This is How it All Began

Today I remembered how Pedestrian City began; who and what inspired the project. There are the obvious catalysts, Jane Jacobs, and Guy Debord and the Situationist International – Jacobs was an advocate for dense, active mixed-use neighbourhoods made for walking and socializing, and encouraged walking as a means of getting to know your neighbourhood; while Debord gave me a new way to explore with his concepts of psychogeography and the derive.  The less apparent, but probably first inspiration was Gaston Bachelard and his book, The Poetics of Space, which I am re-reading for at least the fifth time.  I like to think I dream differently when I read this book. At least I think about and experience spaces differently, more consciously and reverently.

As I wrote in the opening paragraph of Pedestrian City: A Visual Narrative of Trinity Bellwoods: “To borrow from William J. Mitchell, I need to make myself into an urbanist, a geographer, and begin “to understand how the objects, narratives, memories and spaces [of the city] are interwoven into a complex, expanding web – each fragment of which gives meaning to all of the others” . I have undertaken this task with this project; through gaining a sense of how people perceive and experience a particular neighbourhood through walking. To relate it to the phenomenological writings of Gaston Bachelard, Max van Manen, and Tony Hiss, this project begins to explore the relationships between place, space, and a sense of individuality; about how our experiences with the environment, natural and built, shape who we are and how we experience different spaces and spaces differently, which is portrayed in individual maps and photographs of the neighbourhood.”

In The Poetics of Space Bachelard explores lived-space as it relates to our daily experiences, reveries and reactions, with the earliest impressions, those formed in childhood, being the basis for how we experience space throughout the rest of our lives. It was this that I remembered while walking to Queen Elizabeth Park today, with the book in my bag and a camera in hand.

Today’s walk was reminiscent of my first conscious attempt of engaging in the act of psychogeography; an instance where I had a destination in mind but no planned route and only a vague sense of time. My pace was slow, my eyes were curious, and my camera and notebook were ready to record the objects that caught my attention and stood out from the rest of my surroundings – the things that enhanced the walk for me…