There was a reason this post was originally “annotated” - it’s not easy to conjure in words alone, the things that happened along this walk. So there was a map which it might help to peruse while listening to the podcast: the map is here.
These boundary walks (of which there were 4, each corresponding to a point of the compass) which I completed with various friends and accomplices during the project, were an attempt to define the limits of my territory, by surfing right along the edges. To a certain extent, it was a wilfull exercise in pointlessness: the border between Petersham and Stanmore is hardly charged and political the way the Israel-Palestine borders are. I can’t think of a reason why living on one side or the other might change your life in any great way, the way it would depending whether you live in Tijuana or San Diego. Instead, these are the (largely) invisible borders of banal suburban beaurocracy, designed to make life simpler: to divide a large slab of land into smaller chunks, I suppose making them easier to “administer”. So it’s somewhat wilfull and cheeky to take these maps and see if we can find where the boundary lies.
By “following a rule” — eg to try and walk the border, no matter how tricky and silly the route might be — we shift the bounds of our normal activity, where we’d normally go, and the way we’d normally travel. We begin to use walking for something else, something non-useful, in the classic sense of “use”. Of course, there’s a big tradition of non-useful walking, particularly de Certeau’s famous “walking in the city” essay. I like what he says about how the city, when walked, is not something pre-existing, but comes into being in response to our pedestrian bodies.
To the flâneur urban surroundings suddenly become both familiar and alien, inscribed with a subjective resonance, strange associations and the depth of myth. By making themselves travellers in their own city, these writers believe that they are capable of subverting the dominant image of Paris as grid, plan or spectacle. The walker is held to invite an alternative city to express itself, one that cannot be separated from the pedestrian body.
Chatting with Tully, while making this recording, I realised that this walk, in particular (with me, Tully, Polly, Bec, and Sunny) has become a kind of myth, at least amongst ourselves. Something that bound us pedestrians together. This would not have been possible by simply sitting around drinking tea and perusing the map. We had to walk it.
Listen in here [mp3, 7mb, 17min]
Read the original posting here.
