Category: Resources
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Trans Canada Trail
Dominion Day seems an appropriate time to celebrate the Trans Canada Trail/Sentier Transcanadien, the longest multi-use trail in the world. It reaches every province and territory, and connects all three of Canada’s coastlines. Each section of the Trans Canada Trail is managed locally and supports different activities and community needs; my parents Fred and Allie…
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Walk Listen Create
Walk Listen Create is a gathering place for a wealth of material on the work of walking artists and artist walkers. There’s a website, a podcast, an online Museum of Walking with an archive of walks, films and more, and an online community of artist/walkers.
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Pedestrians First: Tools for a Walkable City
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) is “a global organization at the forefront of innovation, using technical expertise, direct advocacy, and policy guidance to mitigate the impacts of climate change, improve air quality, and support prosperous, sustainable, and equitable cities.” The ITDP website has a wide range of studies and reports, and tools…
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Right of Way?
Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way looks at the ways in which pedestrian deaths are not really accidents, but the result of ignoring pedestrian safety when we design our cities, roads and vehicles. Pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. increased a shocking 80% between 2009 – 2023! Jeff Speck, whose book Walkable City we’ve previously noted, wrote…
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Useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting
Three books with similar titles that look at how urban planning impacts our experiences as pedestrians. Mary Soderstrom’s The Walkable City (2008) takes us through Paris, New York, Toronto, North Vancouver and Singapore, and examines how cities have changed the lives of ordinary citizens – in positive and negative ways. Soderstrom spoke with Pedestrian Space…
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Plodcast
When I go for a walk, it’s often to the soundtrack of a podcast. I realise having headphones on splits my attention between where I am and where the podcast takes me, and I miss out on the sounds of the environment I’m in and send signals to others not to approach. This is not…
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Writers On Walks
BBC Radio 3 has collected a series of its program The Essay into the audio book Writers on Walks. 22 contributors, “an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere”, gathered into categories like Dawnwalks & Night Walks, Springwalks & Winterwalks, and Strange…
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The Road Is How
In The Road Is How, Trevor Herriot writes about how while still recovering from an accident, he made a three day walk from his home in Regina to a cabin his family has at Cherry Lake. Trevor is a wonderful writer and attentive observer of the natural world; Daniel Baird in The Walrus called him…
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Iain Sinclair’s London
Iain Sinclair has spent decades roaming the British capital on foot and excavating the city’s psychogeography in books such as London Orbital, where he follows the route of the M25 motorway, and London Overground, where he walks alongside the city’s Overground rail network. Sinclair has said that 2017’s The Last London is his final book…
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Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane has walked in places I never will and his books about his journeys – most of which take place on foot – have been some of my favourites over the past decade or so; he’s a wonderful writer. Macfarlane described his third book The Old Ways (2012) as being about, “the relationship between…
Project Pedestrian 