Drawing Walking : Perceiving Difference in the Public Sphere

As the 2022 Roger Martin Fellow, my work will test the walk as an investigative tool and research method. The aim is to discover the ways that spontaneous, subversive, unregulated, appropriative, or emotional moments or expressions can create meaning in the public sphere. These walks will explore various geographies in Italy and will be recorded through the creation of continuous, linear sketches that capture moments of intrigue as a way of perceiving one reality of the urban landscape.

Walking As Research

I’m fascinated by the multiplicity of meanings that walking undertakes; its indeterminacy, and the curiosity and discovery it brings to design practice. Walking has always been an important part of my life. Whether it be through lunchtime strolls, aspirational birding endeavors, bonding with the ones I love, or healing through hard times, walking is meditative and clears my mind to open doors for new ways of noticing and seeing. This mobility is a privilege and walking is not peaceful or possible for everyone. In whichever forms, collective movement can build meaningful connections, reveal critical truths, and empower individuals and communities.

Brief History of Walking as an Aesthetic Practice

Through history, walking has traversed ancient nomadic navigation to post-modern land art, to festival and protest. The 19th century French Flâneur refers to people of high society with the privilege to stroll for the only purpose of observing modern life. Flâneur came to take on many meanings including urban explorers and even the “connoisseur of the street.” [1] Eventually, architectural and urban notions of this concept began to be a useful means of describing the walker as the detached observer, both a part and apart from the flows of the city, situating walking as a method and recognizing the psycho-social influence of the built environment.[2] Over the next several decades, the philosophical, literary, and artistic notion that there was a relationship between the walk, the environment, and psychology continued to evolve.[3] By the 20th century, artists started testing urban exploration as a subversive “anti-art”. This began in the 1920s with the unsuccessful Dadaist ‘lay pilgrimage’, a series of excursions in the ‘banal’ spaces of Paris.[4] But was later refined by the Surrealists’ deambulations, or 10-day long meandering walks, where speculative text described chance encounters. [5] Eventually, Guy Debord and the avant-garde Situationists International coined the term psychogeography[6] and the dérive (the drift) emerged as a subversive cartographic practice that involved an unplanned trajectory guided by impulse, reactivity, and the energies of the city.[7]

Le Pont de l’Europe, Gustav Caillebotte, 1876

In the second half of the 20th century, walking as an artistic motif rapidly expanded, giving rise to movements such as Land Art. These artists found the gait and its traces as embodied sculpture, triggering a sea change in the scope, scale, and understanding of contemporary art, environmentalism, and gender in place.[8],[9]  Today, many artists, geographers, designers, and anthropologists embrace walking not just as an artistic expression but as a research method that can transect the multitude of tensions in cities and places.[10],[11],[12] Walking and its facets are scrutinizing how gender, social injustice, reconciliation, and identity can transform spaces.[13],[14]

(left) The Naked City, lithograph, Guy Debord, 1957. (right) A Line Made by Walking, photograph, Richard Long, 1967.

Walking + Drawing in Landscape Architecture

Landscape architects use walking as a critical research method in order to capture the intuitive and visceral site qualities not legible on a map or survey, to generate ideas and questions, and engage in transdisciplinary reflection to share the knowledges of a place.[15]

While working in landscape architecture, there have been a handful of meaningful experiences that have informed my walking agenda. Two of these walks, an epic two-day trek along a highway/electrical corridor in an arid desert city and a sub-zero night hike through dense, snowy forest in northern Wisconsin were both part of the “site analysis” process. However, they revealed so many, deeply contextual and beautifully phenomenal moments that ultimately informed the final designs of the projects and that were not conceivable through GIS maps, surveys, or Google Earth. Discoveries were made about how the scorching heat of the sun without shade elongates the perceived scale of the site, and the wonderful starry sky in the darkness of a winter night, inspiring us to incorporate nighttime wayfinding elements. I’m curious how these moments can be captured in a way that represents their qualities beyond simply our memory and have been experimenting with a method of linear drawing that aims to render these powerful moments within the procession of a walk. In my walking drawings, drift drawing[16], I’ve incorporated vignettes that situate moments along a walk to represent the subjective experiences that draw my intrigue, so that I can practice noticing more and in deeper ways through time. These methods react to environmental, thematic, or research-oriented drivers.

Unfolded Sections (Drift Drawings) created in Granada, Spain, 2017.

Throughout my experiences and the larger walking practice, the in-between, peripheral, or uncanny spaces are consistently the primary typology explored. Perhaps, walkers are drawn to these types of places because they offer a degree of strangeness that other forms of site analysis cannot capture fully. Some theorize that the in-between spaces are where the urban conscious evolves as an active reflection of a changing society.[17] As landscape architects, what types of values do these places bring to our work and how can walking be a tool for observing their inherent qualities, meaning, and histories?

Rome as a Study Area

Historical Layering

Rome is a diverse patchwork of forms, spaces, uses, policies, ecologies, and cultural contexts (and gelato). The tension between these layers changes how we experience sites and loosens the notions of placeness, providing an array of meanings, uses, and norms for us to discover. This looseness allows for changes in the ways that people, and even non-human life are existing and expressing within the public sphere.[18] It is valuable for us (as landscape architects) to practice noticing this diversity of expressions at the scale of the walk, in order to witness how sites serve, or don’t serve, different people, genders, affiliations, identities, cultures, or ecosystems.

While Rome has been studied extensively, and potential research pathways are endless, for this project I will orient strolls around three trajectories that function as guides. The themes flora, infrastructure, and transience are biological, physical, and temporal elements that can disrupt urban experience.  Each theme is embedded with the potential for further research into the deeply complex economies and histories in which they are associated (more on these methodologies in my next blog post!). By combining walking and drawing, new ideas or ways of knowing a place may emerge and could provide a more honest picture of the urban landscape.

As this project progresses, I will continue to share updates on research discoveries, curiosities, and plans. Keep an eye out on the Roger Martin Fellowship website and social media account. If you’d like to participate in the 2023 Martin Fellowship, more information will be available prior to the competition period in early 2023.

RMP Prize Overview

The Roger Martin Fellowship is an annual travel grant awarded to University of Minnesota Landscape Architecture alumni and Minnesota-based professionals in their early career. The grant supports travel and research endeavors that contribute to professional practice and personal growth.

Rachel is an Associate at TEN x TEN Studio. Her work stems from a deep curiosity about the natural world and the sensory qualities of our environments. As part of her professional practice, she has collaborated on a range of multidisciplinary projects, both local and international, and is particularly intrigued by work that questions norms and builds relationships among communities, disciplines, and ecologies.

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[1]Shaya, Gregory. “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910.” The American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 41–77. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.41.

[2] Tester, Keith. The Flâneur. Psychology Press, 1994. 6-7

[3] There is a massive amount of literature on walking and its facets. For the sake and simplicity of this blog post, the brief history here will focus on walking as an aesthetic practice and the genealogy ancestral to current walking methods in design practice.

[4] Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. 2nd ed. Ames, IA: Culicidae Architectural Press, 2017. 67

[5] Ibid.  78

[6] Reader, The MIT Press. “Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City.” The MIT Press Reader (blog), July 16, 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/.

[7] Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. 2nd ed. Ames, IA: Culicidae Architectural Press, 2017. 92-100

[8] Ibid. 125

[9] Timken, Kris. “Women, Land Art and the Social (1978-83).” Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz. Accessed December 12, 2022. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2491201348/abstract/72BAEC81FC0944D6PQ/1.

[10] “Spatial Agency: Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade.” Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.spatialagency.net/database/stalkerosservatorio.nomade.

[11] Danielle Wiley (2010) A Walk About Rome: Tactics for Mapping the Urban Periphery, Architectural Theory Review, 15:1, 9-29, DOI: 10.1080/13264821003629220

[12] O’Rourke, Karen. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013.

[13] Timken, Kris. “Women, Land Art and the Social (1978-83).” Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz. Accessed December 12, 2022. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2491201348/abstract/72BAEC81FC0944D6PQ/1.

[14] McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity & Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

[15] Brink, Adri van den, Diedrich Bruns, Hilde Tobi, and Simon Bell, eds. Research in Landscape Architecture: Methods and Methodology. London: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315396903. 182-183

[16] a method evolved from the unfolded section, taught to me by Ozayr Saloojee and Vince deBritto during a graduate school drawing workshop.

[17] Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

[18] Franck, Karen, and Quintin Stevens. Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. 10-12

BIBLOGRAPHY

Borthwick, David, Pippa Marland, and Anna Stenning. Walking, Landscape and Environment. 1st Edition. London: Routledge, 2019. https://doi-org.ezp2.lib.umn.edu/10.4324/9781315209753.

Brink, Adri van den, Diedrich Bruns, Hilde Tobi, and Simon Bell, eds. Research in Landscape Architecture: Methods and Methodology. London: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315396903.

Caillebotte, Gustav. Le Pont de l’Europe. 1876. Oil on Canvas, 125 cm x 181 cm. Musée du Petit Palais.

Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. 2nd ed. Ames, IA: Culicidae Architectural Press, 2017.

Debord, Guy. The Naked City. 1957. Lithograph, Ink on Paper, 33.3 cm x 48.3 cm. FRAC Centre-Valde Loire.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

Franck, Karen, and Quintin Stevens. Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007.

Long, Richard. A Line Made by Walking. 1967. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper and graphite on board, 375 x 324 mm. Tate.

McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity & Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Museum of Walking. “Museum of Walking.” Accessed December 12, 2022. http://www.museumofwalking.org.

O’Rourke, Karen. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013.

Reader, The MIT Press. “Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City.” The MIT Press Reader (blog), July 16, 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/.

Shaya, Gregory. “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910.” The American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 41–77. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.41.

“Spatial Agency: Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade.” Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.spatialagency.net/database/stalkerosservatorio.nomade.

Tester, Keith. The Flâneur. Psychology Press, 1994.

Timken, Kris. “Women, Land Art and the Social (1978-83).” Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz. Accessed December 12, 2022. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2491201348/abstract/72BAEC81FC0944D6PQ/1.

Wiley, Danielle. “A Walk About Rome: Tactics for Mapping the Urban Periphery.” Architectural Theory Review 15, no. 1 (April 1, 2010): 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13264821003629220.