Project
Urban Media Archaeology /

Walking Tours: The City Underfoot and Over Time

At once restrictive, in that they impose a specific reading of the city, but also challenging and potentially expansive in the way they guide us to different sites and streets, or the same places but in a different manner, walking tours offer very deliberate examples of what Michel de Certeau suggested in his essay "Walking in the City" (1980) about the act of walking as a kind of symbolic re-writing of the urban text. Though it would be very hard (and perhaps not all that interesting) to track all the steps of citizens and visitors on the streets and sidewalks of the most walkable city in North America, New York City, digging up the routes and data from current, recent and past walking tours designed for the city provides new ways of thinking about, and thinking through the city. The goal of this project is twofold. Firstly, to understand how the three walking tours mapped and documented herein offer (or don't) a new way of exploring the city conceptually, historically and physically. Secondly, to begin plotting how walking tours offer radically new and enlightening ways of exploring and understanding the city, whether in its current state, its historical incarnations, or its never-ending transformations. Walking tours can allow us to make sense of the city, a sense we help to create through our own acts of walked re-writing.

Tags

Filming locations, Greenwich Village, Literature, Lower Manhattan, Music, Tribeca, Walking tours

Arguments

Project Layers

  • Walking Tour Stops
  • Walking Tour Paths

Records

Members