In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of Charles Dickens. In Peter Ackroyd’s (unabridged) biography Dickens (1990), I learned more about the man behind the writing. An aspect of his life that really fascinated me was the long nocturnal walks Dickens would take to try and deal with insomnia and the racing mind that gave us Scrooge, Jenny Wren, Uriah Heep and hundreds of other characters. Dickens wrote about these night walks in a collection of essays first released in his weekly magazine All The Year Round, “To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it, and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to the treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers passing the night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate, in some hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early, crossed London-bridge and got down by the water-side on the Surrey shore among the buildings of the great brewery.” These are now available in a volume titled Night Walks. I had intended to begin Project Pedestrian by retracing a Dickens’s night walk, but our dog Marlene had other ideas, so that trip to London was postponed. Perhaps some day.

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Lauren Elkin, whose book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City is profiled on the Resources page, contributed a radio essay to the BBC on the types of pedestrians one encounters on urban sidewalks: “Elkin reckons that the way people walk, their gait, is a signifier. It also tells us something about ourselves as we watch people file past us, the quick and the slow. And it makes her think of George Sand strolling Paris.”

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CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Blue Sky devoted an episode to walking: “Ken Wilson spent days walking the car-centric bypass highway around Regina. He wrote about his experience in a new book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway of the Buffalo People Arts Institute did a ceremonial walk dragging buffalo skulls along what is currently known as Dewdney Avenue. She describes it as an act of reclamation. Hermes Chung wants to change the future of the Riversdale Neighbourhood by helping people remember the past and the Chinese history in that community. Alex Oehler discovered a love of walking grid roads. How has walking changed the way you see the world?”

We walk for a variety of reasons: transportation, exploration, contemplation. Over the past decade there has been a lot of attention paid to walking as a form of exercise, and the idea that one needed to complete 10,000 steps a day to get a worthwhile health benefit. The origin of 10,000 steps doesn’t come from science, but rather a 1965 marketing initiative by the Japanese company Yamasa to promote a pedometer they produced called the Manpo–Kei, the 10,000 step meter. The Japanese kanji character for 10,000 looks a bit like a human figure walking and that’s why they chose that number for the pedometer, and that’s how we arrived at 10,000 steps. This isn’t to say there’s not a health benefit in walking 10,000 steps a day (or 8000 or 5000) – of course walking is better for our health than sitting at a desk or lying on the sofa – but for me the health benefits of walking are a bonus, not the primary reason to do it.

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The Canadian province of Saskatchewan – where Project Pedestrian originates – is 651,036 square kilometres, with a human population just north of 1.2 million. The island of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) is 209,331 square kilometres with a human population just over 65.5 million. This perhaps explains why there are so many British TV shows devoted to walking; you can walk knowing you’re never far from a cafe, pub, inn, railway or bus station. An incomplete list of British TV shows based around walking – with anorak clad folks “setting off to…” – includes: Tate Britain’s Great Art Walks, Walks Around Britain, Coastal Britain, Wainwright Walks, Britain’s Lost Railways (the host walks around looking for them), Walking Britain’s Roman Roads, and a personal favourite Walking Through History, with Sir Tony Robinson (aka Baldrick from Blackadder), who also had a series where he walks Britain’s Ancient Tracks. What are your favourites?

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The Canadian artist Janet Cardiff works in a range of mediums, often in collaboration with her life partner George Bures Miller. Cardiff started creating audio walks in the 1990s. Designed for specific locales, the audio walks guide you along, in your headphones the sound of voices whispering, telling stories, giving directions, recorded sound fx blending with the sounds of the environment you are walking in. I’ve been lucky enough to do three of Cardiff’s walks: The Missing Voice: Case Study B begins in a library in Whitechapel and takes you on a journey towards Liverpool Street Station in London’s East End; Her Long Black Hair takes you through New York’s Central Park; A Large Slow River is set in the grounds of Gairloch Gardens on Lake Ontario, west of Toronto. The Cardiff walks are wonderful experiences. Every person’s walk is unique; the recorded soundscape stays the same, but the environment you’re walking in is always shifting and you bring things of your own to the walk. Here’s a short video illustrating part of what you might have seen and heard while doing The Missing Voice: Case Study B in London. You can find more about the work of Cardiff & Bures Miller at their website, or if you’re in British Columbia, at their Art Warehouse.

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I started work on Project Pedestrian in March 2025 in a city I’d never been before: Lyon, France.

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One of the things that made me want to go to 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 trace the life of the 19th century writer and activist Flora Tristan. Walking through Lyon with a tape recorder, Elisabeth tells another character, “I want to imagine what she might have heard, seen, or felt. Colours, noises, all of that, in this town, Lyon, where she spent some time while travelling. I want to make the same trip.” The film made me curious about Lyon and its traboules, pedestrian passageways hidden behind doors that link buildings and streets. I enjoyed retracing some of the routes taken by the film’s character, and noting the ways the city had changed in the intervening decades and the ways it has remained the same.

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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, Trier has made the central part of the city a priority-pedestrian zone)

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The playlist you didn’t know you needed? Perhaps. The Project Pedestrian Playlist gives you 88 choice cuts about walking (OK, we know, sometimes they’re using walking/strolling/shuffling as a metaphor). The playlist is on Tidal, because Tidal pays the musicians more than Apple Music, and Spotify has a billionaire CEO investing in AI weaponry who pays the musicians even less than Apple. Best enjoyed while hoofing around yourself, the Project Pedestrian Playlist will walk with you to New Orleans, take you through London, Paris, and Memphis with Cher, on and in sunshine, and the rain. Enjoy!

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The American Geographical Society published a story on the world’s most walkable cities, and the winner is Milan, Italy! Three cities Project Pedestrian has spent extensive time in: Lyon, France (5), Paris, France (7), and Genoa, Italy (9), are in the top ten and we can understand why, we loved walking in them. 45 of the world’s 50 most walkable cities are in Europe, and the top North American city is Vancouver coming in at 53. “A walkable city is often defined as a city where you can walk to key amenities, like grocery stores, pharmacies, and schools. More specifically, the concept of a “15-minute city” asserts that cities can function more effectively, equitably, and sustainably if key amenities are within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Walkable cities not only make daily errands easy, but they also encourage more physical activity and foster community.” If you want to see how your city is doing, you can look it up on the 15-minute-city platform; the city of Regina where Project Pedestrian is based averaged 17 minutes walking time for essential services, better than our rivals Saskatoon and Winnipeg. On a side note, WordPress’s spell check doesn’t think walkable is a word.

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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.

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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 make the journey, and while it may be a coincidence, Eisner recovered and lived nine more years. Herzog’s account of the walk was published as Of Walking In Ice. In 2019, Herzog made a film about another walker, his friend and the author of The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. Herzog talks about Chatwin and the importance of walking in this interview.

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