Category: Notes
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Dickens’s night walks
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…
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Phone zombies, drifters, speed bumps
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…
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How walking changes the way we see the world
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…
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I’m walkin’ here!
If you’ve walked in a North American city, there’s a good chance you’ve witnessed and/or experienced something similar to that of Ratso and Joe in Midnight Cowboy – a driver makes a right hand turn without looking for pedestrians. In Canada, there are an average of 300 pedestrian fatalities every year, and thousands of injuries…
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Walking The Bypass
Congratulations to Ken Wilson on the public launch of Walking The Bypass, published by University of Regina Press. Ken’s book evolved from a series of walks he took during the pandemic lockdown, and in its manuscript form Ken received the City of Regina Writing Award in 2022. Dan Piepenbring writes about Walking The Bypass in…
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The marketing of 10,000 steps
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; Reddit’s walking forums are full of anxious posts…
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Walking across Britain (from your sofa)
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. Perhaps this explains why there are so many British TV shows devoted…
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Walkable cities
The American Geographical Society published a story on the world’s most walkable cities, and the winner is Milan, Italy! Two cities Project Pedestrian has spent extensive time in, Lyon, France (5) 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…
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Cardiff Walks
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…
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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,…
Project Pedestrian 