A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City

Persighetti, Simon, Hodge, Stephen, Turner, Cathy and Smith, Phil (2006) A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City. Performance Research, 11 (2). pp. 115-122. ISSN 1469-9990

Abstract / Summary

A version of this collaboratively authored article was first presented as a performance-paper at a plenary session of ‘Everyday Walking Culture’, Sixth International Conference on ‘Walking in the 21st Century’ (organised by Walk21 at Lakeside Conference Centre, Zurich, 22.09.2005). The manifesto was commissioned from Wrights & Sites as a keynote intervention in the conference, with its focus on the future of cities, public access, the creative agencies of walkers and their implications for civic planners/policy makers. What are the political, cultural and structural means whereby walking may be re-valued in urban contexts? (See http://www.walk21.com/conferences/zurich/asp). In this context, a number of questions and issues were investigated through dialogue and practical research around Zurich. Subsequently the paper was reworked for Performance Research, with interventions by walking artists Richard Layzell, Bess Lovejoy, Fiona Templeton and contemporaries of the Dadaists. Other live versions have been presented at PSi (London, 2006), Exeter tEXt Festival, and Dartington (all 2006).

Drawing on the exploratory work of the Mis-Guide projects, in particular on our use of the 'drift', this manifesto proposes strategies for the active/creative pedestrian engaged in practices of walking that re-fashion the city. We envision 'walkings' as neither functional necessity nor passive appreciation/consumption of the urban environment, but rather as constitutive re-inscription/animation of the everyday.

Our concerns as site-specific practitioners informed our decision to present the paper in a manner specific to the conference’s Casino setting. We divided our text into the four suits of a playing-card deck, with each 'suit' of the manifesto written by one of the members of the company. The material’s order of presentation was determined by a croupier shuffling a card deck. This differentiation of voices/dispositions is retained in the published print version.

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