Kitchener compared with Vienna
Check out this Story Map that compares the walking 'footprints' of Kitchener, Ontario with Vienna, Austria
I am excited to announce the launch of a new project entitled, My 15 Minute City! This project will be a series of short videos providing a ...
Kitchener compared with Vienna
Check out this Story Map that compares the walking 'footprints' of Kitchener, Ontario with Vienna, Austria
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.
“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
"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.
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 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.
I am excited to announce the launch of a new project entitled, My 15 Minute City!
This project will be a series of short videos providing a virtual experience of walking My 15 Minute City, which is downtown Kitchener (DTK), Ontario.
In each episode I will explore parts of the downtown within a 15 minute walking radius of the intersection of King and Queen Streets. During these walks I will apply various ideas and questions from the urban scholarly literature. The overall question to be addressed is:
What makes a successful urban walking experience?
These episodes will be Youtube videos, no more than six minutes long, consisting of a filmed walk narrated by the author. The video will be edited to include supporting maps, images and additional narrative. The Youtube channel will be complemented with an online, interactive Story Map that will locate each episode and provide additional materials. The intended audience of the project includes both the general public as well as students of the city, at all levels.
Here are some the proposed topics for episodes of My 15 Minute City. These are not their final titles or sequence.
The first two episodes are currently in production. I will publish the project when the first few are complete, hopefully in May, 2021. Subsequent episodes will be rolled out over the summer.
To get a better idea of the project see My 15 Minute City StoryMap
As episodes are completed they will be posted on my Youtube channel.
Thanks for viewing My 15 Minute City.
Bob Sharpe
Like other approaches to teaching and learning, a walking andragogy includes the following elements: