StoryMap: Kitchener cf Vienna - a surprise

Kitchener compared with Vienna

Check out this Story Map that compares the walking 'footprints' of Kitchener, Ontario with Vienna, Austria

Space Syntax Fun

Many cities have a distinct urban form evident in their street pattern. The spatial properties of that form, such as street density and connectivity are identifiable and measurable.  This is known as space syntax. 

There is a substantive literature on space syntax in architecture and urban planning.  Recent research uses space syntax measures to examine how urban form is related to routine walking, showing that street layout is a primary factor influencing pedestrian movement.  (Koohsari, et al, 2019). 

Quiz

How many of the following 15 cities you can identify from their urban form or street layout alone.  Answers are on the next page.

https://entornoalpatio.wordpress.com/tag/urbanismo/

No peeking!

The New Urban Agenda

The New Urban Agenda, was adopted at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, on 20 October 2016.  The intent is to strengthen and implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 11.  A policy of increased walkability is affirmed as central to this goal that cities become inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.  

The following guidebook to help foster action on the New Agenda was published in 2020.

The New Urban Agenda Illustrated: The New Urban Agenda, adopted at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, on 20 October 2016, presents a paradigm shift based on the science of cities and lays out standards and principles for the planning, construction, development, management and improvement of urban areas. The New Urban Agenda is intended as a resource for different actors in multiple levels of government and for civil society organizations, the private sector and all who reside in urban spaces of the world.

How to take a walk

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson

Below is a draft list of guidelines for ensuring a safe and successful urban walk.

• Wear proper shoes
• Dress for the weather
• Protect yourself from the sun and insects
• Bring water and snacks
• Know where you are:  carry a map, compass, GPS or smartphone
• Keep track of the time and distance travelled
• Walk with a partner
• Respect private property
• When in environmentally sensitive areas, stay on the marked trails
• Bring a communications device: mobile phone, walkie-talkie  
• Bring a simple first-aid kit
• Bring tools to help collect information: notepad, camera, GPS
• 
  

Anything else?

Graffiti

A montage and contemplation of graffiti in downtown Kitchener, April 2021.   This material is preparatory for an episode of My 15 Minute City.  This version is Graffiti 3, updated April 24th, 2021

I update this video as I collect additional clips of graffiti.  The video is over 2 minutes in length with a file size of 180 mb.  Larger files like this  cannot be uploaded to Blogger, so further updates to this video are posted on Youtube and linked here:

Graffiti 6 

How often is the term 'walk' used in English?

"When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years."

Below are a few Ngrams plotting the frequency of the word 'walk" in the Google corpus called English(2019) during the period, 1830-2019. 

The first chart plots 'walk' in comparison to 'urban' and 'rural'.  It is evident that the word walk is a frequently occurring word in English.  'Walk' occurred more frequently than urban and rural in the periods 1830-1910, and then again after 2010. 

The second chart shows an inflection search on the word 'walk'.  According to Google, "An inflection is the modification of a word to represent various grammatical categories such as aspect, case, gender, mood, number, person, tense and voice. You can search for them by appending _INF to an ngram."  

The corpus today uses 'walked', 'walk', 'walking' and 'walks' in that order.  Interestingly, the predominance of 'walked' is new since 2000.  

The third chart disentangles 'walk' as a verb from 'walk' as a noun.  Walk is used as a verb more often throughout the entire period, and since 2000 more than twice as often as a verb than a noun.

Overall, the word 'walk' has occurred frequently in the English (2019) corpus since 1830.  Its usage dropped slowly from 1830 to about 1990, but since then the word has been used at a growing rate.  

How to use Walkscore

 This is a short video and trial voiceover for 'How to Use Walkscore".  This material is preparatory for an episode of My 15 Minute City.  

Walkability within the Waterloo Region

 The Region of Waterloo provides a nice interactive map of walkability in the Region

  

The website provides a brief description of how the walkability index is calculated. 

"Walkability rankings are relative to neighborhoods in Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo. The ratings combine 4 neighborhood characteristics: 1) Residential density 2) Number of intersections 3) Variety of places to visit and 4) Design of retail stores."

A walkability rating is calculated and assigned to each cell on the map.  It looks to me that each cell represents 100 X 100 metres on the ground. The higher the walkability rating of the cell, the darker the shading of green.   

Downtown Kitchener is shown to be the most walkable district in the Region.   It is affirming to note that the spatial extent of this green district is very close to that of My 15 Minute City.  

The added benefit of this map is that it shows variations, although rather coarsely, in walkability within DTK.

A Philosophy of Walking

 

A Philosophy of Walking by  Frédéric Gros, (Verso, 2014) is a beautifully written, reflective, and insightful collection of essays about walking.  

That said, the author has a penchant for long walks in the countryside, and doesn't much like the urban walk.  Among 25 short essays, only one is focused on the urban walking experience.  He comments that "Walking in town is torture to the lover of long rambles in nature, because it imposes, as we shall see, an interrupted, uneven rhythm." (175).   His perspective on the urban walk is through the emergence of the urban flaneur.   Urban concentration, the crowd, and capitalism, or more exactly consumerism, enabled the urban stroller to appear, and moreover are at the root of interruptive nature of walking in the city.  The urban walker "... just lays himself open to scattered visual impacts.  The walker is fulfilled in the abyss of fusion, the stroller in a firework-like explosion of successive flashes." (181).  

Strong, colourful and critical language of the urban walk.  Rarely, however, is downtown Kitchener that exciting.  Even so, encounters with the city, crowds and consumerism provide students with learning opportunities to see how the city is infused with power, inequity, and injustice.  Such insights make for a good urban walk.

  

My Research Interests

This schematic illustrates my major research interests and how they fit together.  

 

Walking in the European City

Walking in the European City: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography

Edited By Timothy Shortell, Evrick Brown, 1st edition Routledge, 2016

Walking Pedagogy/Andragogy - 1

Over a few posts I will elaborate on my ideas of teaching and learning about walking.  

 

A walking pedagogy/andragogy is essentially a set of approaches to teaching and learning that is built around the activity and subject of walking.  Approaches to teaching and learning differ between children and adults, hence the distinction between Pedagogy = paidi (child) + ago (guide), and Andragogy = andras (man) + ago (guide).  Working mostly with adult learners, my approach is rightly called a walking andragogy, and I'm a walking andragogue!  A future post will discuss experiential learning as a key component of the adult learning model.

Like other approaches to teaching and learning, a walking andragogy includes the following elements: 

• A methodology and practice of teaching 
• A strong theoretical foundation 
• A curriculum of content 
• A research domain

"What your walk really says about you"

What your walk really says about you By Christian Jarrett BBC 19th May 2016

"Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Walk"

Here is a concise reminder of the powers of walking. 

Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Walk

by Deborah Grayson Riegel

Harvard Business Review

February 02, 2021

On the trail again

Time to update this blog.