WALKING

a geographical perspective

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return--prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms."

Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," in The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975): 593.

"Pedestrians are the catalyst which makes the essential qualities of communities meaningful. They create the place and the time for casual encounters."

Peter Calthorpe, Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993): 17.

"Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city's streets and its sidewalks."

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1961): 30.

"To walk through a place is to become involved in that place with sight, hearing, touch, smell, the kinetic sense called proprioception, and even taste. Auditory sensations range from the calls of birds to the sounds of traffic and horns. Tactile sensations include the brush of tall grass, the spray of passing cars on wet roads, and the jostling of strangers in crowded places. Olfactory sensations range from the scent of apple blossoms to the stench of paper mills to the pleasing and unpleasing odors of passing strangers. Proprioceptive stimuli, signals from the muscles, indicate among other things the slope underfoot and one's rate of movement. Even taste can be involved in a walk, if the mouth intercepts berry bushes or bakeries." (p.188)

"To climb and descend a hill on foot is therefore to establish a kind of dialogue with the earth, a direct imprinting of place on self; this physical dialogue becomes silent when one moves by merely pressing on a gas pedal. In peripatetic place-experience lies the basis of a special kind of knowledge of the world and one's place in it." (p.188)

"A self-perpetuating process of substitution leads to dependency on vehicles: as walking disappears from the human-environment interaction, the multisensory qualities of the landscapes experienced by the remaining walkers are increasingly degraded with the sounds, smells, dust, and spray of traffic. Furthermore, an absence of positive social interactions in transit spaces prompts a psychological retreat from public space as that space is increasingly accessed remotely, not only from media in places but also from mobile media such as the on-board stereo and cellular phone. The blurring of the distinction between virtual place and physical place is not only (as I have argued elsewhere) a product of new technologies; it is also a product of the evisceration of our unmediated experience through the presence of machines in the landscape and elsewhere in daily life." (p.189)

all of the above from: Paul C. Adams, "Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place," in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 186-206.

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