A library search for the term “walking culture” turned up this manifesto, produced in 2006 by the walking performance collective Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Cathy Turner, although the manifesto includes contributions from Richard Layzell, Bess Lovejoy, and Fiona Templeton and contemporaries of the Dadaist movement [115]) for Walkzi’s “Everyday Walking Culture” conference in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2005 (121). What primarily interests me about this manifesto is its title: a call for a “new” walking culture presupposes the existence of an “old” walking culture, one which runs contrary, perhaps, to the manifesto itself, one the manifesto wishes to change, to make new. The use of the term “walking culture” in the name of the conference is also a suggestion that such a thing exists and is clearly recognized. Perhaps I don’t need to worry so much about defining a walking culture—unless there’s a literature that uses that term, one I can’t seem to find for some reason.
The manifesto is organized apparently at random (although looks can always be deceiving): each of the 52 sections is identified by a playing card. I think the nod to chance is both in recognition of the conference venue, a casino (121), and the chance procedures used by some psychogeographers to organize their urban dérives. Apparently each section was a PowerPoint slide, so I’m going to refer to the sections as slides, without trying to summarize the entire manifesto.
The first slide calls for walking to move beyond functionality: to become, in addition, “a wandering, an odyssey of sight and sound, a quest for knowledge and stimulation, a grand roaming expedition, and a living breathing work of art in its own right” (115). The third slide calls for walkers “[t]o combat the functionalism of walking” by, among other things, “having no particular place to go” and “[t]o write the city with your relationships” (115). The fifth slide quotes Guy Debord describing the dérive as a “great game” (qtd. 115). That slide also uses the term “mis-guide” (115), which was one of the themes of the work of Wrights & Sites. It suggests “making things strange,” as if the light had changed, thus making “the city ‘other’” (115).
The seventh slide suggests that functional walking—from home to the train or automobile to work—is “the antithesis of walking culture” (qtd. 116). The eighth suggests shopping without buying anything, considering “shopping malls as hyper-real museums to consumerism” (116). The ninth advocates “discovering sensations in the textures and secrets” of the city, “a city disrupted to meet the needs and desires of an evolving, mutating walking” (116). The fourteenth slide calls on walkers to “[s]tep on the cracks and find the gaps and make new tracks” and to “[e]xtend your walking territory becoming more aware of the restrictions being imposed upon you by signs and surfaces and the aggressive armoured invasion of the car. . . . Walk a new walking culture to write the city with your bodies” (116).
The seventeenth slide calls on walkers to “[a]bolish habitual walking patterns, such as the home-to-work-and-back-routine: those head-down journeys when the mind is focused elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’” (117). It cites the example of Lone Twin’s disruption of Colchester by carrying a telephone pole in a straight line across the city, through shops and houses, in Totem (1998) (117). The following slide demands that pedestrians insist upon their rights over the car (117). The twenty-first slide states, “We demand the right to linger. We are loiterers without intent. We are children taking the long way home from school” (117). The twenty-third slide suggests that walkers “re-value public space” as if they were children (117).
The twenty-fourth slide quotes André Breton’s call for walkers to leave everything—including wife, mistress, and children—to “[s]et off on the roads” (117). In their article on women walking, Cathy Turner and Deidre Heddon object to the masculine adventuring implied by this statement, and instead call for domestic, convivial, participatory walking (Heddon and Turner). Later, the fortieth slide quotes a similar call for pedestrians to be free from domestic responsibilities (119), another example of a masculinist rejection of the domestic that Heddon and Turner refuse to countenance. Clearly Wrights & Sites was not in agreement about this slide, or else Turner’s thinking changed.
The thirtieth slide states, “Amble, ramble, and de-ramble the city in search of wildlife, ancient tracks, sacred signs and paths of desire and fill abandoned roadside cars with earth and turn them into immobile gardens” (118). The reference to rambling in this slide suggests one element of the walking culture to which this manifesto responds: rural rambling. That form of walking culture is relatively unusual in my city: while there are two footpaths within a 30-minute drive of the city, only one, the Fairy Hill trail, sees much use, although with the appearance of wood ticks this spring and the widespread fear of lyme disease, it’s possible that it will see less use until autumn arrives.
The thirty-first slide calls on walkers to create their own maps: to abolish published maps, and use GPS technology to map their own journeys. The thirty-second suggests inviting town planners “on practical courses exploring trespass and paths of desire” (118). The thirty-fifth slide calls on pedestrians to “[b]elieve absolutely that every walker is a potential mis-guide,” that “every walk leads to anywhere” (118). There is a strain of utopianism in that statement, along with the reference to the “mis-guide” theme.
The thirty-seventh slide suggests abolishing ETAs, “predetermined destinations and thoughts of artistic outcomes” (119). It calls upon pedestrians to, instead, “[d]rift for three or four months at a time,” following the Situationist psychogeographer’s Ivan Chtcheglov’s example or, like Richard Long, “let the walk become the work” (119). I’m surprised to see a positive reference to Long’s artistic practice here, given the way attitudes towards his work seem to have changed in the past 15 years since the manifesto was published.
The thirty-eighth slide suggests a variety of walking strategies or techniques, including “[p]layfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing,” “mis-guided tours,” using “wireless on-line technology” to spread “networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows in the glints in pedestrians’ eyes,” as “the instruments of the architect-walker” (119). The reference to “mis-guided tours” suggests another aspect of the old walking culture this manifesto reacts against: walking tours of historical sites, something that only happens in this city during the annual Jane’s Walk event. Again, the walking culture against which Wrights & Sites is reacting simply doesn’t exist here. Would it be possible to create a walking culture without that foundation? I’m not sure. If nobody walks, would anyone show up for a convivial, participatory drift?
The forty-fifth slide calls on walkers to “[a]cquaint yourself with methods of urban exploration rejected by the good manners of the heritage and tourism industries” by misapplying a map of one city to the geography of another, an old psychogeographical strategem (119). Again, the heritage and tourism industries are not connected to walking in this city: tourists—when we get any—are expected to drive.
The forty-seventh slide demands that walkers follow the composer Erik Satie’s example and work while walking, instead of at their desks (120). The forty-ninth slide calls on pedestrians to “reclaim the nights in the city. Walking through the streets at the dead of night is not a criminal offence” (120). Such walking, if practiced alone, might be dangerous or at least frightening for some walkers—and I wonder if this is another example of gendered approaches to walking that are rejected by Heddon and Turner.
The fiftieth slide states, “Anyone, anywhere can be an architect-walker—begin by mapping atmospheres and feelings—they are our foundations as we build from ideas and emotions outwards. . .” (120). Again, I hear echoes of psychogeography here, particularly as practiced by the Situationists.
The fifty-first slide tells walkers to “walk with a sense of not knowing anything about the city,” to consider walking “a constant experiment to discover the intricacies and individuality of your walk that is as distinctive as your handwriting” (120). I don’t see any sign of the kind of compromise required for group, convivial, participatory walking, where “the intricacies and individuality of your walk” would have to be subordinated to the group as a whole.
Finally, the last slide states, “Know that every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are potential material for an artwork” (120). It suggests recording “the stories of people that you encounter,” encouraging “personal associations,” generating mythogeographies, and looking for “the extra-ordinary in the seemingly ordinary” (120). That sounds like a call for the new walking culture to be a mythogeographical one, as I understand the term mythogeography.
The manifesto is followed by a brief explanation of its contexts. The work of Wrights & Sites is the most important part of the manifesto’s context, I think: for nine years, Wrights & Sites had been working on urban site-specific performance and art projects (121). The term “mythogeography” apparently was first used in their 2003 book An Exeter Mis-Guide, which generated interest outside that city (121). The purpose of the mis-guide was to encourage “new ways of exploring the city, of making it strange and seeking out its ‘mythogeography’ (the personal, mythical, fictional, and fanciful mappings that intertwine or subvert the official, municipal identities and histories of a place)” (121). That led to the publication of A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (2006), which I think I have a copy of, and other publications as well. “Drawing on our urban exploratory work,” the authors conclude, “this is a manifesto for the active and creative pedestrian—envisioning a walking that is neither a functional necessity (to shops, to work) nor a passive appreciation of (or complaint about) the urban environment” (121). If that is the old walking culture, it doesn’t really exist in my city: nobody really walks to work, or to shops, and nobody walks to appreciate the urban environment (unless the path around the small end of the lake, and to a much lesser degree the path along the creek, might be considered urban rather than park environments). I never see any other pedestrians when I’m walking away from the lake or the creek. So my question remains: can a new culture of walking begin when there’s no old culture of walking to react against dialectically? How can walking engage with and change the city, using art not as a passive expression of the city, but as an active way to change it (121), when nobody walks at all—when the city itself is not walkable, when almost everyone relies on their cars rather than their feet, and so when no culture of walking of any kind seems to exist?
Works Cited
Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.
Wrights & Sites. “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City.’” Performance Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-22. DOI: 10.1080/13528160600812083.