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.