CFP: Walking in the Digital City
Guest editors: Claudia Brazzale and Blake Morris
This special issue will examine the interface between technology and our experience of urban space and, in particular, of walking in the city. We invite contributions of academic articles, interviews, visual essays, artistic provocations, walking scores or artists’ pages that address the topics outlined below.
Overview:
In ‘Walking in the Capitalist City’, Anja Hälg Bieri (2017) identifies a trend to ‘walkable urbanism’, promoted by urban planners and designers to create less car-centric cities. While the desire to create walkable spaces is laudable, Bieri’s research identifies the danger of its recuperation, ‘a sales pitch for real-estate premiums’ and the ‘whole spectrum of gear, clothes and even cars’ that go with a ‘walkable lifestyle’ (34). One of the essential pieces of ‘gear’ that accompanies contemporary urban walking practices is the smart-phone, and the multitude of applications developed for it, which mediate and inform our experiences of the city. In this special issue of Streetnotes, we would like to examine how the ubiquity of digital tools, exemplified by the phones we carry with us, can contribute to new considerations of walking that challenges its recuperation and co-optation by the investment class.
In 2005, in her book For Space, Doreen Massey wonders if technologically facilitated communication potentially reduces “one of the truly productive characteristics of material spatiality”: the “happenstance juxtaposition of previously unrelated trajectories, that business of walking round a corner and bumping into alterity” (94). For Massey, what is at stake is our engagement with the diversity of the streets and more importantly, the requirements of ‘social negotiation’ that accidental and unexpected social encounters foster. Revisiting Massey’s observation fifteen years later, we invite papers that consider how her concerns have manifested, and how digital tools might create ‘happenstance moments’ in urban spaces rather than serve as tools of disengagement and alienation.
The potential for digital tools and mobile applications to be used to increase connectivity through globally connected local practices, is exemplified by recent rise in artistic practices that combine walking and digital technology. A new generation of artists working in and across disciplines - dance/choreography, performance, visual art, music, and what Phil Smith (2015) refers to as "Walking's New Movement" - are using digital tools, such as blogs, listservs, mobile applications, and augmented reality, to encourage different ways of walking through the city. Works such as Jennie Savage’s Fracture Mob (2012), which asked participants to engage in a simultaneous worldwide drift; Jen Southern and Chris Speed’s Comob (2009), a collaborative mapping application; or Deveron Projects’ Slow Marathon, which has connected the rural space of Huntly, Scotland to Gaza in Palestine and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, embrace digital tools to create aesthetic walking exchanges. We are interested in walking as both subject and method, and encourage submissions that take a practice-based approach. Importantly, we look for contributions that offer models for practice, in addition to any critique of, the intersection of digital technology and urban walking practices. Papers may cover a wide array of approaches and creative inquiries to this topic. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes and prompts:
· How are inhabitants of urban spaces utilising technology to encourage new ways of walking through and interacting with the landscap
· How are digital tools being used by people whose access needs are not met by the urban design of their area?
· How might digital interfaces connect walking practices in urban spaces to suburban, town, village or rural walks?
· How might digital media and technologies change our embodied sense of walking in the city?
· To what extent does the digital realm enable and shape more embodied, localised, everyday walking practices? And how do these practices extend and challenge understandings of embodiment and embodied experiences?
· How have locative media and mobile applications changed walking experiences for urban dwellers (eg. the use of digital tech to facilitate tourist walking experiences; walking and digital storytelling; augmented reality and mobile phone applications), and what potential models might we introduce in the future?
Deadline: February 24, 2020
Questions and inquiries can be directed to the issue Editors: Claudia Brazzale, email: c.brazzale@uel.ac.uk and Blake Morris, email:blake@walkexchange.org
All submissions must be made through our online submission system:
https://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes
References:
Bieri, Anja Hälg (2017), ‘Walking in the capitalist city’, in The Routledge International Handbook of Walking. London: Routledge, pp. 27-36.
Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage Publications.
Smith, Phil (2015) Walking’s New Movement. Axminster: Triarchy.
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