Full Description
This book brings together an international group of artists and writers to respond to the question of how our new world orders force us to reconsider urban walking and urban spaces in ways which extend into the digital sphere of online dialogue and screen sharing. In their reflections on walking cities in lockdown, the artists and writers contributing to this book share a number of complementary themes. Key to this is the question of how we walk in post-pandemic cities and how such walking might motivate or be motivated by transgressive, atomised or collective thoughts, affects, relations and experiences. Here we see how navigating cities in lockdown requires us to re-territorialise, improvise, create and de- or re-politize. There is, for example, a clear distinction between the severe lockdown measures that were introduced in Cape Town and the liberal appeal to good citizenship that northern hemisphere cities such as Stockholm chose to rely on. These measures impact on the way we experience urban walking and, in each case, lead to deeper reflections about the heightened presence of ideological structures embedded within the urban.
Contents
Introduction Part One: Politics of Space 1. Development and Standstill: Pandemic Energies in Somers Town 2. Political Geometries 3. Fear and loathing in ZA 4. Hong Kong: An Uneasy Walk Part Two: Digital Walking 5. Isolated Together 6. Traversing the New Byzantium: How Los Angeles was remade by a changing economy. 7. We Will All Only Be Here 8. London Experienced at a Safe Distance Part Three: Art and the Urban 9. Lockdown Art Practice; 12 months in Berlin 10. The Rise of the Infinity Pool 11. Wanderlust Brixton 12. Pandemic Landscape. Fieldnotes from London Heathrow Part Four: Dialogue and Collaboration 13. A Covid-19 crisis. From a Delhi perspective and a half way between London and Delhi 14. Swimming in Venice 15. Court Circular SE11 Part Five: Night Walking in Lockdown 16. Meditations on a nightwalk 17. Melbourne: Mantra Bell Hotel
