Being On One's Feet
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The Right to Roam
Take a Walk
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially
Cities designed to facilitate walking
Let the body wander
A dot went for a walk
Who walks beside you?
20 Minutes in Manhattan
To Make a Book, Walk on a Book
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
A Book by Jean-Jacques RousseauWhat I Talk About When I Talk About Running
A Book by Haruki MurakamiWhy I Walk
An Article by Chris ArnadeOn my first day I literally walk across the city, to the extent it can be done…The next day I do another cross town walk, but in a different direction, filling in the blanks from the prior day’s walk.
Then, over the next week(s), I walk between 10 to 20 miles per day, picking and choosing from what I have seen before, highlighting what I like, what I want to know more about, refining the path, till by the end of my trip, I have a daily route that is roughly the same.
While that is certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content.
Walk Appeal
An Article by Steve MouzonWalk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
Both images below are at the same scale, and the yellow dashed line is a quarter-mile radius. On the left is a power center. As we all know, if you're at Best Buy and need to pick something up at Old Navy, there's no way you're walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You'll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away… not because you're lazy, but because it's such a terrible walking experience.
The image on the right is Rome. The circles are centered on the Piazza del Popolo (North is to the left) and the Green radius goes through the Vittorio Emanuele on the right. People regularly walk that far and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking
An Article by Jeremy DeSilvaYou are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you.
Ri — The Distance Walked in an Hour
An Article by Craig ModA ri is a unit of measure, it’s about how far a person can walk in an hour at a reasonable pace. It clocks out at roughly 3.93 kilometers.
Remnants of the ri system are scattered along the old roads of Japan. During the Edo period, ri were marked recurrently by hulking earthen mounds that flanked the road — ichi-ri zuka, “one-ri mounds.” There are only a handful of “originals” left. When you pass one with an old cypress or oak growing from its center it becomes a tiny moment of celebration.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Walk and ride through London with Foster + Partners
An Article by Norman FosterWith outdoor activities being the flavour of the season, we have drawn up a few routes through the city that you could take on with friends and family. Suitable to bike or walk, each route features a selection of projects by the practice in the capital, introducing some of our ongoing work and reacquainting you with some old favourites.
Psychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:
- "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
New Public Sites
A Place by Graham Coreil-AllenNew Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of public spaces. Through walking tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen pushes pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.
Walking through doorways causes forgetting
A Research PaperEntering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.
Koya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
Meditations
Gravity without affectation
From Sextus: The idea of what it means to live in accordance with nature; gravity without affectation, and a careful regard for the interests of one's friends.
Flesh and a bit of breath
Whatever it is that I am is flesh and a bit of breath.
Any life
Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.
A little thing
Cast everything else aside, then, and hold to these few truths alone; and remember, furthermore, that each of us lives only in the present, this fleeting moment of time, and that the rest of one's life has either has either already been lived or lies in an unknowable future. The space of each person's existence is thus a little thing, and little too is the corner of earth on which it is lived.
Praise has no part in it
Everything that is in any way beautiful is beautiful of itself and complete in itself, and praise has no part in it; for nothing comes to be better or worse for being praised.
Carrying a corpse around
You are a little soul carrying a corpse around.
As Epictetus used to say.
Avenge yourself!
The best way to avenge yourself is not to become as they are.
The clapping of tongues
(for praise from the crowd is simply the clapping of tongues)
Giving up the struggle
How shameful it is that, in this life, when your body does not give up the struggle, your soul should do so first.
Why?
The cucumber is bitter? Then cast it aside. There are brambles in the path? Step out of the way. That will suffice, and you need not ask in addition, "Why did such things ever come into the world?"
Poured
The light of the sun seems to be poured down, and to be poured, indeed, in every direction, but not poured away.
Wanting for nothing
Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?
Laughter
—and my heart laughed within me.