Walking in Cities

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.

Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist. His work explores the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal, regeneration and social organisation as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine master plans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. He has exhibited his work internationally and is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2012). Joseph-Lester is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art.

Ahuvia Kahane is Regius Professor of Greek (1761), A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2017) and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include temporality, complexity theory, ancient literature and the relations between antiquity, modernity and contemporary critical thought. His book Epic, Novel and the Progress of Antiquity (Bloomsbury) is in press. Forthcoming work includes (ed.) A Cultural History of Time in the Ancient World (Bloomsbury), Orality and the Formula (de Gruyter), and “Ancient Narrative Time” (in A Handbook of Ancient Literary Theory, Oxford).

Simon King is a London-based writer and walking artist undertaking a practice-based PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. His research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement. He is the co-founder with Jaspar Joseph-Lester of the cross-disciplinary Walkative project at the RCA and has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble to create participatory group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014); Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016); and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.