PUBLICATION

Walking through instead of flying over: A way to see the flux of urbanization in Istanbul and other places?

Kohler, Martin. 2014. „Walking through in stead of flying over – a way to see the flux of urbanization in Istanbul and other places?“ in Walking the European City. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
 
This chapter aims to discuss walking as a method of studying urban social space that can be used to interpret and explain city regions. In the first part I present references to the fields of aerial photography in urban theory and planning, the challenge of global urban diversity for urban analysis and especially comparison and walking as a multi-sensual experience of places as a “poor methodology.”
These fields situate the practice of “Stadtwanderungen” or Big Urban Walks that will be exemplified in the second part presenting the walk through Istanbul.
 

„The usefulness of walking-based research is more evident when the object of analysis is a large urban area. In these cases, maps and satellite images rely on highly aggregated data and only allow for the identification of visual patterns from a large distance. As an alternative, Chapter 8 proposes „big urban walks“ crossing whole metropolitan areas. This method produces information that while subjective, it is also coherent and systematic, and can be used to understand the complex social and physical factors behind the patterns observed in maps.“

Anciaes, Paulo Rui. 2014. „Walking in the European city: quotidian mobility and urban ethnography“. Urban Geography Book Review 2014 2014.
 
 
https://www.routledge.com/
https://www.researchgate.net/

Sideways – Walking Arts Festival

Sideways is a translocal, experimental festival for contemporary art and cultural
research, exploring different ‘pathscapes’ in the northern region of Belgium.
This first-time event did unfold on the go across a four week period in the summer
of 2012. It exhibited a broad program of visual art, walks, live art and sitespecific
interventions. Ubiquitous yet overlooked, these pathscapes comprise a
broad diversity of ‘spaces of going’: crooked rural footpaths; cycleways spanning
many kilometres; straight tow paths on the banks of waterways; transient ‘desire
lines’ leading from one urban area to another; barely perceptible, overgrown
backroads; picturesque hollow ways; etc.
The festival aims to question the past history, present use and future potential
of these landscape features, as well as our conceptions of time, space, movement
and memory and create a collaborative meeting ground.
The festival was structured in 1. a journey 2. festival nodes and 3. concluding
conference.