Being there: capturing and conveying noisy slices of walking in the city

Abstract

The practice of walking allows us to engage with the city slowly, through kinaesthetic skill and the multisensorial apparatus of the body. Studying the city through this immersed practice-on-the-move facilitates attention to the direct contact with the urban environment, and hence brings forth analytical orientations that highlight ‘being there’ on the move. Indeed, if not including immersed experiences of mobility, fluidity, and contingency in the study of the city, we run a risk of losing sight of the actual complex and multiple cities, we live in. The paper explores how immersed and creative visual methods might be used to capture and convey the city through walking. It reports on two field studies, which sought to provide records of walking, contribute to embrace mundane phenomena that tend to be less considered, and support experientially-informed approaches in urban design, planning and decision making. It offers a discussion on the capture and convey of ‘noise’—the movement and activity that is often omitted from visual digital accounts, the ‘slices’ acknowledging the partial and situated nature of the urban records, and the limits of visual methods in the attempt to not only capture and represent, but also animate the city through these methodological accounts.