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CITY WALKING 349
City Walking: Laying Claim to Manhattan
BEN JACKS
Miami University
The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order. --Michel de Certeaui
Introduction
The postmodern city is conceived of as a fragmentary assemblage of fractured parts of the traditional city, districts of modernist reform, and jumbles of late-capitalist consumer "experiences." Simultaneity, fragmentation, and ephemerality characterize the experience of the contemporary city." Walking around helps us t o know the city, to position ourselves within it, t o lay claim to it, and to "belong." But the city made for walking is largely the city of the past."' We may now know places in fragments, but to begin to assemble a sense of a city or an urban region or an extensive territory requires more than the relatively straightforward "mental map."' For the individual in the postmodern city, the territorial practice of walking is complicated to the point of chaos. How does walking, an old way of laying hold of the city, still help us in this altered spatial, temporal, and conceptual field?
This paper documents a range of recent projects in Manhattan by citizens, artist;, activists, and revolutionaries who seek to understand and address city concerns through walking.' Each project represents a subversive means of re-asserting a territorial hold on the character and space of the city in light of the conditions of postmodernity. Through the projects, practitioners attempt t o deal with the daily challenge of alien and alienating territory to which one nevertheless wishes to reassert some claim. We find evidence i n these intentional walking projects-many of which are mediated through digital
technologies-of the coalescence of communities around what geographer Edward Soja has called a "shared spatial consciousness."vi
I n Thirdspace, Soja cites a recent trend in spatial studies toward rebalancing the traditional oppositional dualism of history and society, of breaking down the dialectic between "perceived" and 'conceived" space. This ontological shift toward "the trialectics of being" unites "historicality, sociality, and spatiality.""" Describing the long-term political dimensions of this shift, Soja says:
Inspired by the breakdown of totalizing modernist political epistemologies... and the possibility of a radical postmodernism.
.. , a new socio-spatial movement or "community of resistance" is beginning to develop around what Iam describing as a Thirdspace consciousness and a progressive cultural politics that seeks to break down and erase the specifically spatial power differentials arising from class, race, gender and many other forms of marginalizing.... Rather than operating in separate and exclusive channels, this new movement/ community is insistently inclusive... , searching for new ways of building bridges and effective political coalitions across all modes of radical subjectivity and collective resistance. I n this coalition-building, it is a shared spatial consciousness, and a collective determination to take greater control over the production of our lived spaces, that provides the primary foundation-the long missing "gluen-for solidarity and political praxis.'"'
As Soja points out, this new critical spatiality, the ethos surrounding a "shared spatial
350 G E l T I N G REAL: DESIGN ETHOS N O W
consciousness," is a recent phenomenon in its earliest stages of development. As shared frames of reference for experience, whether of social life or material culture, the projects documented here illustrate specific manifestations of the new consciousness Soja points to. For architecture and the urban landscape, the implications of these practices are that digital means do not trump bodily experience, and that design establishes relevance through daily life and the everyday world.
City Walking
Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it "speaks." --Michel de Certeau''
I n The Practice o f Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau opens his chapter on city walking from a vantage point on top of one of the two World Trade Center towers." He views our walking from afar, as a surveillant unable to identify individuals-as i f we are ants in the labyrinthine spaces of the city. He takes on for a moment the role of the all-seeing scientist content with (or stuck within) the frame of the dominant "rational" consumer-capitalist order so that we might be able to see beyond the official frame to the everyday. But in the remainder of the text he likens walking to reading and cooking, and he sees in everyday practices myriad ways i n which the weak (most of us), trick, trip up, and play with the system. The order that threatens t o oppress, he notes, is a "sieve order," shot through with holes between and within which some maneuvering is possible.
I n light of de Certeau, we can consider walking from two very different perspectives: from above and afar, from a perspective in which walkers are subjects and objects, controlled by the dominant order, or intimately, from our own perspectives as walkers, i n touch with the spaces and gaps in the "sieve order." These two perspectives correspond to de Certeau's categories proper and quotidian, to the scientific and the everyday, and to the official and the vernacular. The first perspective belongs to what de Certeau calls the strategy of the hegemonic order, and the second to the tactics of the powerless.
The walking projects documented here reveal the contours of tactical maneuvering: as complex, localized, territorial, interwoven, and constantly negotiated and renegotiated practices. The practices range from the unconscious everyday to the politically informed and motivated. The more overt practices of resistance-such as surveillance camera mapping-have much in common with those that appear on the surface to take a more cooperative stance toward the dominant order. Alone, each way of walking may seem a bit desperate, deranged, or even silly, but this is perhaps the disguise or the ruse of the everyday, which, as de Certeau argues, makes revolution beside the point: a tactic like walking takes place "within enemy t e r r i t ~ r y. " ~ ~
De Certeau defines tactics in terms of the powerlessness of the practitioner: the "weak" practice tactics i n response to the force employed by the dominating power through its strategy. I n some of the practices documented here walking is a conscious counter-strategy, a tactic used as a strategy to reclaim public space. As public space has become more limited, controlled, and circumscribed, the tactics of the powerless have had to become more explicitly about using actual public space. Walking is more than a utilitarian way of getting from one place to another: walking is an everyday practice that may be taken up as a tool.
Walking, however, crosses overlaid terrains: it may be impossible to separate ideal and practical "territorial" walking from everyday walking that tends to habituate the walker to surroundings under the control of a dominating and unwanted authority. Perhaps it is this lack of clarity about the efficacy of walking that has led some proponents of walking as a critical spatial practice to turn to Situationist ideas to theorize their activities. At the very least, the Situationist's derive and psychogeography illuminate the potential of walking to shake the dominion of habit. ""
"Situationist" and "Situationism"
I n The Situationist City, Simon Sadler points out, "one is not even meant to use the word situationism," He quotes an early dictum from the journal Internationale Situationniste: "The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationi~ts."~~~~Generally credited with
352 GETTING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS N O W
(Fig. 1) After realizing the necessity of walking every Manhattan street to discover the city's secrets, he decided upon a few rules to define the "official" walk: he would walk alone, he would carry his map and a pen to mark off completed blocks, and he would take photographs. (Fig. 2) The project took him two and a half years to finish.
Figure 1. Caleb Smith's hand-marked map.
I n reporting Smith's walk in New Yorker magazine, Ben McGrath invokes the trope of the task-obsessed eccentric."" Beginning with Smith's decision to finish his walk on the day that Thomas 3. Keane had completed his walk of every block in Manhattan fifty years earlier, and ending with his "passing the torch" to another every-block-walker, McGrath slyly suggests that only a complete nut-case would waste his time on such an activity. What McGrath overlooks i n his focus on the odd
Figure 2. Hamilton Heights. Caleb Smith photo.
statistics of Smith's long-distance walk is the care and concern with which Smith looked at the city. Even this point is twisted in the direction of suggesting monomania: he quotes Smith as saying, "Greeenwich Village and the Financial District were almost a total loss, because you're looking at the map the whole time. I'm clearly going to have to go back and do them again."
Though highly personal, Smith's walk is motivated quite simply by a love of the city and a willingness to explore, and it is documented without a trace of irony or posturing. Smith's walk repeats, unselfconsciously and unintentionally, de Certeau's walking tactic: to walk every street is to insist that the city may be and should be known.
Jim Naureckas, New York Songlines
"New York Songlines," an interactive map of Manhattan streets in the form of a simplified grid organizing a collection of hyperlinks, also insists on the knowability of the city.""' The introduction compares Manhattan's streets to Australian aboriginal songlines, explaining how the song-stories of Aboriginals guided people across the land by way of physical features. Concluding that the aboriginal songline was a way of organizing large amounts of information, the site's author, Jim Naureckas, argues "the Web is our technological society's closest equivalent." Naureckas feels that a certain mindlessness has developed because it is so easy to get around the city using knowledge of the grid, a few signs, a subway map, and taxis. People may go past the same buildings hundreds of times without ever really looking; many lack a
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sense of place. I n answer to this condition, "New York Songlines" offers "virtual walking tours of Manhattan's streets" that may uncover New York's own "giants, heroes, and monsters." The songlines are the result of a kind of reverse engineering; their power comes from the congruity of the hyperlinked Web and the grid organization of the city.
Shorewalkers, "The Great Saunter"
Shorewalkers, a non-profit environmental/ recreational group, takes an on-the-ground approach to knowing Manhattan. Every first Saturday in May since 1985 it has been possible to take a walk around the approximately thirty-two-mile long waterfront edge of the island of Manhattan on "The Great Saunter.'*'" The event begins early in the morning at South Street Seaport and proceeds clockwise. Involving i n some years as few as 17 people, and one year more than 500, Shorewalkers' mission is "to enhance, enjoy and protect the parks, promenades, and paths along the waters throughout the New York metropolitan area." The groups activism has contributed to the establishment and development of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, a continuous path around Manhattan linking numerous public parks, providing recreational opportunities and waterfront access.
Walking, as De Certeau explored, is a speech act. I n the case of "The Great Saunter," the walk, like much successful protest and advocacy, is explicitly for fun, but it also makes a clear political statement. Cy Adler, a founder of Shorewalkers, in his guidebook, "Walking Manhattan's Rim: The Great Saunter," remarks on the citizen's ability to speak out in support of the environment, that "no activity symbolizes the essence of conservation more than walking.'*"The act of walking the edge of Manhattan suggests the city foundation ritual.""' I n this case the ritual has been repeated annually for the past twenty years, reflecting ongoing concern for the limits and environmental impact of human inhabitation of earth. As citizens and claimants, Shorewalkers walks to advocate an environmental understanding of territory.
Surveillance Camera Players
Advocating against the growing police state, Surveillance Camera Players has protested the
use of surveillance cameras in Manhattan since 1996, creating plays for "the bored people who must watch the cameras," continuously updating maps, authoring position papers, encouraging other security camera protesters, and, beginning in 2000, offering walking tours."" Each walking tour (nine offered in the summer of 2005), is based on maps of all known cameras in a particular zone. (Fig. 3)
Cameras, reasons SCP, neither aid in the prevention of crime, nor are operators interested in the prevention of crime. Rather, private security cameras are sold for the documentation of events surrounding insurance losses. I n wealthy neighborhoods building owners receive discounts on insurance if they install cameras, so cameras proliferate. On the other hand, contends SCP, there are few cameras in poor neighborhoods regardless of the level of crime. While arguments in favor of surveillance cameras claim they induce paranoia selectively in criminals, SCP counters that surveillance cameras are intended to induce paranoia in everyone-they cannot do so selectively. I n a delightful analysis of press coverage that attempts to position Bill Brown and other
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the story. Cappello intends for participants to develop both a physical and psychological, an "objective and artistic," awareness of environment. This awareness is developed by sighting, measuring, and communicating about narrative objects among a community of peers.
Figure 5. Odin Cappello, "Navigazing."
Dario D'Aprile's "Street Stripes with Memory" uses flour to stencil faux pedestrian crossings. A video camera records the effects over time of people and cars using the crossing. D'Aprile's interest is i n the "resistance time of urban furnishings made by flour," and "to characterize and create traces and ways inside the urban space."'" I n a similar vein, Noriyuki Fujimura's Footprint Mapping uses a backpack with a pedometer, a compass, a web cam, and a computer "to create a digital map of streets and public spaces by gathering 'footprints' of participant^.""'^' The collected walks, consisting of images of "footprints," are collated into a single map.
"One Block Radius," a project of Christina Ray and Dave Mandl, (founders of Glowlab and the PsyGeoConflux) provides a website to serve as a repository of information concerning the city block completely destroyed to build the New Museum of Contemporary Art.""" Conceived as a navigable online map and database, the idea of "One Block Radius" is to collect "the
enormous volume of data at scales not normally considered important, and to make the data available to anyone wishing to navigate the site. The "multi-layered portrait of the block as i t has never been seen before (and never will be seen again)" is intended t o constitute "an extensive psychogeographic survey." A revised version of the project allows for the assemblage of similar kinds of information on a citywide scale.xxx"' The psychogeographical projects of the PsyGeo Conflux reflect perhaps the most intentional and self-conscious forms of territorial practice.
Conclusion
Each of these projects illuminates a particular frame or theme through which we might understand the territorial practice of walking and local negotiations with the dominant order. Walking every street i n the grid temporarily unearths an apparently comprehensive collection of memories in physical things. A virtual walking tour similarly contends the city is knowable. Walking the shore consecrates the earth as home. Walking on a tour of surveillance cameras protests their proliferation, the police state, and the loss of civil liberties. Walking a psychogeographical drift makes a surprising poetic experience out of the raw material of the city. I n de Certeau's terms, each such act of walking is a speech act. Each constitutes a "rhetoric of walking," making dialogue out of the everyday and the rational. Each reconnects us, no matter how temporarily, to the alienating infrastructure of the contemporary city.
It seems the list of intentional and self- conscious tactics has only grown since the historical moment of the situationists, and the dissemination of de Certeau's thought. I s this in response to the proliferation of academic theory o r to conditions? I s this merely the playful illusion and delusion of intellectuals, or is i t that we are increasingly aware of all kinds of oppressions, large and small?
amount of information one would normally (^) Quotation, "poaching," to carry forward one of
I find^ in^ a^ guidebook^ for^ an^ entire^ city."^ de Certeau's playful ideas, is the backbone of
Included are photographs, video, historical, walking (as well as of reading and writing).
II narrative,^ and^ creative^ writing,^ and^ other Quotation lets us move forward as a
forms of information gathered from a wide (^) community. When we walk we are quoting the variety of people having direct experience (^) walkers who have come before us, and with the block. The idea is to create a website (^) performing communal turns on each environment capable of receiving an (^) quotation. The myriad ways we walk the city
356 GElTING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW
seem to yield ever more turns, more variations, on the spaces of the pedestrian everyday.
Notes:
I Michel de Certeau (tr. Steven Rendell), The Practice o f Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p. 107.
" David Harvey, The Condition o f Postmodernity, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).
"' Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: the Process o f Growth i n Boston, 1870-1900, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
" Kevin Lynch, The Image o f the City, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
" Because of space limitations this particular paper cites nine of approximately three-dozen specific New York examples. New York serves as both an arbitrary and a unique frame for walking practices; similar projects have been undertaken elsewhere, in many cases by practitioners who have also practiced in New York.
'I Edward W. Soja, "Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination," (ed. Alan Read) Architecturally Speaking: Practices o f Art, Architecture a n d the Everyday, (New York: Routledge, 2000); Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).
- " "Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination," p. 14.
""I Ibid. p. 29.
" de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p. 99.
" Ibid, p. 37.
""Walking artists and projects directly influenced by Situationist ideas, in addition to those described here, include the Italian group "Stalker," and the English group "Wrights & Sites." Some recent Situationist influenced design projects and speculations are partially documented in l a i n Borden and Sandy McCreery, eds. New Babylonians, Architectural Design, June 2001, 71-3.
X"' Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 3.
"'Most situationist histories explain that delegates from two or three small groups formed the Situationist International-four groups counting "The "London Psychogeographical Committee," a name invented by its only member, artist Ralph Rumney. See Ralph Rumney, (tr. Malcolm Imrie) The Consul, Conversations with Gerard Berreby, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), p. 37.) Acknowledged also is that the term "delegate" is perhaps too formal a term, reflecting both the earnestness, and the mock seriousness of participants, who met at Alba "in a state of semi- drunkenness." (see Stewart Home, The Assault o n Culture: Utopian Currents from Leftrisme to Class War (London: Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, 1988), p. 30.
" Internationale Situationniste, (reprint, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1997).
"" Guy DeBord, The Society o f the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1994). As Sadler and others have enumerated, in addition to 'spectacle," the main lettrist and situationist ideas are psychogeographie ("psychogeography"), ditournement ("diversion"), derive (drift), situations ("situations"), and urbanisme unitaire ("unitary u&anismn).
xVii Sadler, Situationist City, p.13.
"" Ibid., p.186 (note 123).
'Ix Caleb Smith, "New York City Walk," December, 2004, <http://www.newyorkcih/walk.com/html/about.html
(May 19, 2005).
"" Ben McGrath, "The Talk of the Town," New Yorker, January 3, 2005, pp. 22-23.
""' Jim Naureckas, "New York Songlines: virtual walking tours of Manhattan's streets, <http://www.nysonglines.com/~, (May 23, 2005).
""" Shorewalkers [www.shorewalkers.org], (May 13, 2005).
""I Cy A Adler, "Walking Manhattan's Rim: The Great Saunter," (New York: Green Eagle Press, 2003), p. xiii.
"'' See Joseph Rykwert, The Idea o f a Town,
(London: Faber and Faber, 1976).
I X V (^) Surveillance Camera Players, http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html, (May 26, 2005).
