Wandering The City

wandering the city a thesis bundle

MAP01/01 Map illustrated by Léna Paté.

Lena, recounts her experiences of poetic stances of sequential walking through everyday places.

MAP01/02 Map reacted to Léna Paté’s by Paula Chang.

MAP02/01 Map illustrated by Paula Chang.

Paula, through the map illustrates her experiences of the summer world of Strijp S and of walks that led to no destination.

MAP02/02 Map reacted to Paula Chang’s by Léna Paté.

MAP03/01 Map illustrated by Viktória Kaslik.

Viktoria’s map is an amalgamation of habits, rituals and happenstance that involves an atmosphere filled with good architecture, thought provoking street art and a daily array of pedestrians.

MAP03/02 Map reacted to Viktória Kaslik’s by Doi De Luise.

MAP04/01 Map Illustrated by Doi De Luise Doi retraces the path between his new apartment and the City Photo, a photography shop - a path he takes regularly highlighting his interest in photography.

MAP04/02 Map reacted to Doi De Luise’s by Viktória Kaslik .

MAP05/01 Map illustrated by Juliette Mirabito.

Juliette’s illustration of the map (on a cup) starts and stops at the same place, signifying the circular path she takes through her favourite places in Eindhoven.

MAP05/02 Map reacted to Juliette Mirabito’s by Ramon Jimenez Cardenas.

MAP06/01 Map illustrated by Ramon Jimenez Cardenas.

Ramon recounts his experiences of wandering around the vicinity of the bus station, instead of waiting in the crowd, before taking a bus back home.

MAP06/02 Map reacted to Ramon Jimenez Cardenas’s by Juliette Mirabito.

MAP07/01 Map Illustrated by Cecilia Casabona.

Cecilia’s interest in discovering new ethinic delectables led her to exploring the path between different types of markets as a metaphor for wandering the corridors of a supermarket which she finds stimulating.

MAP07/02 Map reacted to Cecilia Casabona’s by Sofia Topi.

MAP08/01 Map illustrated by Sofia Topi.

Sofia illustrates her experience of being susceptible to the environment when she wandered into a totally new area that surprised her with its open area, water body and how it all interacted with the architecture.

MAP08/02 Map reacted to Sofia Topi’s by Cecilia Casabona.

MAP09/01 Map of Eindhoven where the circle was drawn.

MAP09/02 Map reacted to the map of Eindhoven by Litty Salas.

The per map fer

map collection you just saw is printed on calque paand is meant to be read one on top of the other. Each set consists of 2 maps (follow the map numbers). Reto page 53 of the main text booklet.

wandering the city embodied experiencing of places through walking

Wandering the City

embodied experiencing of places through walking

Litty Teresa Salas This publication resulted from the research conducted as part of the individual thesis project in the Master’s department Critical Inquiry Lab at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Thesis Tutor: Patricia Reed Head of Depatment: Saskia Van Stein

foreword

This research is part of a personal inquisition into understanding why I prefer to walk through places, despite visiting them multiple times. The following narratives of the research are only a part of the epistemological approach to understanding the person-place relationship - a choice that was naturally attuned to my role within this research. It does not include an exhaustive understanding of how each person relates to a place completely, but rather a trajectory that helps explain our immediate connection and the underlying layers to an attachment.

For many, there might not be an immediacy in understanding the person-place relationship. But in a world that is in constant flux, stimulating an understanding of how and why we ground ourselves to certain places brings forth a sense of identity. I believe, that this sense of identity is one of the many aspects we will be holding on to when the world transitions into a homogeneous mass, a global civilization. When there are no longer borders and divisions between people, cultures, and states, we will hold on to this identity to justify our presence in this world.

So, I dedicate this research to everyone who is, in one way or the other, engaged in understanding the different ways we relate to our worlds. I hope the contents of this publication bring you one step closer to realizing them.

-litty

contents 1. Introduction 2. Walking As A Tool The Act And Art of Walking

3. Exploring The City Revisiting The Figures Of The Nineteenth Century

4. Understanding The City Understanding Geographicality

5. Analyzing The City -

Ethno-mimesis And Embodiment

6. Conclusion 7. Bibliography 8. Acknowledgements

introduction cité and ville The spread of Christianity invoked two types of meaning to the word city - the city of God and the city of Man - which was introduced by St. Augustine around the 5th century. This reference to different cities soon faded away, but the association of a city to two different meanings lingered for a long time. The French used two words to describe both cities - ville and cité, the physical attributes being the ville, and everything in between, the ephemeral, was the cité. “Ville referred to the overall city whereas cité designated a particular place. Sometime in the sixteenth century, the cité came to mean the character of life in a neighborhood, the feelings people harbored about neighbors and strangers and attachment to place”1. These distinctions are no longer inw use, but the two aspects of the city - the built environment and the manner of dwelling - have always remained separate, and if anything we need to revive the usage of these terms. Both the ville and the cité have evolved tremendously ever since its inception, but their relationship to each other has remained constant. As more people migrated to bigger cities, the ville grew, in turn attracting more people and changing the lived experience. The cité is never completely separate from the ville, but to understand and analyze a city, we need to look at both aspects separately and through different fields and mediums. While the ville is always looked at by analyzing the architecture and infrastructure, the cité is analyzed through

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1. Richard Sennet, Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City, (United Kingdom, Penguin House,2019), 32.

neighborly relations, sociology, place consciousness, and so on.

If ville is the body, then cité is the soul.

So how is it that the cité enhances our experience of a place?

How does the cité help us develop a relationship to a place? To understand this, we need to fully understand how we engage with the cité, the different ways we become part of the cité, and how it truly attaches us to a place.

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Souvenir He was having a rough day.

He had been running around, trying to sort out the confusion in a very chaotic building.

The sun was scorching hot, the humidity irritating.

He was cursing - the heat, the work, the place.

There was no solace.

Temperament high, all cool, low; Scooter whizzing by Soon the sun seemed to go.

There’s a sudden outburst of rain with thick, heavy droplets crashing from the sky.

He stops his scooter and takes a moment to smell the rye, The perfume of the earth, sweet and scented, Took him back to a time when the skies melted.

Of school buses and cotton candy, Of lighter lives and no melancholy To childhood friends and laughter galore, How could this place not be home?

With consciousness he finds, The simple connection he likes, To this horrid little place, Sometimes where he finds solace.

memory making and place making

Growing up in a particular place, whether village, town, or city, we are sure to have developed close associations with a particular activity or a part of this place. But we rarely reminisce about it until we have left it far behind. Occasionally, we see something that barely resembles, yet it triggers our memory and brings to mind a solemn act, a passage of life that pinpoints our attachment to a particular place. And the piece that triggered this memory in the first place, becomes a souvenir, possibly of a time gone by.

Most of us have a collection of these souvenirs in our minds.

These souvenirs, along with another set of experiences and memories, inherently attach us to the city through an intangible reality. A reality where cities are made of connections and encounters with a landscape. “This was the daytime marvel of cities for me: coincidences, the mingling of many kinds of people, poetry given away to strangers under the open sky.”2 These layers of memory making, encounters, coincidences, and consciousness are what makes the cité.

Slowly but surely, this forms an attachment, a relationship.

How can we perceive this relationship? How can we understand ourselves in conjunction with our environment?

As a student migrating from India to the Netherlands, I was quite surprised to find out that I enjoyed walking more than any other mode of transport. This helped me observe new places and take in everything that they had to offer to me. And

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2. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (London, Granta Publications,2001), 172.

I was always on the lookout for something familiar - A face that reminds me of a friend back home or a shop that is the same color as another one back home. With an interest in understanding lived societies, walking also helped me observe and digest things that were common to the neighborhood but far from my own lived reality. It was through walking that I could justify my presence in a strange and new country, juxtaposing the differences between my hometown and this city, and in a way making a home of it, as a way of understanding its culture.

And by doing that, I was forming a relationship with the city.

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Paris What is Paris? Paris for me was Anthony Doerr’s historic fiction, “All the light we cannot see” and my childhood favourite movie, “Passport to Paris”. Paris was the taste of macaroons my aunt whipped up in her kitchen, and parts of Pondicherry, the former French colony, with its bright yellow walls and drooping bougainvilleas. Paris for me was the amalgamation of all those day-dreams of traveling once to this impeccable spot on the earth, where romanticism is not just a genre, but a way of life. Paris was…...

In the July of last year, I got a chance to visit Paris for the first time in my life. Having conjured up an image of the city from the likes of the books I had read, movies I had seen, and images that would so often pop up on the internet, it was quite puzzling to have this vague familiarity with the city. Paris is one of the most talked-about places in the world. It’s a honeymoon destination and a fashion capital. Paris was an emotion everyone felt, irrespective of visiting it or not.

Through this research, I aim to understand how and why we form connections with a place through its cité. To understand what connects us to some places and what doesn’t. How the cité influences our connection to a city. To understand how ‘walking’ as an activity can be utilized within this relationship.

How can we appropriate ‘walking’ to comprehend what we consider our own (what we identify with) and how can we use it to help create a better environment? And inherently, how can we use all these findings to develop a toolset that helps us, as citizens, to understand places better and design them? “To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings.”3 This research follows a trajectory that starts from understanding what walking is. Walking cannot be considered just as an act that allows us to move. To dig deeper into this whole realm of the thesis, we first and foremost need to understand what the theory of walking entails and how it reflects in our day-today lives. How walking can be used as a tool to investigate and discover aspects of society, the cité. From this, we look back to the 19th-century theories and characters such as psychogeography and the Flâneur to situate it in the present and use them as tools to study the cité. They were brought about to critique and understand environments through the act of walking. And if these characters were to exist now, in the 21st century, we

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3. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A history of Walking, (London, Granta Publications,2001), 3.

need to understand how they would have adapted or evolved to keep up with the transformations that the cities are going through.

While moving through a place, we form connections with everything in the environment, most of which we don’t realize. There is an equation between us and the aspects of the landscape immediately available to us as we navigate through space. Using Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological theory on geographical experiences, these connections are elaborated using geographical terms with a more abstract meaning and in doing so understanding how we relate, individually with the environment.

All these sections focus on walking and how we relate to the environment while doing so. By reflecting on it and understanding others’ perspectives on the city, we can form a discourse that justifies our understanding of the research so far. For the last part, we will be looking at ethno-mimesis and how it can be used to embody and understand experiences of the city. All in all, these sections look to validate what we know through ourselves, and hence we can see in others’ experience of the city.

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The Immersion ….We walked through most of our visit to Paris. We would only take the metro when we were going from region to region. The walk on the Champs Élysées to move toward the Arc De Triomphe from the Place de la Concorde was the most overwhelming one. While passing by, what can only be called the grandiosity of Paris, there were times when I lost myself, immersed myself in the spectacles around, that I kept forgetting that I was in Paris. And there were times when knowingwee and whatever I could seek. However, the hot day was of no help. While going forward, the sun kept pulling us backward. But we kept moving ahead to discover the Arc De Triomphe as it slowly rose on the horizon...

walking as a tool the act and art of walking

To define ‘walking’ does not need much deliberation. Walking has been a natural process throughout the evolution of humankind, that even to describe what it is seems mundane.

But even though a majority of humans have evolved to walk, the luxury of walking hasn’t been uniform to every being. With the advancement of technology and innovation, this gap has been bridged by instruments such as prosthetics that promote near-walking experiences, thus knitting a community of walkers closer together.

Can you recall your most recent walk? For all you know, it must have been from your room to the toilet and back. But the fact that even that journey between those two spaces is termed as walking slips our mind quite often, and hence it is overlooked.

The act of walking has been taken for granted to an extreme that, even in literature and theory, a conscious attempt at exploring the practice of walking, started fairly (comparatively) recently. While we can characterize walking as a physical movement between different sorts of spaces, for the sake of this research, we will be looking at walking as an act of being outside, moving in close proximity to a lively city.

The experience of walking is attuned differently for everyone.

While some involve in and encourage it actively, some others

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are only obliged to its most basic form at disposal - in getting from one place to another. “Walking is a practice of manifolds influencing our perception of the city. We seldom observe and reflect upon walking, or consider the impact and potential of distinct walking practices on the perception and relationship patterns we develop for urban places.”4 Walking allows one to experience the space in slow and steady motion, which gives us enough time to ponder and absorb the externalities of the environment. While walking can be utilized for different purposes, three types of walking have been identified namely purposive walking, discursive walking, and conceptual walking.

Purposive walking is when our aim through the act of walking is to get from one place to another. This is noticeable especially in cities with high pedestrian traffic where people are trying to get to work, to school, etc. Characteristics of people practicing this form of walking involve a heavy disengagement from their surroundings - like listening to music or talking on the phone, etc. And a certain anxiousness in the time to reach their destination. Here, the destination is of prime importance.

Discursive walking is a less anxious mode of walking where one is more spontaneous and is characterized by varying pace and rhythm. “It is discursive because its pace and rhythm are synchronized with the walker’s own internal bodily rhythms (biological and psychological) whilst experiencing and swinging along with the places’ own moving rhythms, and being sensitive to external paces and temporalities in urban space.” 5 Discursive walking was inspired by Michel de Certeau’s ‘urban walking’- “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”6, and here, the journey is the highlight.

4. Filipa Matos Wunderlich, “Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space” Journal of Urban Design 13, no.1 (February 2008): 130.

5. Ibid.,132.

6. Michel de Certeau, The Practise of Everyday Life, (Bereley, University of California Press, 1988), 97.

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The third type is Conceptual Walking where it’s neither the journey, nor the destination, but the “principle act of walking itself, or other practices attached to it,”7 which is the main purpose. It is a conscious way to observe, understand and decipher the underlying layers of a city, that are not noticeable in everyday life. It is a way of “rethinking place as unfixed and site as performed.”8 This type of walking helps us understand lived societies by observing them and an ability for the walker to charter their perception of the lived city.

The three different types of walking indicate our presence of mind and our engagement with the surroundings. Surely, all acts of walking do not connect us to our environment all in the same way and an understanding of their differences helps identify how we relate to our environment. They are not mutually exclusive, but rather a classification through which we can acknowledge the different roles we take up through the act of walking. While all three types of walking help understand the characteristics of a place, discursive and conceptual practices of walking are primarily the ones to engage in to understand oneself and the environment. The concepts of “Flânerie” and “psychogeography” (which will be discussed in another chapter) are examples of discursive and conceptual walking respectively. By engaging in discursive walking we are allowing ourselves to be part of the observed city, which we actively observe through conceptual walking. By observing a person in the act of discursive walking, we can draw in data of how one is in the city - how comfortable they are, how conscious they are - through their walk. These data heavily depend on our relationship with the city based on past experiences, encounters, memories, and future expectations.

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7. Filipa Matos Wunderlich, “Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space” : 132.

8. Ibid.

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes making a single chord.

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”9 Walking might not be an ideal mode of transport considering the technological era we live in.

Innovation has provided us with quicker options that reduce time and increase efficiency. But apart from locomotion, walking as a methodology to slow down, understand and absorb the development around us has rarely been tapped into. To understand and put into effect the inherent qualities that walking provides is a practice one needs to adhere to. “As a ‘lifeworld’ (Seemon,1980,p. 149) practice, walking is an unconscious way of moving through urban space, enabling us to sense our bodies and the features of the environment.”10 The planned development of cities and towns acknowledges the pedestrian by providing them with pavements and footpaths through the urban jungle. But the choice of incorporating them or not, into the urban fabric, lies within its cultural context. For example in a country like India, with a stark difference in culture from western societies, pedestrian routes are often encroached by small-scale businesses and street vendors leaving little to no space for the pedestrian. And so the pedestrian tends to take over the motor roads, developing the knack to navigate traffic, tackle moving vehicles, and experience the amalgamation of the vendors, vehicles, and walking. (As we will see later on in the chapter). Over the years, the pedestrian movement has been subjected to restrictions in terms of how to walk and where to walk as a result of the organization of the city. This makes for an urban layer of experience only accessible to the pedestrian. “In great cities, spaces, as well as places, are

9. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (London, Granta Publications,2001), 5.

10. Filipa Matos Wunderlich, “Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space” : 125.

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designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship around participation in public life.”11 Pedestrianization doesn’t mean just ‘walking’ in cities. It also involves an invisible landscape of experiences and encounters that make our perception of the city more humane. To access it is to understand the city and how it lives and breathes. This perception is exactly what constitutes the cité. Pedestrianization becomes the passage through which we experience this cité. “Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city’, for the city is made to be walked, he (De Certeau) wrote. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”12 Despite these developments, certain activities - cultural, religious, and political - still encompass the practice of walking.

Crowds take to the street in the form of processions and parades on special events or festivals. This creates a sort of shared and lived memory, with the crowd that encapsulates one with a higher ideology that brings forth a different sort of experience, an exhilaration of sorts. In summoning all these experiences, individual and collective, we are forming an experience with the place, a relationship with the city.

What is most interesting about walking in cities is the way it entangles the ville and cité. With cities being highly designed for different types of transportation, the pedestrian is left with very little access. If a pedestrian had the choice to move in any direction, there are high chances of the pedestrian violating

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11. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, (London, Granta Publications,2001), 176.

12. Ibid., 213.

others’ privacy, being run over by moving vehicles, or being prone to other accidents. In this aspect, the designed city serves the purpose of controlling pedestrianization for one’s benefit though it might seem otherwise. The designed city also provides a platform for happenstance. Most cities are designed on a block basis with a never-ending number of crossroads and pedestrian enhancements. Cities built on varying landscapes also provide instances of happenstance through chance encounters with the people, the cityscape, or the landscape itself.

All these instances are ways in which the ville and cité interact with each other.

Through this, we can then say that walking is a part of any active urban life. It doesn’t matter if it brings about a collective or singular experience, it is still a medium through which we can experience the city and draw out understandings of the cité.

The invisible landscape we spoke about earlier makes up a large portion of the cité and it can be tapped into through any of the types of walking. This understanding is what we can effectively use as a tool to understand the cité and its city. Different ways through which we can put this into practice will be looked into in the following chapters, with practical exercises that were put to the test.

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contextual experiencing of walking To understand the cultural differences experienced through walking, I called upon a few friends in India, a country with drastic cultural and social differences. This led to a dialogue that helped ponder over the differences in cultural contexts and how walking leads to completely different experiences in different cities even in the same country. Walking in India is not easy as it is in Europe. While each side has its own set of constraints to tackle, the social fabric of India possesses more hurdles. Development in both countries has brought about ample pedestrian space, with European cities like Eindhoven being more organized and orderly, than cities in India. I conducted this activity with three cities, juxtaposed with Eindhoven, namely Pune (Tier 1 city), Mysore, and Pondicherry (Tier 2 cities).13 The activity consisted of a skype call with a friend from each city and we walked around the neighborhood showing each other the peculiarities while engaging in a conversation about walking. The following are the descriptions of the walks in each city. pune, maharashtra While walking around Pune14 with my friend, the first thing that one notices is the drooping canopy of trees that surround most paths of the city. Though the main roads of the city are equipped with pedestrian footpaths, the inner, smaller roads often don›t have them. This on a normal day could cause chaos due to a large number of vehicles and pedestrians trying to move through the same 6ft wide road. We were walking right after a major Indian festival called Diwali, which led houses

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13. Indian cities are classified as X (tier-1), Y (tier-2) and Z (tier-3) categories by the government, based on the population density. There are 8 metropolitan tier-1 cities, 104 tier-2 and the rest tier-3.

14. Refer pg 16-17 in the image booklet.

to be adorned with flowers and lights (lit at night) with the splendor of ‹rangolis›, a vibrant floral pattern made of colored rice powder. At major junctions, lines of auto-rickshaws ( three-wheeler taxis) stood at an edge, waiting for their next customer. Most footpaths were also equipped with wheelchair tracks. We walked past a local laundromat that uses coal to iron clothes usually leaving a trail of a sweet coal-burning smell. An open tennis court also adds to the visual experience when people passing by stop to watch matches. The overall built environment of Pune consists of infrastructure that improves the accessibility to places while being scattered with old traditional buildings along with newer modern ones which inherently give it the charm of an old heritage city. mysore, karnataka Mysore15, unlike Pune, is a smaller and less organized city. A major part of the city has a sort of pathway, beside the road, which has been covered in overgrown and unkempt shrubbery.

Mysore, like most cities in India, has a lot of trees bordering the roads and pathways. This keeps the paths quite cool. Due to the overgrown shrubbery, a pedestrian can walk only on the road, going around cars and other vehicles parked on the side. Without much surveillance, the vehicular traffic is also quite unruly and one is forced to look out for their safety. In the areas where the pavement is not covered in the shrubbery, and close to public spaces like parks, one can usually find small vendors selling snacks and colorful vegetables. The roadside vegetable vendors usually display their produce on a piece of cloth or tarpaulin. A temple with an ongoing service where bells were being rung and camphor being burnt lined the road. Running into familiar people is also a common thing in Mysore. And the city also has a lot of open restaurants where

15. Refer pg 18-19 in the image booklet.

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the customers eat standing at tables that are put up on the pavement. These are the Indian versions of fast food. pondicherry, pondicherry Pondicherry16 is a coastal town that was a French colony. The most pedestrian part of the city is by the beach where there is a promenade and is completely pedestrianized during certain parts of the day. The temperatures in Pondicherry are quite high that makes it uncomfortable to walk for longer periods.

The Promenade by the beach is laden with sand right beside the sea, a paved platform for walking, and a lower road that is closed off for pedestrians from time to time. There are a lot of stray dogs roaming around the streets and gaggles of pigeons flying around. Once you turn off from the beachside, the streets of Pondicherry are smaller and consist of a lot of parked vehicles. The roads have trees beside them, giving them some shade. A lot of the city also has well-maintained pedestrian pathways that are seldom used. Being a tourist city, Pondicherry is almost empty during weekdays and overly crowded during the weekends. Being a French colony, there are a lot of traditional French buildings along with Tamil (native to the region) ones. Most buildings are in bright colors with yellow and peach being the most common. They have huge branches of drooping bougainvillea plants that enhance the visual aesthetic of Pondicherry. Major streets also house vendors selling tender coconut water on their motorbikes and some with carts of roasted peanuts.

All these instances give us glimpses of the cité we encounter through walking in different parts of the world. To acknowledge that is to understand how each and everyone

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16. Refer pg 20-21 in the image booklet.

experiences walking through cities differently, how even people walking the same city have a completely different experience of it. Reflecting on this aspect helps us understand how each of us is connected to the same city, through different cité. This forms the basis of what the cité networks into. It becomes this huge entanglement of channels and a networked layer of personal cités.

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The Chase Another time we went exploring the neighborhood of Le Marais, or the swine of Paris. It was a dynamic, trendy neighborhood, and there was so much to capture. The cobbled streets with boutiques back to back, enjoying some strawberry and basil sorbet while looking at the Pompidou’s eccentric pipes, listening to a man curse as he picked up pieces of the bottle that broke with his plastic, a couple kissing while the stench of the area was wafting through. We passed through several bridges and roamed the streets. It seemed as though we were chasing something, but very slowly. When we finally sat down at a bar, we caught ourselves reminiscing about the chase, of what we left behind while pursuing the place…..

exploring the city-

revisiting figures from the nineteenth century

People come up with numerous answers when asked how they experience a place. While some say through food, through music, some through encounters with the locals, and some through historical monuments, I say it’s through walking. It’s not that there is only one way to experience a place, but to me, walking around, observing, and absorbing the nuances of the environment is a way of interacting with a place and its people, and helps me experience it to the fullest way possible. It helps us inculcate activities like site seeing and eating local food all through one medium. Walking helps us observe the landscape and see how plants and trees react to that particular climate or how people eat when passing by cafes and restaurants. It can also at times give us glimpses into indoor family life. As seen in the previous chapter, one could make use of the three types of walking, either by itself or in combination to develop one’s own set of rules and conduct to walk and experience the city.

Flanerie and Psychogeography are concepts of walking methodologies that were introduced around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand the city. An understanding of their development could help us understand the potential of walking in cities.

While looking for definitions of the flâneur and psychogeography, one realizes that it’s quite hard to define either of those,

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as they have been remodeled and redefined according to the place and the person whose interest it was to pursue them. At its most basic definition, the flâneur is a figure who wanders aimlessly through a place, drawing perceptions of it. While the flâneur has been elaborated as a literary figure with Charles Baudelaire as its leading pioneer, there have been many after him who took the figure and interpreted it in a way they deemed fit, thus making the flâneur a very ambiguous character. “It is precisely this elusive quality, and a resistance to easy classification, which is so apparent in the identity of the flâneur, a character who has managed to establish a literary history for himself without having ever fully disclosed his origins”.17 This ambiguity of the flâneur provides us with tools that can be appropriated to understand how the city around us evolves.

Most accounts of flanerie are documented in the literature, like stories written by André Breton (Nadja,1928 ) and Philippe Soupault (Last Nights of Paris,1928 ) of a protagonist who is a man wandering the streets of Paris, in pursuit of an enigmatic young woman who he met serendipitously. Such sort of literature, about the city-walking experience, mostly revolves around stalking a particular person or a general group of people (Breton stalked women with beautiful feet) and through the act, stumble upon different aspects of the city (in this case, Paris). It wasn’t the discovery of the city itself that was the drive towards walking it, rather the chasing of an enigma that became the discovery of the city. The enigma then becomes the thread that connects you to the flânerial activities.

Psychogeography is a way of exploring places through acts of playfulness and wonder that render the city from a different perspective.“Psychogeography seeks to overcome the process of ‘banalisation’ through which the experience of our familiar surroundings is rendered one of drab monotony”. 18 Known to

17. Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, (Herts, Oldcastle Books, 2006), 67.

18. Ibid., 17.

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gain popularity through Guy Debord’s Situationists movement, psychogeography has been adapted and put to use by various artists, researchers, and theorists. Many pioneers after Debord have made attempts to criticize his thinking of petitioning psychogeography as a process to enhance the experience of cities.

J.G Ballard is known to have brought in the “Death of Affect” where he draws parallels with Debord’s idea of resisting the banalisation of cities using psychogeography as a tool, where he reinstates that the very same things Debord claimed to have made the city banal, brings out an exhilarated experience of the city. One could make use of psychogeography by engaging in playful activities with the city that helped one to de-banalize it. These activities sought to break off from the traditional trajectory of viewing the city by offering new and exciting ones.

But even after their interpretation, psychogeography as a term and concept has been revived and modified to adapt to the changing landscape, whereas the flâneur has been a controversial one in terms of its existence.

The introduction of the flâneur in the 19th century gave its pioneers and authors a figure they could relate to. It was not necessary that everyone who knew about the flâneur needed to associate with it, but rather it provided a chance to those who did to identify and inculcate a set of habits, rules that potentially led them to develop their own narratives. For Walter Benjamin, the environment of the city provided the means to provoke lost memories of times past as he illustrates in his book The Arcades Project which centers around his version of the flâneur. Susan Buck-Morss, who studies Benjamin’s work says that “It is the material culture of the city, rather than the psyche, that provides the shared collective spaces where consciousness and the unconscious, the past and the present meet”.19 By trying to achieve a form of transcendence, the

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19. Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering” New German Critique, no. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn, 1986),

flâneur, exists in that space between the physical and the imaginary. This is what the flâneur does, it bridges the cité and the ville by walking through the city in a state that reverberates its physical aspects with the stimulations of the mind.

Iain Sinclair, a pioneer of psychogeography, sought out to walk the streets of London as a form of historical and geographical research along with contempt directed at the governance of London “more of a raging bull’s journey against the energies of the city”.20Through these acts of walking, he attempted to contemporize the flâneur by introducing characters like the stalker and fuguer. The fugue is a state of walking, where one relinquishes themselves into the act of willful forgetting, a dream-like progression where the act of walking itself is a symptom of madness - into a state of fugue. Sinclair describes the fugue as “both drift and fracture. The story of the trip can only be recovered by some form of hypnosis, the memory prompt of the journal or photo album. Documentary evidence of things that may never have happened” .21 This attempt was to understand the socio-political conditions of the city, by pausing whenever necessary and keeping note of everything that it observes, understands, and feels. By transforming the flâneur to the stalker and then to the fuguer, Sinclair has attempted to help us understand the changing landscape of cities, how the act of walking can at the same time help us understand the environment while being distanced from the surroundings. While Sinclair’s take on psychogeography has been successful, at least within the London sphere, I cannot but wonder if this extensive detachment of the fuguer in an attempt to understand the city is valid globally.

Walking or rather drifting to study the environment is not a method many people would choose to adopt. But to those who

20. Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, (Herts, Oldcastle Books, 2006), 155.

21. Iain Sinclair, London Orbital, (UK, Penguin Books, 2003), 119-121.

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do, the ideologies of flânerie give them a base with which they can relate to other fellow flâneurs. Like a template that can be used by everybody. When we relate to a pre-existing figure, the conviction of what we do, in this case walking the city to understand its settings, becomes more relatable and concrete.

Inherently the flâneur becomes a research tool we can use to understand the city. And like any other tool, giving it a concrete definition, a defined characteristic helps it to be appropriated for the particular task.

Most of the theories relating to the flâneur and psychogeography have meddled within only Paris and London and a few cities in the United States. So from that point of view, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord or Iain Sinclair’s attempt at framing it is largely lacking in a common template that acknowledges different cultural contexts. As seen from their works, the theories they proposed did succeed (might still be successful in some cities in the world) in the places they were attempting to understand. But at this point of age and time, we should be progressing toward an inclusive character or concept, one that transcends geographical boundaries and social stigmas while acknowledging different cultures. It’s not that Sinclair’s fuguer doesn’t approach this, but maybe we should exemplify this and add to the fuguer as and when we deal with newer urban social issues. This could then possibly bring about multiple versions of the flâneur, one for each place with its own peculiarities.

If the accounts of walking that were described in the previous chapter were looked through the flanerial eye, it shows how the flânerie would be different in different places and hence calls for a more uniform definition. Like Iain Sinclair speculated, I am more convinced of the term ‘fuguer’ as a drifter with fractures in his path for the current situation rather than a

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flâneur. With the urban fabric being so dense and chaotic, one cannot easily stroll through the city. It needs a lot of reflexivities which the body can provide in a state of conceptual walking, with pauses in between. The flâneur has transitioned from a discursive method of walking to a conceptual one. In doing so, the flâneur also needs to be more political in its drifting, where it sticks to the task at hand without being distracted by the pressures of society. The task, as mentioned before, should be pursuing an enigma, that helps in the discovery of the city. The flâneur needs to be rooted in the culture of the place, observing its traditions while simultaneously being a tourist in its own city. As the early versions of the flâneur, the new one needs to move not only with sight but with opinion, thoughts, and morality. The flâneur also needs to be empathetic, knowing the limits of the city but not burdened by it. “A present-day flâneur is, or perhaps we might say ‘should be ‘ more attentive to questions of gender and ethnicity. As Featherstone and Jenks say, a flâneur today has to be engaged with the crowd. But Morawski is probably correct as well when he argues that, in today’s society, a flâneur is very likely to be seen as a capital criminal.

There is then a difficult political ground to be walked, not idly and carelessly strolled by the flâneur”. 22 With this form of a revised flâneur, there seems to be hardly any distinctions between flânerie and psychogeography. But it could then be that by practicing psychogeography, we are conjuring a flâneur. And this flâneur in turn becomes the tool, a template with which we can assess the city, and have a common set of values through which understanding the city becomes accessible to everyone. This then helps us observe and synthesize the parts of the city that constitute the cité.

22. Chris Jenks and Tiago Neves, “A walk on the wild side: urban ethnography meets the flâneur” Journal for Cultural Research 4, no.1 (March 2009): 15.

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The Chaos ...While observing the Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot, there were so many things happening around us. As it was my first time seeing the Eiffel tower, I was keenly intent on observing it to understand if it fell above or below my expectations. At that very moment when I felt the pleasure of finally being there in Paris, witnessing this famous monument, is when a family of four asked me to take their photo. I couldn’t understand French, but we spoke in a language universal to all - smiles and gestures.

There was a staging of some sort going on there when we were visiting. People of a Middle Eastern country were gathering together in solidarity. A few people were talking in Arabic with a large crowd cheering them on. For me, it seemed so unusual to hear a language other than French in Paris. For a while after taking photos of the family, I stood there observing them. I wondered, would I have joined them had I known what they were talking about?...

understanding the city geographicality of a place

The previous two chapters focused on walking and its relation to the person and how it helps one navigate and understand the environment. To further the research and look into how we react or rather mingle with the environment, we need to make use of phenomenology. Martin Heidegger describes phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves”. 23 “Phenomenology is a way of thinking that enables us to see clearly something that is, in effect, right before our eyes yet somehow obscured from us - something so taken for granted that it is ignored or allowed to be distinguished by a cloak of abstractions”. 24The way I look at it is that phenomenology is a process of thinking about things beyond its physical appearance, how it interacts and interferes with everyday lives beyond the obvious and in a more abstract form. This allows us to understand the psychology of mundane matter, in this case, the environment, and how we humans experience it.

In this research, we are looking at ‘geographical experience’.

Geographical experience is a very ordinary phenomenon in phenomenology that “refers to the entire realm of feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in which they apprehend themselves in a distinct relationship with their environment”.25 While geographical experience does not give us answers to our behavior with the environment, it does provide some insight

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23. Martin Heidegger, letter in W.J. Richardsons, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p.xiv.

24. Edward Relph, “Geographical experiences and being in the world: The phenomenological origins of geography” in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world, ed David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 15 25. Ibid., 20.

into how we look at certain aspects of geography, the philosophy of geography. It introduces us to what Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’. According to Heidegger, being-in-theworld is the “basic state of human existence, and it indicates the fact that everything which exists has an environment”.26 In this sense, it could mean that everything which exists, can be singled out and studied with respect to its environment. “Being-in-the-world embraces the fact that there is always and already an environment for each of us before we become curious about the earth and the location and character of its different places”.27 While everything surrounding us is already in a state of being-in-the-world, we can use the fact that everything we interact with has an environment of its own to get a good insight into understanding our relationship with it. By interacting, for example with a tree, we are becoming a part of its environment as much as it becomes part of ours. This affiliation of understanding environments becomes crucial to understand geographical experience.

The French historian, Eric Dardel attempted to provide definitions to aspects of the environment, based on geographical experience. He describes how we resonate with our environment using a few terms such as region, landscape, space, and place.

These terms are collectively known as the ‘geographicality’ of the place. Geographicality is the experience of any geographical phenomenon beyond its physical matter and more in an abstract and metaphorical connotation. It is used to understand how we interact and situate ourselves within the environment.

“Geographicality is grounded in an original wondering about environment and is ‘the distinctive relationship which binds man to the earth….his way of existence and his fate’.”28 Geographical terms such as region, place, and landscape are 26. Edward Relph, “Geographical experiences and being in the world: The phenomenological origins of geography” in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world, ed David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 17.

27. Ibid., 19.

28. Ibid., 21.

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simple terms that are used to denote parts of the terrain. In geographical experience, these terms are given meanings that are associated with the experience of it and not the physicality of it. This is what Dardel terms as geographically, the main aspect of geographical experience. These aspects, which are all different ways of manifesting being-in-the-world are region, landscape, space, and place.

Region is defined just like its geographical counterpart, where it determines how we identify ourselves belonging to a certain environment. That is, in my case, I identify myself as a Malayali, from the region of Kerala in India. And I speak the language Malayalam. No matter where I am in the world, these data are what I would like to define me. One necessarily does not have to identify with a particular area of geographical land. It could even be broader classifications including history, terrain, or even climate, or all of them together. This could even be looked at as a way to center oneself around our own environment.

Landscape, in plain geographical terminology, is the visual aspect of the environment - the most visible part of regional character. It usually refers to the scenery, the view from one’s window, or the skyline of a city. But landscape in geographical experience denotes something beyond the physicality of these scenes. It is an amalgamation of encounters and interactions, with people, animals, and nature. It’s not something that is forced, but rather something that exists without knowledge, something that manifests with acknowledgment. Eric Dardel wrote that “a landscape is something more than a juxtaposition of picturesque details; it is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived moment. There is an internal bond, an ‘impression’, that unites all its elements”.29

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29. Eric Dardel, L’Homme et la Terre, p 41. Referenced from Edward Relph, “Geographical experiences and being in the world: The phenomenological origins of geography” in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world, ed David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 23.

Geographical space as Dardel explains is the natural and constructed parts of the world. To understand it better, Dardel talks about five aspects of geographical space which are not mutually exclusive. Material spaces are those that consist of cliffs, fields, city skylines, etc. These material spaces are those that give a particular surrounding its physical character. Telluric space consists of areas that signify depth, solidity, and durability such as caves, mineral deposits, exposed rocks. The space of water is all the bodies that consist of water. They are “ formless and filled with motion and almost endless contemplation”.30 The space of air is of the shifting skies filled with clouds, mist, sunshine rain, and snow. The aforementioned four spaces are all-natural, natural in the sense that it is not made by people but are either discovered, given or exposed to them. The fifth aspect of Dardel’s geographical space is that of human-made spaces. These are spaces that are constructed to offer a sense of security from the external world. All of these aspects together form geographical space.

Place, though closely related to space and landscape, has a different experiential quality. While space and landscape are part of immediate encounters with the world, place is what has been formed by memories created by repeated encounters and complex associations. They are attachments that are formed over time. “In geographical experience, a place is an origin; it is where one knows others and is known to others; it is where one comes from and it is one’s own.”31 One does not necessarily need to have a strong and positive connection to a place (topophilia). Some places are rendered negative with a need to avoid them (topophobia). But irrespective of the type of connection we have with a particular place, they are meant to have a significant meaning in our life that is set apart in time and space.

30. Edward Relph, “Geographical experiences and being in the world: The phenomenological origins of geography” in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world, ed David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 25.

31. Ibid., 27.

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All these aspects of geographical experience are threads with which we relate ourselves to the world. While region and place are carried along with us, they form this ‘metadata’ of our existence. And landscape and space provide us with a platform for encounters and interaction that add to our geographical experience. They are all geographical modes of experience with an element of metaphor. And in this way, individuals like us, can be fully aware and hence immerse ourselves in the environment completely. “Geographical reality demands an involvement of the individual through his emotions, his habits, his body, that is so complete that he comes to forget it much as he comes to forget his own physiognomy. Geographicality is therefore unobtrusive, inconspicuously familiar, more lived than discussed. It is, in fact, a naming of the geographical forms of being-in-theworld”.32

the eindhoven project To put these theories and that of the flânerie and psychogeography from the previous chapters, into practice, I made use of an activity that Robert Macfarlane suggests. He says “ Unfold a street map of London, place a glass rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experiences as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking

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32. Edward Relph, “Geographical experiences and being in the world: The phenomenological origins of geography” in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world, ed David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 21.

makes for content; footage for footage”.33 I appropriated this activity, originally intended for London, and did the same with Eindhoven.34 Throughout my walk, I marked and noted down experiences, thoughts, and observations. By tracing out the closest path to the circle, I familiarised myself with the route, thus not having to stop now and then to check the direction and have a rather smooth experience.

The circle took me to parts of Eindhoven I have been to before, but the experience was completely different as I approached it from a totally different direction. These led me to notice a few other things I wouldn’t have noticed had I gone my usual route.

The bright painted graffiti, the brick pattern, and the quirky oat milk advertisement were a few. I even discovered a street I had never known existed as it was completely hidden from sight before. I encountered a huge truck on a crossroad struggling to move and stopped to witness its struggle in the quiet neighborhood. A large wheelbarrow with what seemed to be trash, containing a few broken pieces of furniture also added to the poetry of what I was witnessing.

Throughout the walk, I was in a constant encounter with everything I was surrounded by. Whatever I observed was a conscious effort is acknowledging this relationship and accepting its mundane presence. There were instances where I encountered the geographicality of Region when passing by a Motta book store, taking me back to my identity with Malayalam, the language I speak. Or with having to deny people answers to questions in Dutch because I don’t know and cannot speak the language. Another time, I was reminded of the geographicality of Landscape, when I was walking in synchronization with a stranger and we appeared to move in harmony.

33. Robert Macfarlane, “ A Road of One’s Own: Past and Present Artsists of the Randomly Motivated Walk”, Times Literary Supplement (October 2005): 3.

34. Refer to pg 22 onwards from the image booklet.

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It was as though there was an invisible thread connecting us.

Or the time when I stopped to observe a school building that appears to have been there for a long time. This walk enabled me to discover the small yet astounding parts of a city by invoking the flâneur and at the same time, reflect on the aspects of the environment that connect me to it. This walk also provided me with a fresh perspective of Eindhoven, which has brought me closer to the city. By observing and looking at these minute aspects of Eindhoven, I have been able to tap and gather another layer of interactions and encounters with the environment that has helped me realize a bit more of what constitutes Eindhoven’s cité.

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The Memories ...In the end, what do I remember of Paris? I remember the drab monotonous sandstone building with yellow awnings, the numerous postcards of others’ memories, being sold by the Seine. I remember the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris burnt down yet standing strong.

I remember an English book in a pile of French and a beautiful orange sandal by the store window. I remember the taste of strawberry (sorbet) against the basil. I remember my parents, through a phone screen gaping at the Eiffel tower. I remember ice-cold concentrated lemon juice. I remember couples kissing in front of the Arc De Triomphe.

I remember a bewildered passenger expressing her frustration and I remember the pink sugar of the Brioche aux pralines. Paris for me no longer remains a city. It has now become a web of stories...

analyzing the city -

ethno-mimesis and embodiment

So far, we have been able to look at walking as a tool and use it as the flâneur to understand the relationship we develop with our environment. While this methodology is important in understanding how we perceive our cities, a look at cities through another person’s perspective helps us clarify our position and understanding. It also helps us navigate a certain reality we are not directly connected to. This is what I understand to be the next step in our quest for the cité.

With trying to embody another person, we also develop an empathetic understanding of the environment which is very essential in determining our attachment to place.

Maggie O’Neill, an ethnographer termed the word ‘ethno-mimesis’ as: “Ethno-mimesis is a term that captures the combination of ethnographic participatory work and the visual artistic or poetic representation of research”.35 Using the concepts of Participatory Action Research (PAR) and ethno-mimesis, she devised a few activities that helped her understand a ‘sense of belonging’ in asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants in the English East Midlands. While her research had the objective of focusing on these displaced participants, her subjective matter, her methodology can be adapted and repurposed to understand how individuals experience the city. The underlying theory she uses to support her research method of

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35. Maggie O’Neill, “Ethnography and Participatory Acts”, in Advances in Visual Methodology, ed Sarah Pink (London, SAGE Publications Ltd, 2013), 6.

walking and performing has been used in the exercise. “Walking as a practice, combined with ethnographic, biographical forms of doing research (ethno-mimesis), can help articulate the sense of being ‘home away from home’ in a number of registers, simultaneously producing knowledge about the rich cultural combinations and skills migrants bring to the region’s cities, towns, cultures, and communities”.36 Both sets of exercises (the one originally executed by O’Neill and the one repurposed by me) start from the same point drawing maps of pathways entirely from memory. While the “Sense of belonging” project looked into pathways from the migrants’ home towns, I focused on a frequented or favorite pathway within the city we (participants and I) were located in - Eindhoven. The highlight of these ethnographic endeavors was to highlight a language, accessible to all, irrespective of educational status, which is also a form of art-making. “Certainly, in representing ethnographic data in an artistic form we can access a richer understanding of the complexities of lived experience that can throw light on broader social structures and processes.”37 The “sense of belonging” project suggested the superimposing of these ‘memory maps’ onto the city map of London, where they now reside, and the respective participant was asked to walk the map with a co-walker native to the particular region.

In doing so, they developed a dialogue that drew in aspects of experiences, memories, feelings about home, dislocation, placemaking, etc. Whereas in the Eindhoven project, participants were asked to exchange their maps with a partner and walk the map they received. They were later on called in to exchange dialogues on their experiences thus making the walk a complete embodied experience. Both the projects looked at 36. Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard, “Walking, Sensing, Belonging: ethno-mimesis as performative praxis”, in Visual Studies, (London, Routledge, 2010), 47.

37. Maggie O’Neill, “Ethnography and Participatory Acts”, 6.

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factors of time, place, context and situatedness that brought in an air of sensuousness, that linked memories of the past with the present, which was performed during the walk.”...tracing an imaginary and real journey that linked the here and now to the then and there”.38

ethno-mimesis as a form of embodiment A group of eight participants were given a sheet of paper and asked to draw a map completely from memory. The map was to consist of a path between two points in Eindhoven of not more than 10 to 15 minutes long walk and it was to be layered with buildings and spaces they could remember, experiences and encounters they have had, small things they pause at to admire and any set of other instructions that makes it a worthwhile experience for the walker. After the map was drawn, they were asked to exchange their maps with a partner and find a suitable time to use their partner’s map to walk and experience what they have drawn. The exchanged map was to be reacted to, using a translucent sheet that joined both (drawn map + reacted map) to make a web of experiences and everyday poetry.39 Later they were also called on for an interview of their experience where they shared, the highlights and encounters during the walk.

Upon studying the maps that are produced by the participants, we can observe an underlying theme. For the map illustrated by a participant (check MAP01/01 and MAP01/02), there are references to nature. Rains, dogs, rabbits, leaves, wooded areas, and a hint at a homely atmosphere with references to friends’ homes.

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38. Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard, “Walking, Sensing, Belonging: ethno-mimesis as performative praxis”, in Visual Studies, (London, Routledge, 2010), 46.

39. Everyday poetry is an attempt to romanticize the mundane activities of daily life.

This does give the reader a look into how this participant views this part of the city. We could safely assume that nature and natural pockets are what connect them to the city.

Observing the maps by another participant (check MAP06/01 and MAP06/02) we can see that the map is connotated with words such as danger, lost, unknown, nowhere, etc. These give the sense that the city is filled with suspicious places through the mapper’s eyes. The use of a lot of black scribbles adds to this conception.

MAP02/01 and MAP02/02 show us the maps by a third participant. Here there is a sense of ambiguousness purposely incorporated by the participant. During the interview, when both the participants were talking about their experience, the topic of this ambiguousness came about. The walker of the map appreciated this quality because it gave room to add to it one’s interpretation, but at the same time, the walker also mentioned getting lost in certain areas.

These are only a few examples from the participants, but during the interview sessions, there were a few observations noted down by the participants when in dialogue with their partner.

While all of them found the activity exciting and interesting, the highlight of the entire activity was the interview session where they were in dialogue with each other about their experiences. Most of them completed the entire activity through the act of walking, but some to whom walking was not appealing enough, chose to ride their bikes through it. This shows how the demand for walking in any form lies. It is not a choice many would consciously opt for. Some participants mentioned how

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the city the activity took place in, Eindhoven, felt like it was not meant for pedestrians. They felt that with Dutch cities being predominantly filled with cyclists, walking felt like a dangerous activity. This particular reaction also draws in from their previous experience of cities where it was predominantly pedestrianized. Weather played a very big role in these activities. Most of them were lucky as they were blessed with good weather, except for areas where there were the remains from the rains, like damp soil and slippery paths. One of them who happened to be caught under the rain during their activity said that it only added to his experience. Apart from these, everyone felt that there was a mingling of experiences, a deeper understanding of the place and its mappers, and a form of memory-making.

All these are facets of ethno-mimesis. “At the core of the process is an exploration of the transformative role of art and the methodological approach of working with artists: ethno-mimesis foregrounds the transformative role and capacity of art and emphasises the importance of biography (life-story) as critical theory in practice”.40 If we were to understand the cité using these forms of research, we are bringing in a critical tool that helps enable dialogue and discussions on experiences in the city.

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40. Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard, “Walking, Sensing, Belonging: ethno-mimesis as performative praxis”, in Visual Studies, (London, Routledge, 2010), 47.

conclusion cité and ville What exactly is the relationship between cité and ville? The evolution of cité and ville can be quite a tricky one. What came first, the cité or the ville? The way I see it, a group of people with similar ideologies came together and decided to form a community to live in. This was the start of the cité. They then built houses, roads, and community centers that became the ville. With the development of the ville, many more people were drawn to the community increasing the scope of the cité, which further led to the development of the ville and so on until it became large enough to be called a city, creating a constant loop of development for both ville and cité. While the ville can be quantified in some form (by keeping records of the buildings, roads, bridges, etc), cité is something that cannot be quantified but understood as a scope within a defined ville. So neither cité nor ville can exist without the other and cannot be understood without the other.

Since the early 1900s, researchers and urbanists kept the ville and cité separate from each other without connecting them to study the city. While the people were studied (only a portion of the cité ) for demographic and cultural research work, the ville was studied for the physical development of cities. There was a struggle to connect both and an attempt at doing so was soon given up. The biggest examples were of The Chicago School of

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Sociology, researching to understand what it was like for African Americans after the first world war to migrate and dwell in Chicago after coming from poorer states. This research culminated in a two-dimensional perception of a city, without looking at its infrastructure, but only its citizens and their lives. Here only the cité was considered, while the ville was neglected. This gave inaccurate images of the city that disregarded the physical as though cities were never three-dimensional. In a similar, but opposing outlook was Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin model of Paris. Plan Voisin was made as an attempt to redesign Paris in order to eliminate disease and plague that had affected a few of its areas. The Plan Voisin sought to bring about light and air into the X-shaped towers and the plan focused more on the materiality of the building rather than the citizen who would have supposedly lived in it. Corbusier at that time was against the pedestrianized street, blaming it for the lack of prosperity of the city. This attempt saw a huge disparity between cité and ville and distanced the former from the latter.

Ever since then, there has hardly been any conscious effort to reunite the cité and ville. Some theorists attempted to bridge this gap, but it was never considered a rekindling of cité and ville, rather an attempt to design the ville by including the cité.

Jane Jacobs, who firmly believed in an organic, slow development of cities, suggests that if we pave way for more interactions, more encounters, a sort of “neighborliness without intimacy” 41- what is essentially cité at its root, it could develop a ville that would attach people to the place where they live irrespective of how attractive it was. What cities then need is the right kind of ville that enhances the cité. And to enhance the cité we need spaces that allow us to walk, move while making contact, make relations with the environment without getting intimate and drift with some fracture.

41. Richard Sennet, Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City, (United Kingdom, Penguin House,2019),81.

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The first three parts of this research were to understand, 1. how we situate ourselves within the environment while engaging with the city, 2. how we form connections by inhabiting the space 3. how our engagement with the environment is a manifestation of different attributes we carry within ourselves.

These parts of the research were only the groundwork and it was put to the test using activities, especially through ethno-mimesis. The entire research while focusing on walking at the core was an attempt to derive different practices and methods of research that uses a mundane activity to discover the extraordinary in mundane parts of everyday life. As we saw in the earlier chapters, we are in a multi-dimensional relationship with our environment when we walk as opposed to a two-dimensional relationship when we move in a vehicle. We are fully physically immersed in our environment while walking and not just with the interiors of a vehicle. This gives us a great insight into what our neighborhood consists of and an opportunity to understand it. By understanding the concept of the flâneur, which makes use of walking, we can develop a tool that will help us explore the diversity of everyday life in cities. And by exploring the diversity of everyday life, we are opening ourselves to newer experiences and broadening the scope of the cité.

By being aware of how we relate to the environment, how we experience geographicality, we are understanding the city. This allows us to empathize with our neighborhood, understanding how each and every tiny piece of the environment is vital to a lively communal society. And finally, by immersing in ethnographical practices, we get a chance to analyze the city. And in analyzing, we get a better idea of the short and long comings, that help bridge the gap between the cité and ville.

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With this research, what I am attempting to highlight is not how people should walk more often or how beneficial it is, rather the implications it has on the temporal, cognitive, spatial, and social fabric of the city and by allowing oneself to be in the midst of an environment, completely susceptible to happenstance is when we are truly part of the city by engraving our mark on the ever-growing cité. Without understanding the cité, we cannot completely make sense of the ville and without understanding the ville or the cité, the city is rendered drab and monotonous.

All cities are romantic in a way. These romantic elements come about when there are spatial, temporal, and sensorial conjunctions of the cité. By following the flâneur, we get an experience of the spatial and sensorial aspects of the city over a temporal period. By incorporating experiences of geographicality, we are constantly engaging with our memories of place and time in an urban setting. And by analyzing both, we can paint a picture of what it is to live in a reality of entangled experiences that add to the invisible urban layer making up the cité. Hence these three aspects, the exploration, understanding, and analysis of the environment while actively taking part in walking become crucial elements with which we understand the cité. And understanding the cité becomes critical to understanding the ville. And only by understanding the ville, are we able to bring about necessary developments that keep the cité as a blend of interactions, encounters, and everyday poetry. Only by discovering the cité, can we truly understand what connects us to a place. All the souvenirs we collect over our years, knowingly or unknowingly become a part of our encounters with the cité, which makes us attached to the cité. It is at the end, the cité of the place that connects us, develops a relationship with us that we cherish for the rest of our lives.

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bibliography books Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Hertfordshire: Oldcastle Books, 2006.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practise of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Ellard, Colin, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2015.

O’Neill, Maggie. “Ethno-Mimesis and Participatory Acts.” in Advances in Visual Methodology. edited

by Sarah Pink, 153-172. London: SAGE Publications, 2013.

Pink, Sarah, Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE Publications, 2009.

Seamon, David and Robert Mugerauer. Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,1985.

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Self, Will. Psychogeography. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Sennet, Richard. Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City. London, Penguin House, 2019.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Granta Publications, 2001.

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articles Adams, Mags, and Simon Guy. “Senses and the City.”

The Senses and Society 2, no. 2 (April 2015): 133-136.

Bassett, Keith. “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic Experiments.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28, no. 3 (November 2004): 397-410.

Boutin, Aimée. “Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses.” Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuxiémistes 16, no. 2 (March 2014): 124-132.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering”, New German Critique, No. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn, 1986): 99-140.

Jenks, Chris, and Tiago Neves. “A walk on the wild side: urban ethnography meets the flâneur.” Journal for Cultural Research 4, no.1 (March 2009): 1-17.

Lévesque, Carole. “Narrative Walking as a Research Method: 42 Hours across a Terrain Vague.” Narrating Urban Landscapes, Oase Journal no 98 (July 2017): 116-118.

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Middleton, Jennie. “Sense and the city: Exploring the embodied geographies of Urban Walking.” in Social and Cultural Geography 11, no.6 (August 2010): 575-596.

O’Neill, Maggie, and Phil Hubbard. “Walking, Sensing, Belonging: ethno-mimesis as performative praxis.” Visual Studies 25, no.1 (March 2010): 46-58.

Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. “Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space.” Journal of Urban Design 13, no.1 (February 2008): 125-139.

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acknowledgements for all the help, support and encouragement (in alphabetical order)

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supervisors:

special thanks to:

Agata Jaworska Alex Walker Antonis Pittas James Taylor Foster Lua Vollard Marthe Prins Patricia Reed Saskia Van Stein

Akarsh Sinha Anala Patwardhan Cecilia Casabona Deepa Parameswaran Doi De Louise Fernand Gloria P Xavier Jonė Miškinytė Juliette Mirabito Léna Paté Malavika Murthy Marija Bilijan Nachiketa Mohanta Paula Chang Ramon Jimenez Cardenas Silvia Angelucci Sofia Topi Valeria Fabiano Victoria Plasteig Viktória Kaslik

wandering the city,2021>> the main text booklet

wandering the city a visual interlude

what constitutes a city? is it the organisation of buildings? or the building of experiences?

3

pg 4-13; images taken and edited by litty salas.

pg 2-3; source: barcelona from above by marton mogyorosy https://martonmogyorosy.com/barcelona-from-above edited by litty salas.

of one’s daily life,

or the intertwining of passages susceptible to happenstance..

5

with subtly nuanced memories...

Sometimes, its hard to understand what ha We know only a part of it, process

appens in a city... an even smaller bit -

but the beauty of it l

by projecting what it woul

lies when looking at it from a distance...

ld seem for it to be a friend...

and by caressing it, by walking through we breathe life into the poetically

h it... prosaic city.

wandering the city a research through imagery

pune, maharashtra

contextual experience of walking 00:20 01:03

03:32 04:10

10:00

10:48

15:56

16:12

02:04

05:09 06:28

13:19

15:07

17:14

17:28

17

refer page 27 of the text booklet.

video collaboration through skype with Anala Patwardhan.

01:28

mysore, karnataka

contextual experience of walking 01:02 01:54

04:20 04:56

08:37

08:43

12:00

13:37

02:35

06:40 06:58

08:57

10:02

14:10

14:54

19

refer page 28 of the text booklet.

video collaboration through skype with Malavika Murthy.

02:08

pondicherry, pondicherry

contextual experience of walking 01:45 02:32

11:18 11:34

12:58

13:54

14:49

17:46

09:06

12:09 12:21

14:19

14:38

18:47

19:34

21

refer page 29 of the text booklet.

video collaboration through skype with Nachiketa Mohanta.

03:53

the eindhoven project

videography of a walk through eindhoven. refer to page 45 of the text booklet.

(video frames from the eindhoven project of 20sec intervals.)

23

XX:00:20>> XX:00:40>> XX:01:00>> XX:01:20>> XX:01:40>>

the eindhoven project

videography of a walk through eindhoven.

(video frames from the eindhoven project of 20sec intervals.)

25

XX:00:20>> XX:00:40>> XX:01:00>> XX:01:20>> XX:01:40>>

the eindhoven project

videography of a walk through eindhoven.

(video frames from the eindhoven project of 20sec intervals.)

27

XX:00:20>> XX:00:40>> XX:01:00>> XX:01:20>> XX:01:40>>

the eindhoven project

videography of a walk through eindhoven.

(video frames from the eindhoven project of 20sec intervals.)

29

XX:00:20>> XX:00:40>> XX:01:00>> XX:01:20>> XX:01:40>>

what is a city that cannot be seen?

what is a city that cannot be heard? what is a city that cannot be smelled?

31

a city that needs to be felt..

wandering the city,2021>> the image booklet