Author: Mark Wihak
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Waiting for a green Karl
The German city of Trier remembers its native son Karl Marx with a few transit signals near the street where he was born. Unlike where I live, pedestrians in Trier don’t need to press a “beg button” in order to get a green Karl, it’s a part of the regular cycle of lights. (Like Lyon,…
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Why Lyon?
I began gathering footage for Project Pedestrian in Lyon, France and one of the things that made me choose Lyon was the German film Die Reise nach Lyon (Blind Spot was its English title). Directed by Claudia von Alemann and released in 1981, the film stars Rebecca Pauly as Elisabeth, a young historian trying to…
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Lyon: A city designed for pedestrians
I started work on Project Pedestrian in March 2025 in a city I’d never been before: Lyon, France. I didn’t know much about Lyon before going there and that was the point. Walking is a good way to get to know a place, and I wanted to learn about Lyon by walking in it. It…
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Herzog & Chatwin
In the winter of 1974, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris in the hope that this would prevent the death of his friend, the film historian Lotte Eisner, who was seriously ill. “I set off…believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.” It took Herzog three weeks to…
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The Songlines
An early influence on what is becoming Project Pedestrian is Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book The Songlines, which made me think about walking as more than just a way to get from A to B. Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare writes about Chatwin and The Songlines. Michael Ignatieff interviewed Chatwin about The Songlines for Granta.
Project Pedestrian 