What I’m Reading!

As the work for this project progresses, I’ve tried to keep the balance between open-endedness and gradual resolution. That said, I tend to embrace rabbit-holes and have subsequently found myself half-buried in a mountain of long-overdue library books. Despite my reading list continuously growing, there have been several works with great influence over the project thus far. In this post, I’d like to share some of the reads that have been lingering in my brain this year and how they’ve shaped my work.

Through Time and the City : Notes on Rome

Kristi Cheramie with Antonella De Michelis

Through the lens of Anthropocene forces, Cheramie extracts and extrapolates on nine of the myriad layers that make up Roman history, ecology, urban fabric, and politics. Each study includes extensive mapping, diagramming, and photography and positions these overlapping geographies in elegant ways. As a Landscape Architect, Cheramie’s work is an effortless read and deliciously visual. As one of the first books I read on Rome, it had a powerful influence on the tectonics of my entire project by introducing me to the themes and sources that have continuously thread through my research thus far. The chapters on the Papal route (On Ritual Urbanism and the Via Papalis), flooding and the Tiber River infrastructure (On the Space of Flooding), and the short final chapter on the enduring mythology of Rome’s trees (On Time and the City), are now the framework for my studies on walking and introduced me to other works and minds, some of which you’ll see below.

Walkscapes : Walking as an Aesthetic Practice

Francesco Careri

This book is truly essential reading for anyone interested in the expressive qualities of walking. Careri navigates along the history of walking practice, in chronological order, framing a genealogy that spans from the Bronze Age to the present day. This work is referenced in almost everything I’ve read and provides the foundation, permission, and invitation to experiment with walking not just as a research method, but as an expression of self and art.

Loose Space : Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life

Edited by Karen A Franck and Quintin Stevens

This book is a series of essays that aim to describe the concept of “Loose Space” as it relates to the urban environment. Essentially, Loose Space is defined as the ways in which spaces are used that were not originally intended or that are subversive to government oversight, privatization, and surveillance. As such, a community appropriates its shared spaces and pushes boundaries of expression within them. This book was a big ah-ha moment in my research. Can walking be the ideal way to observe looseness? Can drawing those walks be a way that something so liminal and non-spatial be mapped? We have yet to find out if this course of action is successful, but what I do know is that the ways in which people identify within and appropriate the public sphere, whether through protest, memorialization, street vending and subversive economies, parkour, or exploring in wild, unkempt spaces, are what make cities vibrant and what I am the most fascinated by. This book also triggered my “Foucault Phase,” a foray into the philosophical cottage industry that is Heterotopia and the studies of the in-between.

Italian Gardens : A Cultural History

Helena Attlee

I’ll admit, I’m a nerd for textbooks. There’s something quite satisfying and somewhat transactional about reading clear and organized facts in an unbiased manner. Attlee describes, in what feels like both a lecture and a photographic coffee-table book, the meaning of gardens in the Italian peninsula from the Early Renaissance onward. This book builds foundational knowledge of botanical happenings and the evolution of their expression through power, identity, influence, trade, and ecology. A branch of my research is oriented around the meaning of urban plants and the chapters in this book, organized by the eras of art and architecture, paint a clear picture of how gardens are truly microcosms of society. They evolve and change alongside cultures and I’m so curious what this means in the modern day, considering biodiversity shifts, novel ecosystems, spontaneous plants, and species migration.

Psychogeography : Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place

Will Self, illustrated by Ralph Steadman

“Solidary Walker is, himself, an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler.”

This book is unique from the others. It is a compilation of first-person accounts of Self’s walks through various geographies and states of mind. The book reads like a diary, and is a means of describing the psychological fluctuations generated by walking and the environments through which a walk occurs. Self’s walks are somewhat purposeful, rather than aimless wanders, and rooted closely to the Situationist International’s derive. Self writes about each walk, describes what he’s thinking about, noticing, his plans for the day, and other reveries. I connect with this and see drawing as a similar sort of record. How does the psyche affect how we are perceiving our environment, and vice versa? How are experiences along a walk occurring in relation and influence to one another?

Terra Forma : A Book of Speculative Maps

Alexandra Arenes, Axelle Gregoire, and Frédérique Aït-Touati

The book is a powerful study on mapping the liminal, non-discrete, and ever-changing aspects of cities from an anti-colonial . Nine studies, contemplating living landscapes to borders, soil, and space-time, attempt to draw the webs that are formed by these interconnected entities. Creating graphics that are somewhere between a diagram, section, and 3d model, the researchers in this book challenge traditional representation strategies like GIS, and beautifully experiment with new ways of visualizing nature and the space that a body creates as it moves. This book provides an excellent example of speculative mapping strategies useful in complex contexts like Rome with its many layers.  Much like how Self’s Psychogeography speaks to unhinging a free-flowing mind while walking, I find this book has inspired me to ask how representation can be understood differently. What do we believe to be the limits of mapping and how can it be retooled in new or different paradigms?  

Books on Deck

SPQR and Twelve Caesars |  Mary Beard

A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time and The Necessity for Ruins |  J.B. Jackson

The Life of Plants, A Metaphysics of Mixture | Emanuele Coccia

The Geography of Time | Robert Levine

Gender, Identity, and Place | Linda McDowell

The Power of Place | Dolores Hayden