Time and space: walking
In these flows, wandering between the imaginary and the real, walking in the first person, the processes of creating subjectivities and new spaces in which to project ourselves are generated. It is in this criticism[1] that the social, political and cultural dimension of public space is brought into question (Fig. 2), a disruptive situation of walking in urban space that leads us to a need to analyse the transformation of “space from the body to the body in space” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.302) that is channelled through the act of walking. According to Jane Rendell: “By exploring ongoing and changing spaces of encounter between people, objects and places, walking can play an important role in creating new kinds of relationships between subjects and objects in architectural design, shifting emphasis from the qualities of particular end-products to the aesthetic values of exchanges involved in the processes of investigation” (Rendell, 2006, p.158).
[1] In À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), Marcel Proust invited us to learn to recognize and take pleasure in the interpretive challenges that a subjective perspective generates: "The only true voyage of discovery…would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes” (Proust, 1923).
Fig. 2b — Documented walking experience under the bridge.
St. Anna’s Tunnel, Antwerp. (Source: author's own compilation).