Downtown Miami, 062619, 6:40 pm.
“I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note […]. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. ” Lauren Elkin, in her wonderful Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London via BP
One more quote from Elkin,
“[…] walk[ing] […] confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.
I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. […]
You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead [my emphasis].”
