Walking Tour Research Articles

Dancing in the archive: Bodily encounters, memory, and more‐than‐representational participatory historical geographies

AbstractThis paper explores the potential of participatory methods and practices to address the methodological difficulties surrounding the historical geographies of dance, and moving bodies, within archival research. Dance has long challenged traditional notions of the ‘archive’. While non‐representational cultural geographers have privileged dance's ability to generate affect and embodied expression, historical geographers have predominantly struggled to engage with moving bodies through traditionally ‘disembodied’ archives. Ephemeral and embodied, dance escapes conventional historical documentation; this methodological challenge demands a more creative, participatory, and more‐than‐representational approach to historical geography and its privileging of the ‘archive’. Focusing on tap dance and its circum‐Atlantic performance, this paper will explore how bodily encounters with and within the archive can lead to new research questions, through contemporary embodied participation in creative practices. By combining participatory approaches with more‐than‐representational historical geographies, it is possible to reconcile the history and politics of dancing bodies with corporeal and affective dimensions of the past. This dual approach demands working with creative communities as a researcher, in the past and the present, to draw out previously marginalised voices. This paper discusses three specific methods: oral histories and records of lived experiences; approaching the ‘body’ as an archive; and fostering public historical geographies, including walking tours, memorials, and festival participation. The paper finally considers how these participatory approaches work to build memory, community, and place‐making through shared heritage.

The impact of biomechanical factors on tourist satisfaction and comfort in walking tourism: A study of Beijing’s walking tours

Walking tourism combines physical activity with cultural and environmental exploration, making it a growing sector of the tourism industry. This study investigates the effects of key biomechanical factors—fatigue and energy expenditure—on tourist experiences, specifically focusing on satisfaction and comfort during walking tours in Beijing. Using a structured questionnaire administered to 175 participants across various walking tour sites—including the Great Wall, Hutongs, and the Summer Palace—we collected data on perceived fatigue, energy expenditure, satisfaction, and comfort. Statistical analyses, including regression models and correlation tests conducted using SPSS, revealed that increased fatigue significantly reduces tourist satisfaction, while higher energy expenditure decreases comfort levels. These findings highlight the importance of managing physical demands in walking tours by incorporating rest periods and considering tourists’ fitness levels. The study contributes to the literature by linking biomechanical factors to tourist experiences and offers practical recommendations for tour operators to enhance the appeal and competitiveness of walking tours, ultimately leading to improved tourist satisfaction.

EXPLORING BANDUNG CITY ON FOOT: WHAT MOTIVATES TOURISTS TO JOIN WALKING TOURS?

Walking is a practical and popular tourist activity, but it remains underexplored in the field of tourism. Although extensive literature has been published on topics related to walking and walkability driven by public health, sustainability, livability, and urban design concerns, tourism sector requires deeper exploration, particularly in urban settings. Walking tourism has been observed to possess the capability to promote sustainable tourism. Therefore, this study aims to examine the influence of motivation on the decision of tourists to engage in walking tour in urban tourism areas of Bandung City, Indonesia. Data from 220 tourists and interviews with resource persons were subsequently analysed using multiple linear regression to assess the impact of push and pull factors on walking tourism decisions. The results showed that tourist motivation significantly influences walking tourism decisions. The motivating factors include physical health, pleasure and satisfaction, knowledge gained, and local community behaviour. Physical health and relaxation were considered crucial push factors, while tourists’ attractions and social media promotions were categorized as significant pull factors. This study provides valuable input for local governments and tourism agencies seeking to develop sustainable urban tourism destinations.

A study on landscape feature and emotional perception evaluation of waterfront greenway

Waterfront greenway is important spatial carriers for urban residents to engage in walking tours and fitness activities. Improving the quality of its walking spaces can have a positive impact on the mental well-being of pedestrians. This enhancement is a crucial aspect of building healthy cities. This study focused on urban waterfront greenway landscapes. Field surveys combined with questionnaire scales were used to assess pedestrians’ emotional perceptions, while concurrently collecting image data of waterfront greenway walking spaces. Semantic segmentation was employed to identify elements, and landscape metrics were calculated using relevant formulas. Correlation analysis was used to investigate the relationship between landscape metric features and emotional perceptions. And established a multiple regression model of pedestrian spatial perception on waterfront greenways to investigate the influence mechanisms of emotional perception and landscape metrics. The study indicates that greenness, proportion of water area, and vegetation diversity positively impact emotional perception of waterfront leisure greenway walking spaces, whereas path width negatively affects emotional perception. Specifically, the magnitude of influence is ranked as follows: greenness (0.491), proportion of water area (0.356), proportion of trails (−0.272), and vegetation diversity (0.130). The design guidelines for urban waterfront greenway spaces were proposed, guided by quantitative studies on landscape elements of waterfront greenway spaces and based on the measurement features of these elements. Moreover, the environmental experience of the waterfront green walking spaces was further enhanced, satisfying the public’s visual perception and psychological needs. The contribution of this study is to lay the foundation for the development of spatial control items for urban waterfront greenway.

Digital Walking Tours as a Tool for Assessing Place Attachment and Community Responses to Regional Environmental Change

Digital Walking Tours as a Tool for Assessing Place Attachment and Community Responses to Regional Environmental Change

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.

Keats and The Stranger at Inveraray

On Friday 17 July 1818, Keats and Charles Armitage Brown arrived at Inveraray in Scotland, midway through their Scottish walking tour. Here Keats, a passionate theatre-goer, saw for the first time Augustus von Kotzebue’s play The Stranger at a makeshift playhouse inside a barn. Although Keats dedicated a long letter and a poem to this experience the precise location of the barn has never been located, nor has there been discussion of how this performance of The Stranger contributed to Keats’s theatrical experience. In this article I show that the barn-theatre at Inveraray still survives, and suggest how the Stranger performance at Inveraray, heavily ridden with Scottish inflections not present in the playscript, left an impression on Keats. I also point to traces of The Stranger found in later poems such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.

Inspirational Story of Agriculture at Living with The Land Attraction at EPCOT

Since its debut in 1982, The Land has embodied Walt Disney’s vision, capturing the attention of millions of EPCOT guests with venues focusing on agriculture and environmental stewardship and sustainability. The Land pavilion spans over eight acres in the World Nature section of EPCOT at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. The pavilion houses three attractions, namely Soarin’ Around the World, Awesome Planet, and the Living with The Land boat ride, complemented by a greenhouse walking tour entitled Behind the Seeds and two restaurants. Each attraction derives inspiration from nature and challenges mankind to be responsible stewards of planet earth. This feature article focuses on the Living with The Land boat ride attraction, which traverses greenhouses showcasing agricultural technologies and crops from around the world. The sections below describe both how various show elements are designed to engage guests and how the show is made possible by applying relevant science and technology.

Foraging as an Aesthetic Response to Hunger

This article analyses the aesthetic dimensions of foraging through a botanical walking tour alongside Kaniatarowanenneh, “the big waterway,” otherwise known as the St. Lawrence River, at Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. There are rules involved in foraging, and performative dimensions to its enactment that lead to a particular orientation toward place. A certain choreography is involved in foraging. In the waterfront walk, Balade Nature, which I describe, participants are guided through a tour of edible and medicinal plants. They can be found crouching, stooping, leaning, observing, listening, comparing, moving back and forth, even lighting the scene — as with cell phones — for a better view, discussing and exchanging information, looking down, treading carefully, digging with bare fingers, picking, and more. These acts attune participants to place. The hunger that catalyses foraging contains within it deep interest in other species, and demands attunement to place. This aesthetic sometimes also involves an orientation toward food justice.

Seeing mathematics together: A comparative case study of youths and facilitators collaborating to learn mathematics in informal settings

BackgroundThis comparative case study examined the use of math walks with middle grade youths and adult facilitators in an informal STEM learning space. Math walks are place-based walking tours where youths and facilitators critically examine and ask math-related questions about their environment. MethodDrawing on situated theories of learning and frameworks for understanding group participation, we examined how facilitators constrained or supported youths’ mathematical thinking as they participated in math walks at the local zoo. ResultsUsing interaction and stance analysis, we identified, analyzed, and compared three contrasting cases: In the first case, the facilitator may have overly constrained youths’ mathematical thinking by asking leading questions and not providing time for youths to discuss their personal interests. In the second case, the facilitator may have underly constrained youths’ mathematical thinking by allowing youths to ask too many new questions without refining or developing any one specific question. In the third case, the facilitator supported mathematical thinking by praising youths’ work, layering on mathematical terminology, and providing clear and actionable instructions for how youths could refine their mathematical questions. ConclusionsFindings support efforts to understand how adult facilitators can support youths in seeing mathematics within and asking mathematical questions about the world around them.

Black Thursday: A Historical Walking Tour

Earlier this semester, multiple campus organizations collaborated to direct a historical walking tour exploring the events of Black Thursday.

Walking tours as transcultural memory activism: Referencing memories of trauma and migration to redefine urban belonging

This article maps two grids of city walking tours, conceptualizing them as expressions of transcultural memory activism. The first are walking tours in Berlin, guided by Syrian refugees, which use memorials of local traumatic history to testify to the refugees’ current traumas. The second are walking tours in an impoverished neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv, that inter-weave African asylum seekers’ travelling memories as part of the story of those streets. Analysing these tours, the article probes how references to histories of urban migration and traumatic legacies might inform contemporary political projects asserting the rights of refugees, and redefine the parameters of urban belonging. It therefore proposes a dual theoretical contribution: (1) advancing the transcultural turn in memory studies by paying greater attention to the materiality and performativity of transcultural memory and (2) enhancing research on the agency of refugees by demonstrating how they affect and expand the public memory of the contested national and urban contexts in which they travel or inhabit.

The Urban Walking Tour as an Experience-based Methodology for Built Environment Education in Budapest

Built Environment Education (BEE) plays an important role in urban sustainability as citizens who are more aware of the surrounding architectural heritage have better opportunities to develop a sense of place and place attachment. Themes and stories make the architectural fabric of a city more legible that is why urban walking tours are such a popular format for BEE initiatives. These experience-based educative events are originally constructed for visitors (mainly tourists) of a city to receive in-situ impressions of the built heritage during their visit. But in recent years, the new phenomenon of proximity tourism appeared, inviting locals to participate in walking tours to discover their own neighbourhood, rendering this tourist-focused activity into a BEE tool for adults.Urban walks have been used in architectural education at the university level for quite some time, and recently organisations focusing on BEE have adapted the format as well, which therefore can reach a wide range of audiences. This research presents the quantitative and geo-referenced analysis of 449 photos taken during the walking tours by participants and a qualitative content analysis of the photos. The results of a questionnaire completed by 119 students upon the end of their walking tour are presented and analysed to determine the effectiveness of this BEE methodology. Results show that the experience-based format of urban walking tours in the context of BEE can contribute to the forming of sense of place for participants, and therefore should be considered as an educational tool.

Using QR-Code Technology in Medical Education to Foster Health Equity: A Walking Tour About Combating Racism in Medicine

Using QR-Code Technology in Medical Education to Foster Health Equity: A Walking Tour About Combating Racism in Medicine

Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem

Abstract From 2014 to 2017 I guided half a dozen public walks in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods. The walks were conducted during the research and production of the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here, which digitally reinscribes Palestinians into the neighborhoods from which they were expelled by the 1948 war, or the nakba. The walks were performative and participatory and joined a long tradition of walking as art. They offered an alternative to mainstream Israeli guided tours that manufacture linear and simplistic narratives about the politically contested space of Jerusalem. This article examines the guided walks within critical discourse about the place of art, and specifically the art of walking, as a political practice that unsettles colonial frameworks, or as decolonial gestures. I examine the ways in which the physical walks—primarily for Israeli participants—intervened in a nationalist paradigm and offered Israelis a (rare) emotional and ideological space from which to consider the communities whose dispossession enables Israel to exist. I review the strategies I used to disrupt Israeli denial and encourage accountability within relevant theoretical paradigms, using anecdotes and my own records for analysis. No qualitative data were collected during or after the walking tours. My conclusion is that walking tours can effectively “unsettle” nationalist narratives, encourage settler reckoning, and enable a different kind of seeing or restorying, one of the preconditions for decolonization.

Eighteenth century travel writing as proto-ecocritical literary efforts: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an ecocritical travel writing example

Today, ecocritical theory challenges the logic which damages and exploits nature in the sake of technological developments, and which draws human beings to a more mechanised and alienated life. However, when ecocriticism had not arrived at the scene of literary history, there had been some poets who tried to do what today’s ecocritical theory did through their accounts of travels in nature that they transfused into their poetry, by expressing their desires to become one with nature again, thus, moving away from the anthropocentric point of view which ecocriticism aims to undermine today. One of these poets was the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who lived between 1770 and 1850, and dealt with human-nature relationship in his poetry with a proto-eco-centric point of view as early as the eighteenth century. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate his poem titled “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, which was written during a walking tour in nature that he had attended with his sister, with an ecocritical perspective so as to demonstrate the fact that Wordsworth realised what today’s ecocritical theory tries to do more than two centuries earlier, which makes it possible to classify him as a proto-ecocritical poet.

Cracking the Nut in Iraq

In May 2023 I listened to two of Britain’s most prominent political commentators, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, interviewing a former high-ranking government official, Jonathan Powell, for their Leading podcast—a spinoff from their highly successful podcast The Rest Is Politics. After thirty minutes, the subject of Iraq came up. All three had been closely involved in the 2003 invasion: Powell as chief of staff to then prime minister Tony Blair, and Campbell as Blair’s director of communications and strategy. Both had been in the thick of policy- and decision-making at the highest level of government as Britain prepared for war. Stewart’s experience had been utterly different; having completed a walking tour of north-central Afghanistan in 2002, he had served as deputy governor of two provinces in the marsh regions of southern raq, confronting the occupation’s consequences and the ground truth of security, reconstruction, and peacebuilding in a country hollowed out by oppression, conflict, and now occupation.

걷기여행자의 편익이 행복에 미치는 영향 분석

Globally, the number of individuals participating in walking tours is continuously growing. However, besides some quantifiable outcomes or characteristics, little is known about the ultimate benefits or goals that tourists seek through walking tours. Particularly, a comprehensive study is needed to explore the ultimate benefits pursued by walking tourists (e.g., enhancing the quality of life) and a deeper understanding of how their happiness is achieved. This study aims to examine the relationship between the benefits of walking tourism and happiness, as well as the mediating role of involvement and satisfaction in the relationship. The data for this study were collected from the “Walking Tourism Status Survey Report” (Korea Tourism Organization, 2019) which surveyed 1,040 individuals who had experienced walking tourism in the previous year. The survey participants evaluated the benefits, involvement, satisfaction, and happiness associated with their walking tourism experience. The results indicate that health, social, and self-discovery benefits from walking tourism have both direct and indirect effects on walking tourists' involvement and satisfaction. Moreover, involvement and satisfaction partially mediate the relationship between walking tourists' benefits and happiness. Importantly, the impacts of involvement, satisfaction, and happiness vary depending on the benefits sought by walking tourists. Notably, self-discovery benefits lead to walking tourists' satisfaction and happiness only when involvement is present. This study is significant in the following aspects. It analyzes the benefits of walking tourism by using multidimensional measures that define and capture each benefit. This study also reveals pathways to satisfaction and happiness specific to the walking tourism benefits. It elucidates the relationship between walking tourism benefits and happiness, highlighting how the impacts on happiness vary based on the different benefits pursued by walking tourists. Finally, this study sheds new light on the role of involvement in the aforementioned process.

Personality-related characteristics of artists creating Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos and their role in evoking ASMR sensation in others

Research regarding the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a pleasant tingling experience especially perceived on the skin of the scalp and neck and elicited by certain audiovisual stimuli, has so far focused on the consumers of ASMR content. In this study, the perspective was switched to the ASMR artists, focusing on their personality and ability to trigger ASMR in other people. N = 132 predominantly student participants watched 19 ASMR videos from different ASMR YouTubers (who interacted with the same stimulus) with a varying number of subscribers. The evoked ASMR sensation and the perceived personality of the ASMR artists was assessed. Moreover, n = 152 ASMR YouTubers and n = 138 Walking Tour YouTubers completed several personality and mental health questionnaires, which were also filled out by the 132 predominantly student participants. While the ASMR YouTuber's number of subscribers does not seem to play a role in triggering ASMR in others, the perception of the ASMR YouTuber as sympathetic, relaxed, close, empathic and agreeable is correlated with ASMR sensation. With regard to their personality, ASMR YouTubers consistently differ to some extent from other (Walking Tour) YouTubers (openness to experience, empathy) and a predominantly student sample (openness to experience). The notion that certain perceived personality traits of ASMR YouTubers might have an influence on the viewer's ASMR sensation adds to the knowledge of which factors are important in triggering ASMR in other people.

Traveling to the Danger Zone: Emotional Dynamics and Hermeneutics

Although emotions have garnered scholarly attention in tourism, an opportunity remains to examine the interplay between different emotions and their implications on tourism outcomes. This multi-method research was carried out in Venezuela and assesses the physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal of emotions. A guided walking tour through Venezuela’s high-risk zones resulted in varied degrees of emotional stimulation among participants. Their responses were associated with individual differences, such as travel history and personal/professional interests. The appraisal process showed that people who visit conflict-ridden destinations develop cognitively and emotionally. These findings underscore the significance of non-hedonic trips in emotional processes and illustrate how tourism can foster beneficial outcomes. Travel can especially shape tourists’ attitudes towards residents, conflict, and themselves. This research also broadens the literature on risk taking and danger zone tourism.