Bruce Nauman cruising to Drake?

(It really comes together at 2:30)

'to Copenhagenize'

Copenhagenization is the bicycle's equivalent of walkability, where transportation is focused on cycling and pedestrianism, rather than car transport. This is achieved through the implementation of better bike and walking infrastructure.

The term was coined by Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl, who, over decades, studied how public urban spaces worked, and advised cities across the world on improving the quality of urban life.

This is an interesting blog that focuses on European bike culture that I found in a roundabout way through my research into walkability. I wish Rob Ford would get the memo.

Summary: Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche from Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

Walking as a cultural activity is fading, as well as the relationship it gives between the body and the world. This is in part due to growing suburbanization, which changes the scale of everyday life. Walking is an indicator species

Suburbia

In Bourgeois Utopias, Fishman writes, middle-class suburban homes were first built outside London in the late 18th century, as a way for pious city merchants to separate family life from work in the city, which was also full of immoral forces. Around this time, the house had begun to be thought of as a consecrated space separate from the rest of the world, headed by the wife-mother who was also confined. These were different from country estates, in that country estates were a locus of activity and production that housed farmers, servants, game keepers, etc. while the suburb house was a place of consumption. In Manchester, suburbs were built by manufacturers to increase the quality of life for factory workers so that they could escape from the industrial pollution, poorly designed city and the sight of their miserable workforce. Suburbanization had two consequences: it created an empty central business district in the city, and it engulfed the once peripheral factories with a ring of suburban houses.

In fleeing the city, the middle class also left pedestrian scale. They could walk in the suburbs, but there was often no place to go. The proliferation of the car made it possible for people to live even farther from work, stores, public transit, school and social life. This key navigating the suburbs is denied to the very young and the elderly.
Suburbs are built car-scale – modern suburbs, highways and parking lots are infrastructure for driving, much like sidewalks, trails and arcades are infrastructure for walking. Cars made it possible for sprawls to develop independent of urban centres (Albuquerque, Houston, Denver, Phoenix) where no one is expected to walk – it is dull, circuitous, isolated. Walking can become a sign of powerlessness – some urban centres are designed so that the car is the only safe way to travel (Yucca Valley) or without sidewalks entirely (South Tuscon). “The pedestrian remains the single largest obstacle to free traffic movement” according to 1960s LA planners.

In the development of the suburbs, the porch, a feature of small town social life, was replaced by the garage. We are in a new era of design, security and architecture that attempts to eliminate public space. According to Kierkegaard, “it is extremely regrettable and demoralizing that robbers and the elite agree on just one thing – living in hiding.”
The disappearance of pedestrian space has transformed our state of embodiment, of being corporeal in recent decades.

The disembodiment of everyday life

On September 18th 1830, the inauguration of the first steam powered railway between Liverpool and Manchester - foot power became obsolete, and just like how the factory sped production, the train sped distribution and travel. The train severed human perception, expectation and action from the natural world. In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schrivelbusch writes how early railway users saw time and space disappear – essentially transcend the material world and become disembodied. Speed made travel less interesting, boring and travelers read or slept rather than remain engaged with the landscape which they passed by too fast to focus on. This is a state bordering on sensory deprivation.

Bodies are perceived of as too frail for our desires. The car is a prosthetic for a world that has become inhuman in scale. Many identify with the speed of the machine, and look with frustration at the ability of the body. Just like how the speed of factory production did not decrease working hours, the speed of transportation binds people to more diffuse locales, rather than lend free time. The decline of walking is not just about the lack of space to do so in, but a lack of time.

There has been a surburbanization of the mind as well. Even in very walkable places, it is common to drive or take public transit to places easily accessible by foot. There is a shrinking mental radius of how far people are willing to walk. The body has ceased to be utilitarian, and become recreational – we have gone from walking in public space to driving to walk in malls, parks, gyms. The gym is a wildlife preserve for bodily exertion.

The Treadmill

The original treadmill was a large wheel with sprockets that prisoners walked upon, invented by William Cubitt in 1818. It was meant to rationalize their psyches. Sometimes their power was used to fuel grain mills and other machinery, but exertion was the main effect of the treadmill. In Greek myth, Sisyphus was punished for robbery and murder by pushing a boulder uphill. Once he reached the top, the boulder rolled to the bottom and he had to start over, again and again. Until recently, food has been scarce, and physical exertion common – it is only when these are reversed that exercise makes sense.

The gym compensates for the disappearance of outside, a factory for the production of muscles. And like how factory work reduced skilled work to repetitive task, gyms do the same to exercise. It is curious that some gyms and climbing gyms are repurposed industrial sites (The Chelsea Piers). In contrast to industrial machinery, which often caused pain, injury and deformity, today’s exercise machines are adapted to the body. As Marx said, “History happens the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The deepest sign of this shift is that the work done is no longer productive. The body becomes recreational rather than utilitarian.

Walking like a woman walking like a man.

This segment of This American Life really reminded me of the recent topic of women walking. There are a lot of generalizations, but it made me think about what it means to be feminine and masculine and how we perform gender whether we are concious of it or not.

I've been mistaken for a male a couple times - I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. The most poignant happened a few years ago while I was riding my bike home in the evening. A car full of 20-something year old guys pulled up behind me on the street, matched my speed and started yelling insults and variants of, 'Nice bike dude' lathered in sarcasm/hostility. It was very uncomfortable in that I wasn't sure if it would escalate into physical harm, and it was pretty clear they were drunk - which scared me for obvious reasons, being perched and unprotected on a bike. It wasn't until they drove past that one saw my face and shouted, 'Shit! That's a lady.'

To some extent, knowing that sometimes my mannerisms/dress come off as male or at least ambiguous makes me feel less vulnerable when I'm walking around, but at the same time, that event (and drawing from other experiences I've had or heard of) is that street harassment happens to males too, though it's not usually of the sexual nature that women are subject to (which from my experience is also scary and uncomfortable).

Calculate your walk score!

Mixed-use street in Bitola, Macedonia
Source: Wikipedia article on walkability

I've been starting to research more into walkability, and found this neat site that calculates how walkable your neighbourhood is. The algorithm takes into account nearby amenities, but not pedestrian design/safety.

My only criticism is - I'm from a very walkable neighbourhood, but moving my location about 30 m closer to the main thoroughfare (and still on the same block) changed the score from very walkable (needing a car for a few errands), vs. walker's paradise (not needing a car for everyday errands), which doesn't seem entirely logical. The line has to be drawn somewhere though, I guess?

Neighbourhood Walks

This is a nerve wracking account of a walk from WBEZ's This American Life. The whole episode is somewhat related to walking, but this act is especially relevant when thinking about walking and disability. It's the story of a man who takes his 4 month old daughter for a walk for the first time alone.

Did you know...

...that as you walk, your hips follow a sine curve while your head remains relatively stable?

Source: Wikipedia article on walking

On Walking Speed

Some fodder for thought about walking - is there a link between the average walking speed of an city and its other characteristics? Another segment of radiolab that details physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt's equation that unlocks the underlying logic of these connections.

Francis Alys, As Long As I'm Walking...

11 Years Walking

Quebec man spends 11 years walking around the world to raise awareness about children that suffer violence.

Thinking about pilgrimages and other acts of endurance...

This is an episode of a pretty good radio show on human endurance, from WNYC's Radiolab. The beginning details a triathlon gone awry and a bike race so long and intense that participants duct tape their heads to their backs when their necks give out.

Approximate Nuit Blanche Walking Route

Apart from everything else, I enjoy that on Nuit Blanche it suddenly becomes acceptable to walk incredibly long distances.

Time Lapse Mushroom Videos

Mushroom Foray

A little over a week ago, I went on my first mushroom foray. Initially, I felt a bit conflicted as (like many others, I'm sure) I had always been told never to touch/eat/pick strange mushrooms, but our professor assured us it was safe to pick them. Our class was given special access to an area of the arboretum that is not normally open to the public. Due to a bizarre bike accident I had earlier that morning where a pair of boots I was carrying came unsecured and caught in my wheel, myself and my bike weren't in the best of shapes and I had some difficulty getting to the meeting spot on foot, as well as a serious date with a truing stand and some oversized band-aids. Luckily I arrived before the group departed into the path-less forest.  

I broke off from the group and slowly meandered through the trees, being extra cautious not to step on any fungi. I found that no matter where I crouched down to look, if i spent enough time I would find some sort of tiny mushroom poking up through the dead leaves, or the littlest of yellow fungi adhered to the bark of a tree or log. At first I was reluctant to disturb any mushrooms, but my attitude quickly changed as I came across more and more mushrooms I probably would have overlooked on any other day.

I was amazed by the diversity of mushrooms and fungi our class collected. I am now keeping my eye out for a good field guide to better my knowledge of mushrooms for future walks. 

The Way Home

I set out on a brisk walk, looking upward and willing the overcast sky to stay the way it was - not raining. The air was cool and humid, almost suffocating, and immediately made me feel as if I was encased in a cold sweat.

I walked west on D___ Ave. to G_____ Ave., then headed south on G_____ to C______ Ave. I passed one other person, a woman about my age, traveling in the same harried fashion. Continuing south to the university, I crossed a field marked with two parallel paths carved by foot traffic, then entered a building adjacent, eager to escape the tepid atmosphere outside. The purpose of my trip was simple: having recently moved, I had neither internet nor furniture to sit on, and tired of this situation, I traveled somewhere that offered both.

I had not been in the building more than two minutes when an exasperated man exited from one of the doorways of the hall I was in and looked at me.

"Is it alright if I sit here?" I asked.

"No. You can't be here. The building is closed." he replied in a somewhat cross way.

"Really?"

"Yes. Closed."

Finding that interaction a bit strange and contrary to the building's posted hours, I headed to the library. A sign on the door assured me that it would be open for quite some time. After a half hour spent checking email, I purposefully left behind a 3H pencil at the table I had been sitting at. At first, I had marveled at this particular pencil's ability to make precise lines, but quickly became frustrated with its tendency to produce near invisible lines. I wondered whether it would be picked up or ignored. Perhaps someone might find that the worn finish and finger prints on the sides - evidence that it had once been used heavily by a stranger - was offputting. Maybe someone else would overlook that in favour of the usefulness of a pencil that is just there, ready to use.

I walked back home, first backtracking north through the field, but rather than walking on G_____ Ave., I took a circuitous route through residential streets, the names of which I quickly lost track of. At the side of one of the roads, about two and a half blocks from my apartment, I saw a rose coloured armchair. 

It looked old, but in decent condition. I felt it first - it was not clammy, despite the weather. I leaned over and inhaled - it smelt like nothing, neither good nor bad. I flipped the cushion and opened it to check for bedbugs and carpet beetles - none. I gingerly picked it up - I estimated the weight between 30 or 40 pounds.

My neighbourhood is a quiet one. On one of the first days living here, I rode my bike home in the dark and didn't encounter any cars or pedestrians for kilometers. It was so quiet the sound of my derailleur seemed enough to awaken rows of houses. I realized it gives me that feeling during the day too. I was confident I could carry the chair home with no one noticing me.

The first twenty meters carrying it seemed easy. Then the chair began to pull at my arms and interfere with how my legs moved. No matter which way I held it, it was awkward. I had to take breaks with increasing frequency and blocks began to feel exponentially longer. I made it back eventually. I left it at the foot of the driveway and yelled at my roommate to see what I found.

"It's perfect!" she exclaimed. "How the hell did you carry that?"

We hauled it inside, just as rain began to fall.