Walking the City

Walking the City

October 2, 2021: Workshop on the theme of Walking the City: Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius, Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky, Prof. Dr. Tarini Bedi

This workshop on walking the city was conducted as a collaboration between three ethnographers/anthropologists. As the last workshop in this series, it was particularly focused on the planned excursion to Kathmandu (February 2022, canceled because of the Covid Pandemic). This workshop introduced participants to the concepts that have been important in urban studies related to walking such as flânérie, loitering, different temporalities and speeds of movement, in particular walking (sidewalks, roads, and streets), rhythm analysis and the urban sensorium. It also brought attention to questions of gender and class experience of walking a city. Finally, the workshop provided some methodological tools to study urban placemaking through walking. 

It proves very useful to connect the foci of all the involved DAAD-partners into this method. The toolkit will be further developed in the next excursions and online events.

Selected Resources:

  1. Tim Edensor (2010). “Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of Experience.” Visual Studies 25 (1): 69-79.
  2. Natalie Collie (2013). “Walking in the City: Urban Space, Stories, and Gender.” Gender Forum 43: 1-7.
  3. Kelvin E.Y. Low (2015). “The Sensuous City: Sensory Methodologies in Urban Ethnographic Research.” Ethnography 16(3): 295-312.