an analogue perspective takes place in the archives building as workshops, discussion groups, classes, and city walks, and on Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and Twitter. The method supports democratic procedures in the planning of the city and the landscape through the use of archives. Emphasis has especially been made to reach young people through segmented platforms. The article also intends to discuss potential pitfalls of the work method, which could be an attack on professionalism and on context. It draws on cases from Aalborg City Archives (Denmark) which are put into the context of other Scandinavian examples.