Today technology helps bodies move around and are filters producing images of urban space based on social media subjective narratives, cancelling the body’s own experience and provoking space disconnection, an absence of lived self-knowledge, and a feeling of alienation between real and virtual spatiality. In 1960, Kevin Lynch1 highlighted the importance of the body’s experience in creating powerful urban images and, more recently, Jan Gehl and Francesco Careri emphasized that walking is essential to understand space and to build healthy and lived places. This paper questions the role of urban walking, with mobile devices off, to reconnect body and territory through sensory stimuli and to regain knowledge and appropriate space. Considering the old roads of Lisbon, which connected centre and outskirts, lines of movement and city expansion, that cross and connect urban fabrics, environments and ambiences, it will focus on the impact that urban space elements have in a walking body, through the analysis of 2 roads. These are varied and sensorially stimulating landscapes, a result of the combination of elements, and walking here is a contact with geography and history, considering that they are public history2, palimpsests3 reused over time, possessing roughness4 and recording urban multi-temporalities/asynchronies5. They should be a network of walking paths that connect spaces, experiences, ambiances, history, reconnecting body and space and proving that walking is evolution.
- Lynch, K. (1989). A Imagem da Cidade [The Image of the City]. Edições 70. ↩︎
- Hayden, D. (1995). The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. The MIT Press. ↩︎
- Corboz, A. (2001). Le Territoire comme Palimpsest et Autres Essais. Les Éditions de L’Imprimeur. ↩︎
- Santos, M. (2006). A natureza do espaço: técnica e tempo, razão e emoção. Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. ↩︎
- Roncayolo, M. (1996). Conceptions, structures matérielles, pratiques: Réflexions autour du “projet urbain”. Enquête, 59-68. ↩︎
Bibliography
- Careri, F. (2017). Caminhar e Parar [Pasear, Detenerse]. Editora Gustavo Gili.
- Gehl, J. & Svarre, B. (2013). How to Study Public Life. Island Press.
- Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for People. Island Press
