To walk is to cartograph
Walkography began as the need to develop an original methodology for personal observation of territory, starting from walking itself — the most ordinary and least examined of human acts.
As discussed in other entries on this site, walking — understood as the sum of moving, observing and perceiving through every available sense — is both an analytical operation and a strictly projectual one. According to some theorists, walking is simultaneously a reading and a writing of territory, and coincides with the cartographic act. An act which is itself, in turn, both analysis and project.
Manuel de Solà-Morales argues that true imagination cannot do without analysis, and formulated the following sequence to demonstrate the central role of analysis in the design process (9)(10):
• To cartograph is to describe;
• To describe is to analyse;
• To analyse is to imagine;
• To imagine is to discover;
• To discover is to select;
• To select is to propose.
If we treat walking as a “synonym” for cartographing, we can add one line at the start of the sequence:
• To walk is to cartograph.
That addition is fundamental to Walkography’s approach. The project begins with walking and makes observation — and therefore analysis — its starting point, with the aim of integrating conventional approaches to the design of urban space with others that treat wellbeing, collaboration and perception as legitimate design material in their own right.
Ten years on from that first formulation, Walkography has evolved through the building of a specific device, designed to support the practice without replacing either the walking body or the memory that filters what it has seen. The founding hypothesis — to walk is to cartograph — still holds; what’s new is the instrument that now lets it be exercised at a different rhythm, with a continuity that wasn’t possible before. In the Atlas sections you can find more about the Device.
The theoretical foundations of Walkography lie in the research plan of an unfinished doctoral thesis written in 2016. The texts in this section gather and expand on those early writings; some passages may therefore carry the mark of their time. Updating and growing this corpus is one of the project’s aims.
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- Solà Morales, Manuel; Parcerisa, J. La forma d’un pais. A: La identitat del territori catalá- les co-marques- Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme - numero extra. Barcelona: 1981.
- García, J.C. Atlas de paisaje de la memoria - Galicia 1579 - 1865. 2015.