Pedestrians' Perspectives on the City
This seminar aims to explore the complex and vibrant relation between the pedestrian and the city. We will look at walking as medium of urban perception as well as a mode of mobility.
Starting with Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and the literary type of flaneur we will move to sixties' psycho geography, the concept of dérive and than switch over to self experience in a chosen urban environment, whether in Weimar or any other city.
In a second phase we look at the current situation of walking, check alleyways and hidden paths through the city, analyze distribution of space in streets and places and research walking as a sustainable mode of mobility in a car centered city.
Finally we search for new mobility projects that feature walking as an element of multi-modal mobility and a way to reclaim urban space.
Thanks to funds provided by Professional.Bauhaus we will be able to invite specialized scholars for guest lectures Monika Popp and Rainer Kazig. Furthermore the seminar will be a test case for new forms of digital learning, introducing the new E-learning platform moodle.
Selection of students' final work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Public guest lecture and discussion
Parcours Commentés
November 18, 2014
Room: 109, main building Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Monika Popp (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Department für Geographie)
Rainer Kazig (École d'Architecture de Grenoble, Laboratoire CRESSON)
Tracking pedestrians’ experience of space: method and application examples
Dealing with the quality of time spent in public spaces is of central importance in town planning and urban development that is oriented towards pedestrians. It is associated with the task of tracking down systematically how pedestrians experience space in the context of concrete urban situations. However, the established methods of social science urban research are appropriate here to only a very limited extent. It is only recently that there have been methodological innovations which make it possible to record, in a differentiated manner, the experience of urban spaces by people on the move. In our lecture, we present a corresponding newer method in the form of the "commented walks", as well as various application examples.