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.