Category: Notes
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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,…
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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 