Walking Tour Research Articles

Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, Sites of Justice: Transforming the Relational Landscape of Yogyakarta

The collaborative “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project seeks to transform the relational landscape of Yogyakarta by enabling new intergenerational conversations about the 1965 politicide in Indonesia and further injustices with other marginalized communities. This community-engaged project developed walking tours of (largely unacknowledged) sites of historic violence: a colonial fort turned national museum, a derelict office building, a refurbished bank. Through these tours, sites of past suffering are activated by unheard survivor testimonies, making visible historical injustice and its contemporary and enduring significance. Unsettling the dominant spatial arrangement of Yogyakarta, the tours rewrite the city as a space where injustice and persecution are experienced. Crucially, the tour is also a relational encounter, facilitating intergenerational conversations that challenge social and political exclusionary norms. It, thereby, enables a form of relational justice, which requires active involvement from fellow citizens, not solely redress from the state.

The Mirror of the Dead: Thanatoptic Storytelling in an Italian Cemetery

SummaryAs the contemplation of death, thanatopsis attempts to come to terms with mortality; dark heritage and tourism have become the main conduits for this practice in the contemporary world. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Genoa’s Staglieno monumental cemetery between 2016 and 2019 to examine the events—poetic readings, guided walking tours, and outdoor theater performances—that have become popular against the backdrop of the local tourist industry and its economy of cultural experiences. I explore the strategies through which the evocative power of storytelling promotes the contemplation of mortality. Drawing on Heidegger (1962), I argue that the narrations shared during these events grant the dead a temporary Dasein: a “being there” that interrupts the silence of death, even though only for a moment. The poets, volunteers, and theater troupes active in Staglieno use their storytelling practices as a narrative mirror through which they merge the spaces of life with those of death, thus providing their audiences with the opportunity to reflect upon their common humanity and shared mortality.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

The use of 360-degree virtual tours to promote mountain walking tourism: stimulus–organism–response model

Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) theory, this study attempts to investigate how the use of 360-degree virtual mountain walking tours can motivate audiences’ intention to take a real walking in the mountains. The survey results from 320 samples after watching a 360-degree virtual video reveal the positive influence of vividness (stimulus) on presence, emotional involvement, flow state, and enjoyment (organism), leading to the intention to take mountain walking tourism (response). This study also examines the interrelationship between four organism variables to explain the underlying mechanism of 360-degree virtual travel experience in stimulating audiences’ visit intention. It shows how technology helps the development of nature-based tourism. It also offers implications for developers to develop influential 360-degree virtual tourism and destination marketers to promote mountain walking tourism.

Establishing joint attention with multimodal resources in lingua franca guided tours

This paper outlines the practices by which participants achieve joint attention through multimodal resources in lingua franca guided tours. A considerable number of conversation analytic studies have examined participants' embodied maneuvers for achieving mutual attention during tours (e.g., Christidou, 2018; De Stefani, 2010; Mondada, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2019). The current study advances this line of research by expanding the scope of analysis to lingua franca guided tours. The data come from lingua franca walking tours collected in four locations: Yokohama, Antwerp, Jeju, and Taipei. Analysis revealed that the speaker resorted to multiple embodied resources to solicit other attention whether mutual attention to a focal object was guide or visitor initiated. However, one crucial difference between guides and visitors was observed in the actions employed to verbally initiate these sequences. Whereas a guide-initiated sequence began with an announcement or report, a visitor-initiated sequence was launched with a question. Additionally, it was shown that, at least during achievement of joint attention, the tour being a “lingua franca” tour was not of such significant relevance as to cause difficulties for the participants even in the face of non-standard language use as they seamlessly achieved intersubjectivity through deployment of multi-layered embodied resources.

From the child's perspective: How the layout of outdoor school environments shapes conflict between children's self-directed play

Conflict between children's activities has been recognized as one of the main barriers to school recess play; however, the role of school design in shaping the conflict is not sufficiently known, particularly from children's perspectives. This study's primary objective is to investigate the topic in the context of primary school grounds with 8–10 year-old children to understand the nature of play activities that are not compatible and the role of school layout in shaping the conflict between them. By using behavior mapping, walking tours and focus groups in three Australian primary school playgrounds, this paper showed that to avoid conflict, children preferred play settings organized around distinct zones. Children identified the character of each zone by the affordances it contained, the governing school rules, and the activities it supported. They asked for multiple separate zones for gross motor activities, and for each social group to play with their own year and gender. They also required physical barriers and sufficient buffer space around play settings to prevent disruption. The discussion suggests interventions in school layouts that help avoid conflict between children's activities and ultimately enhance their engagement in self-directed play.

Using Design of Location-Based Augmented Reality Experiences to Engage Art-Oriented Girls in Technology and Science

Taking part in creating location-based augmented reality (LBAR) experiences that focus on communication, art and design could serve as an entry point for art-oriented girls and young women towards career pathways in computer science and information communication technology. This conceptual paper presents our theory-based approach and subsequent application, as well as lessons learned informed by team discussions and reflections. We built an LBAR program entitled AR Girls on four foundational principles: stealth science (embedding science in familiar appealing experiences), place-based education (situating learning in one’s own community), non-hierarchical design (collaborations where both adults and youth generate content), and learning through design (engaging in design, not just play). To translate these principles into practice, we centered the program around the theme of art by forming partnerships with small community art organizations and positioning LBAR as an art-based communication medium. We found that LBAR lends itself to an interdisciplinary approach that blends technology, art, science and communication. We believe our approach helped girls make connections to their existing interests and build soft skills such as leadership and interpersonal communication as they designed local environmentally-focused LBAR walking tours. Our “use-modify-create” approach provided first-hand experiences with the AR software early on, and thus supported the girls and their art educators in designing and showcasing their walking tours. Unfortunately, the four foundational principles introduced considerable complexity to AR Girls, which impacted recruitment and retention, and at times overwhelmed the art educators who co-led the program. To position AR Girls for long-term success, we simplified the program approach and implementation, including switching to a more user-friendly AR software; reducing logistical challenges of location-based design and play; narrowing the topic addressed by the girls design; and making the involvement of community partners optional. Overall, our initial work was instrumental in understanding how to translate theoretical considerations for learning in out-of-school settings into an LBAR program aimed at achieving multiple complementary outcomes for participating girls. Ultimately, we achieved better scalability by simplifying AR Girls both conceptually and practically. The lessons learned from AR Girls can inform others using LBAR for education and youth development programming.

Tipping for charity: a field experiment in charitable giving on free walking tours

The following field experiment analyzes the effect of payments in a setting of shared social responsibility where charitable giving is incorporated into a pay-what-you-want scheme as a share of the payment. The field experiment involved free walking tours. Within a timeframe of 10 weeks, tours operated as usual, while every second week a Donation Week was implemented. During Donation Week, 5% of the tips were donated to a charitable organization by the tour firm. Results reveal that tips are significantly higher in the Donation Week compared to the Baseline and that the rise in tips roughly outweighs the cost of the donation payment. Thus, while tour guides’ profits do not differ between treatments donations to charity may be generated additionally in Donation Week.

Social exclusion in a post-industrial city: towards a critical urban social work perspective

ABSTRACT Many cities around the world have been radically transformed by deindustrialisation, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While these processes have marked progress in various aspects of urban life, they have also generated inequality and social exclusion especially in already marginalised communities. The purpose of this article is threefold: to address community exclusion in a post-industrial city, to identify mechanisms and practices that propel it; and to move towards a preliminary conceptualisation of post-industrial urban marginalisation for social work. We build on data from a qualitative study in a post-industrial city in Israel that applied interviews (N = 30) and focus groups (N = 63), documents, walking tours and observations. The findings confirm the progressive deterioration of the communities under study and identify multiple institutional practices in three main mechanisms: service erosion, spatial deterioration, and political disempowerment. These mechanisms manifested urban policies reflected at the local level, while sustaining a dynamic that spiralled community marginalisation. Study implications suggest that social work practice and research in post-industrial cities should (a) be informed by the urban context affecting communities (b) critically re-examine services and programmes to identify their possible effect on urban mechanisms of exclusion (c) adopt a multidisciplinary approach to confront the varied aspects of urban community marginalisation.

Effectiveness of a group-walking intervention for people with dementia based on quality of life and caregivers' burden.

AimsTo test the effectiveness of a 28‐week group‐walking intervention for person with dementia. Participants were accompanied by trained volunteers. The effectiveness was assessed according to the quality of life, ability to perform activities of daily living, independence, mobility, cognition, challenging behaviours and the burden on their caregiving relatives.DesignQuasi‐experimental, one‐group, pretest–posttest trial.MethodsThirty‐two persons with dementia and their caregiving relatives were recruited. The nursing intervention consists on easy walking tours lasting three and a half hours. The walks were performed biweekly and each person with dementia had support from one or two trained volunteer helpers.ResultsThe quality of life was stable through all seasons. The secondary outcomes were uneven. While the impairment (WHODAS) and the dependence (IADL) increased, the challenging behaviours and the burden on the caregivers were stable through all seasons.

A Historical View of Library Instructional Podcasts Demonstrating They Were Beneficial to Students and Staff at a New Zealand College of Learning

A Review of: Jowitt, A. (2008). Perceptions and usage of library instructional podcasts by staff and students at New Zealand’s Universal College of Learning (UCOL). Reference Services Review, 36(3), 312–336. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320810895396 Abstract Objective – To examine usage of a specific set of library instructional podcasts and the potential of the format for effective library instruction. Design – Concurrent mixed methods survey. Setting – Multiple campuses at a polytechnic college in New Zealand. Subjects – A total of 86 self-selected, non-random students and staff. Methods – Web-based survey, piloted before a broader launch, with open and closed questions in one survey instrument (SurveyPro) regarding six sample podcasts accessible via the college’s library website. The researcher used closed questions to gather quantitative data with Likert and verbal frequency scales and used concurrent triangulation to ensure balance with qualitative open-ended question responses for proper later interpretation. Main Results – Of the 86 participants in the study, 71.1% responded that the five library podcasts were “very good.” The study determined that the most useful podcast was called “My account” and helped students and staff activate and use their library accounts. Overall, students enjoyed the five library podcasts slightly more than staff. The orientation walking tour was the least popular podcast. The researchers hypothesized that this was because the podcast did not fit the users’ preferred medium, which was computer based. Even listeners who owned a portable media device preferred using a media player on their computer to access the podcasts. The participants preferred to listen to the podcasts during the day. The participants found that the 24/7 availability and the ability to listen to the material repeatedly were particularly helpful features. Conclusion – Based on the research results, students and staff found library instructional podcasting advantageous because of its ease of access and constant availability. Some participants mentioned ways to improve the quality of the podcasts, but they found them to be an effective new medium overall. Additional research is needed to evaluate podcasts as an instructional medium.

Arc Routing for Parking Enforcement Officers: Exact and heuristic solutions

This paper presents exact and approximate methods for constructing daily walking tours for parking enforcement officers the Parking Enforcement Routing Problem (PERP), a problem faced by EMEL, a municipal company that manages parking in Lisbon. Parking Enforcement Officers (PEO) must ensure that the users of the street parking lots pay the corresponding fee, and that they also comply with the parking rules imposed by the legislation in force. The duration of the tours must be compatible with the PEO daily work schedules. A street cannot be supervised more than once in consecutive hours, nor supervised simultaneously by two PEOs. The PERP is a new generalisation of an Arc Routing Problem with profits aiming to maximise the total criticality, a concept defined to represent the need for enforcement of the street segments, related to the number of vehicles parked in transgression. Moreover, parking rules lead to some specificities regarding the underlying network, which needs to be built with additional unusual characteristics. A flow-based mixed integer linear programming model and heuristics which return two daily trips for each PEO are proposed. Computational results carried out on 50 instances based on real data show that it was appropriate to propose both types of methods, exact and heuristic. Furthermore, PEOs working for EMEL reacted positively to the trips corresponding to the generated solutions. A Decision Support System built on the heuristics was also developed to be easily used by practitioners in EMEL.

Walking Tour of the Sacred Heart Cemetery, Pine Township, PA

Walking Tour of the Sacred Heart Cemetery, Pine Township, PA

Watch Them Closely

The method employed in this intervention is an active performance in writing, using the voice of a docent, who guides a small party of the curious, and possibly bewildered, on a walking tour of Auckland’s inner-city monuments. The subject of what gets commissioned, created, and installed under the general heading of a public monument can be placed within the context of the recent and continuing range of disputes and confrontations about monuments—Rhodes in England and South Africa, Civil War statues in the United States, Cook in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article attempts a mediation (not to be misread as a ‘meditation’) of the messages a selection of Auckland’s city monuments send out on a daily basis, subliminal as some of them are. The intention is to carry out a ‘close reading’ of Auckland’s monuments and, hopefully, to alter the wave-length of the light in which the city is bathed.

From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

This article offers an autoethnographic account of developing a multidisciplinary feminist local history project. In particular it focuses on the construction and delivery of a walking tour celebrating ‘Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’. These were ten women from Greater Manchester, UK, who achieved professional success in the twentieth century. The author evokes ideas of psychogeography and the dérive to produce a tour with collaboration, accessibility and public participation at the heart of its ethos. However the notion of a psychogeographical heritage tour is an oxymoron as the praxis resists essentialist notions of time and space. Additionally, the women featured did not have blue plaques, stately homes or any of the conventional badges of achievement. The focus instead was on resonances, echoes, connections and traces in the everyday landscape. Some, such as Marie Stopes, have a complex and deeply problematic legacy. Geographer Doreen Massey, born in Manchester and one of the subjects, provided inspiration with her progressive vision of space as a simultaneity of ‘stories-so-far.’ The traditional heritage tour became reconfigured as something overtly and proudly performative, participatory and fluid. The route and location contributions are anchored in is mutable, with content evolving as new stories are shared. The walk incorporates education, conversation, art and provocation. This is Feminist public pedagogy which uses the pedestrian to examine issues around commemoration, memory, gender and the right to the city. It utilises embodied creative walking methods to uncover the power dynamics that shape Manchester and offer an alternative way to view them.

Barrier-free tourism as a means of physical recreation for persons with disabilities on the example of the developed active tour «Conquering diseases»

This article analyzes the current state of development of barrier-free tourism in the Zhytomyr region, as well as presents a guided tour for blind people. The study clarified the stages of evolution of the concept of «inclusive tourism» and its interpretation by both Ukrainian and foreign scientists, as well as its own definition of this area. The main difference was due to the variety of terms that can be used to describe tourism for people with disabilities. For Ukraine, the most appropriate option is the word «barrier-free», which, unlike «affordable tourism», has no other interpretation. An important aspect when creating a tourist route is to first choose the direction in which the main attention will be paid when including services in the tourist product. According to the fact that in Zhytomyr in 2021 it is planned to actively develop the sports industry and in general the main tourist specialization of the region is aimed at the development of active tourism. It was sports disability tourism that was taken as the basis among other types. This route is the first in the region, due to the fact that it combines not an ordinary walking tour, but a modified one, which first includes passing a quest-walk for the blind using a smartphone, and then playing various sports. Due to the various services included in the tour, for those who use it, it can serve as a means of rehabilitation through socialization and organized active leisure. Within the Zhytomyr region and the city of Zhytomyr there is a great opportunity to develop this area and attract people with limited mobility, as there are many natural and historical and cultural monuments that can be included in the routes. The main importance of this topic and the development of a tourist route for the blind is that people with disabilities will be able to find like-minded people during the tour and the need to create an environment accessible to all citizens, including people with various disabilities. So, now an important point is the socialization of people with disabilities in the tourist environment.

Review these lessons learned for successful in‐person campus tours

The number of guests who have participated in campus walking tours at Texas A&M University between July 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2021? 11,814. That's almost double the number of people who participated in virtual tours since April 2020.

The physical characteristics of children’s preferred natural settings in Australian primary school grounds

Children have less opportunity for contact with nature in our increasingly urbanised lifestyle yet natural environments play an important role in children’s health and development. Children spend considerable amount of their daily time at school hence school grounds are recognised as crucial settings that can increase children’s interaction with nature. However, little is known about the children’s preferences for the physical characteristics of various natural settings in schools. This qualitative study used walking tours, focus groups and behaviour mapping to identify the types of natural settings that primary school children preferred in three Australian school grounds. The study also documented children’s age and gender and the differences and similarities between the ways they used these settings. Thematic analysis revealed multiple physical characteristics of natural settings preferred by children in the school environments. These characteristics include physical features of different plant species, spatial location of the natural settings, their physical boundaries, and their condition. The results showed that children’s preferred natural settings featured elements that offered affordances to their play; were located along the playground edges; were often marked with boundaries that defined their play areas; and were well-maintained. This paper argues that vegetation in school grounds is important, but its presence is not enough to boost children’s interaction with natural environments. The type, context, and condition of natural settings should also be considered for children’s increased engagement with nature and be taken into account in the design and management of school grounds.

Children's preferences on the move: Establishing the characteristics of unofficial paths and their benefits for children's physical play in Australian primary school grounds

Although school grounds have long been recognised as effective settings for children's physical activity, the design of current school grounds in Australia does not often meet children's preferences for physical play. This participatory qualitative study explored the sophisticated layers of unofficial environmental opportunity that children discovered to support their physical play activities in school grounds. This paper focuses particularly on the activities linked with unofficial paths – the paths that have not been designed deliberately to facilitate movement patterns but are perceived and utilised by children throughout the school grounds. Three methods were used (walking tours, focus groups and behaviour mapping) in three Australian public primary schools. The results from the thematic analysis showed that children's choice of unofficial paths was associated with the form of these paths, their affordances, the ground surface materials and the network of their connections. The study also identified the link between children's choice of these paths and two considerations: the school rules; and their perception of overcrowding. The discussion indicates that the overlay of unofficial paths within school grounds adds more layers of diverse environmental and social opportunities for children's physical play that need to be recognised in school ground design and in school regulations. Understanding children's perception and evaluation of these paths reveals the dynamic relationship between multiple environmental dimensions of paths and children's physical play. This study demonstrates the value of participatory research with children for identifying children's view of child–environment relationships.

Revisiting the Harz Tour of Coleridge and the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’ in May 1799

The walking tour of the Harz Mountains in 1799 by Coleridge and his English companions – Clement Carlyon, Charles Parry, and George Bellas Greenough – was an exploration of Romantic science and Romantic poetry. This paper examines the Harz tour of the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’ as a geological and mineralogical excursion concurrent with Coleridge's Harzreise described in his letters. Influenced by the natural history lectures of Professor Blumenbach, the Harz walking tour was organised around visits to caves and mines. A comparative analysis of Coleridge's letters and Charles Parry's journal reveals that while the tour was more significant as a geological field trip for the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’, it was while walking en route to these destinations of scientific exploration that Coleridge responded to the landscapes traversed and discovered his own Harzreise.