Rain Calendar at 11+

A Reflection - 3.28.21

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Eleven years ago on the spring equinox a pattern began to emerge. My rain calendar, 366 individually mounted acrylic tiles, now resided on my apartment wall. On that day, I pulled forward the tile representing the spring equinox and began. Everyday since, as with my life, the calendar changed to mark a new day and record the pattern of my trajectory. A marking that linked my everyday experience to the environment I inhabit. While the aspiration was there that first day, little did I think that a decade later the record would still be playing strong. A daily motion and reflection that ripples forward from that first tile on that first equinox to today.

Fittingly, as I write, today is a Rain Day.

Spring Equinox, 2010

Gauge 

Inspired by life in the Pacific Northwest, I conceived of my calendar as a way to trace my personal experience of rain. A daily ritual of recording precipitation and my relationship with my place. An enactment and representation of my relationship with rain through art.     

A calendar of 366 individual acrylic tiles. Each morning the forward tile marking the previous day is pushed back to rest flat against the wall and the tile marking the new day is pulled forward to rest on the head of the nail.  At the end of each day the current tile is flipped to reflect if it was a 'rain day' (gray) or not (yellow-orange). The gauge is my body.  Each tile once pushed back to the wall remains in this state as a record of that day until the year passes bringing me and the calendar back around to a particular tile and day. This ritual and daily observance has become a metronome of sorts. An action that has built layers of knowledge and experience that was barely considered that first day. An action that has come to shape both me (the gauge) and the environment around me.

Spring Equinox, 2021

Small Moments

The calendar design acts to continually question the relationship between individual and the whole. An abstract delineation of space and color set within the continuous flow of time and my life. When I first conceived of the calendar it was a way to come to terms with a life within days and days of rain. I think most residents in Seattle have developed their own terms to define their relationship with the low light, the damp surfaces, the gray. Indeed, wherever one lives, one develops a way to relate to the climate, weather, and environment as a biological, intellectual, and creative response. I chose to channel my creative energy and a small moment of everyday practice to produce and enhance this relationship.

The calendar created a way for me to counter the leveling and monotonous consistency that is Pacific Northwest rain. To establish rain as a collection of individual drops not an even drizzle. To remember that behind the low clouds which seem to emerge impossibly from below the horizon is the sun. To imagine that the base of the trees, hills, and city extending up through the cloud base are extending into a world of infinite imagination and inquiry… Does the hill crest? Does the tree ultimately reach the sun light it seeks? Is the city in the clouds able to extend toward a more creative and just world? My calendar was never meant to be able to fully negate the reality of walking the damp and low light city but as a way to reveal the resident potential. To open me up to creative moments that cut through that low light and dampness to see the possible reflecting off the brilliant surfaces. What I was not expecting was how the calendar began to effect how I engaged not just my environment but my larger perspective on life and creative potential.

These daily moments of pause and gauging the environment around me began to give me perspective within the other life flows that can often overwhelm, become default, or be thought of as fixed. Each pause at the beginning of the day became an acknowledgement of the day ahead. That I was entering a beginning and into a day that was most definitely open. Open to creativity, new avenues and an opportunity to make. As Jean Gardner (Parsons) one of my mentors continues to advocate - “…you make your path, you do not find your path. Always focus your energy on making the path you want and all that your creativity can imagine.”

Each daily pause also provides a moment to breathe. The two or three breaths taken while I reconfigure tiles, over time has come to parenthesize all other flows and distractions. It is a small moment that over the past decade I have come to value. The fact that these moments are so small is what makes them so meaningful. Just as the accumulation of small rain drops transforms the city, so this collection of now thousands of breaths has transformed me.

A Rain Day

The rain calendar is now along with me as I make my way in the form of distinct shifts in my body. This is manifest most clearly through a smile that emerges on my face as it begins to rain. I do now ‘smile at the rain’ as Beth Logan and her ever-present painting of Seattle rain asks us to do. I am not sure exactly when the shift occurred but it is now pervasive. Rain begins to fall and I smile. While the daily changes to the installed tiles do entail important breathing, the coming of physical rain drops landing on my face creates a direct shift in my body. A smile reshapes my face. I tend to look up momentarily. This shift in view adjusts my posture and my back becomes more vertical. My weight shifts forward and the next steps I take are from the balls of my feet. It is as if my body is aligning to be ready and be capable to make the most of what is next. The environment around me is changing and my spirit and body are working to align to this shift and become best situated. Finally, I whisper to myself - “a rain day.”

Calibration 

This reflection brings forward theories of Evernden, Butler, Lefebvre, Husserl, and others which could be used to calibrate my thinking. However, a comment made by a friend and former colleague Glenn Myles (McGranahan) a couple years back resonates the most during this reflection. “Matthew your calendar is quite Biophilic.” Yes, the calendar is abstract but it does reflect (in Ryan, Browning et. al. phrasing) a deep-seated need to connect with nature. The calendar does engage in patterns that function to provide psychological, physiological, and cognitive benefits. The calendar makes observable to me a pattern of my experience of rain without the intent to separate my experience but to further connect my experience to my environment. This opens up a larger question of how abstraction is engaged to define experience and the environment. A rich question to open… Does abstraction necessarily presuppose a problematic negation of the environment? Can abstract representation be effectively linked to the environment as to not require defaulting to theories that necessitate a need to establish abstract classification, erasure, negation, and on to othering? A few solid questions to continue to approach over the next decade of my rain calendar…

Sun Break

As I think of the rich exploration possible over the next decade that the above questions contain another Pacific Northwest phenomena is occurring - a sun break. A phrase used to describe a small momentary break in the clouds that allows the sun to penetrate through the thick gray blanket pulled over the city. I have always liked this phrasing. While it is technically a break in the clouds the phrasing focuses on what is acting within or is possible from the break - the sunshine. The phrase is turned to describe the positive environmental result not the shift in the condition or constraint. A phrasing that acknowledges, in my thinking, that the sun was always there and always working to warm us and provide light to our day. A small shift is all that is needed to bring the brilliance and warmth into view regardless of how short lived. After all, as the phrase indicates this is a time dependent phenomena and the break will end soon and the rain will return. Until then, the sun break illuminates a kaleidoscope of brilliant light reflecting off of rain soaked surfaces from all directions. A low cool light transformed, for a moment, into an all encompassing brilliant warm light.

Today was a rain day.

On Walking (Revisited - Part III)

Why do I walk?

This is the common question I receive the first time someone hears that I had spent five hours on a Saturday walking. It is a simple question, however I struggle to articulate a concise answer. I hesitate to unpack it for people and share the intersections of meaning that form my walks. Often around the coffee machine I do not elaborate beyond – "I wanted to get out into the city for some exercise and space to think.” This current pause in the context of COVID and the past months spent walking my everyday provides space to unpack the question and continue to work through aspects of critical theory and spatial practice.

This three part series covers the distinct aspects of my walking practice which give me strength. The first is a walking practice that informs the connection between my mind and body. (Part I) The second is to establish spaces for engagement and spaces for social equity and justice. (Part II) Finally, it is a method to ground spatial theory through everyday practice and how am situated in this world.

Part III

Everyday - theory on the ground

Why I walk.

The farther I walk the more it shapes my existence and design approach. Walking is my life path. This can come off as a large claim. My life path – really? On the other hand, it is a humble and measured claim that states my desire and dream to engage in a life and design process that firmly rest within my everyday. A joy embodied within the present and which emerges from critical mundane acts to make my path forward. It is how I am situated.

Situated Knowledge

Walking is the world I know and how I place my body and mind within environments to make me who I am. Another potentially large and obvious claim. Is this so obvious? Many struggle to connect how we situate ourselves within our everyday environment to larger critical and dynamic systems. The current pandemic, the struggle for social and racial justice ,and the climate crises all require us to make this connection. To just continue to question larger structures and systems without questioning how I am also situated is an untenable position. A position that often leads to abstraction, erasure, and displacement. By critically situating myself within space and design I seek to make meaningful intersections, connection, and support. So everyday I ask – How do I situate myself to produce the intersections and connections to form my existence and knowledge, and joy?

My walking practice is an important formulation of this question. Walking is one process engaged to situate myself and gain agency within a lived experience that resides in a mutually supported world.

I walk to know the world that exists in the blocks around my apartment. By walking as a means of transportation I choose to see and be with the people I live among. I choose to not be transported friction-less and in isolation to various destinations. I walk. I see my neighbors lining up for shelter and food at the resource center down the alley. I share with my neighbors as their family grows and as they celebrate success or morn loss. Walking works to resist forces advocating for a friction-less, abstract, and featureless experience. Yes, portions of my world are digitally and virtually linked through data flows. However, walking foregrounds a life flow that is defined by my step and is situated with others in the city. It acts to consistently ground my mind and place my body, creativity, and energy within a meaning rich place.

This ground is supported by the theories of Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) and Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledge). Haraway inspires me to continually question how I situate myself. She articulates the importance of a situated knowledge which “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.” (Haraway) My walking practice is one approach in which I have learned how to see. She clearly articulates that to be situated and to see is more than a neutral and open gaze but requires accountability. With every step, I strive to learn how to see and to be answerable to myself and others.

“Like ‘poems,' which are sites of literary production where language too is an actor independent of intentions and authors, bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; "objects" do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.”

(Donna Haraway)

Situated knowledge is an acknowledgement that knowledge comes from positional perspectives and leads to a critical series of questions for me. I must question my position because it inherently informs what is possible to know about a space or life path. By siting my body, knowledge, and agency I provisionally generate boundaries. I bring boundaries which previously did not exist into generative existence. An existence I am answerable to and situates me and others to learn. It informs what is possible to create and change.

From what position do I arrive into a space? | What positions are the surrounding spaces asking me to conform too? | What positions are others asking me to inhabit? | What questions am I asking of others with how I am situate myself? | Who did I just displace? | How is the space I inhabit open to and supportive of others? | What boundaries just materialized because of my situation? | How am I bound?

To be clear these are not neutral or abstract questions. Haraway continues – “but we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different - and power-differentiated - communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life.” (Haraway) As I walk, meanings and bodies are produced. I cannot deny these meanings and the effect I have on others. Do I position my knowledge to differentiate in order to gain power or have I learned to see my act to situate my body and knowledge as a ‘chance for life?’

This situated knowledge is not exclusive to me as a body and person but also as a designer. An often overlooked initial step in design is the process through which we become situated as a designer or design team. There are two characteristics to how this initial step is overlooked. The first is to default to previous steps by superficially considering them in passing as rote process. The second is to not acknowledge the fact that even if you do not ask the questions – you are answering them. This is what I take Haraway to mean when she calls for us to be answerable to our existence. My existence as a designer and a person must be one where I critically answer the questions that my situation pose. A conscious overlooking or a detached subconscious answering both generate an untenable existence. As I begin, I ask…

How do I approach this design space? | How am I present and presenting myself entering the space? | Who am I including and excluding into the design process? | Am I providing an open and accessible space for others to join the team at the design table? | How do I access and experience the site? | How do we intend to translate various knowledge among very different - and power-differentiated - communities? | What does being accountable to myself and to others look and feel like? | What do I need to learn in order to see here?

For me design begins as the act to critically situate myself and others. A creation of a ‘now here’ (part II) from which we can engage in an open and robust collaboration from identified and situated knowledge. In Isis Brooks terminology outlined in Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape – a ‘Step 0.’ In order to begin we have to actively work to make a way for us to begin. How we begin informs the process of design and any potential outcomes. A design approach that includes a critical situating of knowledge as a designer within a design process, within a site, and in collaboration with others is a line of inquiry that extends beyond me as an individual design leader. It encourages a larger critical questioning for any design team and design process to ask – How do we Situate Design? We have the ground to ask…

With whom does design agency reside? | In what languages will the design communicate? Spatial, cultural, visual, and verbal? | Who is the space and design accountable too? | What is the time frame of the design? | Who will design serve? | Who has the right to design? | How can each design step produce the knowledge and agency needed to take the next design step? | How is design a verb?

This essay has wonderfully morphed into straight up critical questioning. An open ended series of questioning fitting for any horizontal pedagogy aimed to open up a site for learning. A beautiful shift. Any critical design process or walk at the root is just this– an opening to ask a series of spatial and social questions. No claim toward an answer. Only a claim to be situated in order to be able to begin to question. A design or walk without a claim to predestined solution seeking allows a space for design to become answerable to what we learn how to see.

A focus on situated knowledge is also is a valid way for me to get theory down to the ground and answerable. It is a direct way for me to short circuit binaries common within theoretical arguments. Theory, particularly modernist spatial theory, has worked to establish abstract frameworks for analysis and released design from considering the everyday as a critical source of knowledge. One of the clearest looks into the urban dynamics and outcomes when the design of space is de-linked from the situated knowledge of experience is James Holston anthropological critique of Brasilia in The Modernist City. The passage below illustrates both how he situates himself, his research project, and articulates how a project is conceived to be answerable to the situated knowledge on the ground.

An adequate conception of what drives Brasilia’s development from modernist principles has to include the ways in which the main players interpret these contexts. One important way to do this is to consider that the project generated discourses, statements, texts, plans, models, drawings, and the like, which defined the intentions of this involved. These intentions are fundamental to our study because they make possible and legitimate the tactical interventions that people use to give Brasilia’s development its particular configuration of forms and forces. Architecture is itself a domain of intentions – for changing society, re-patterning daily life, displaying status, regulating real estate, and so forth – which engages other intentions, all of which have consequence in the world. Intentionality constitutes a part of social action that can be neglected only at the cost of having a reductive and deterministic view of historical development. In this case study, I shall focus on intentions as they are manifested in the production of texts of various kinds, and I shall always link these to specific people or groups, their social practices, and their historical circumstances.

(James Holston)

Holston accounts for the full spectrum of knowledge production from theoretical intention and representation on through to the built form as a site of critical situated knowledge. A focus on everyday experience provides an important site along this spectrum that links the two ends. It calls on us to remain in the messy middle and not retreat fully to the abstract world of ‘infinite data’ or a ‘tabla rasa.’ Or, to think that our mundane activities do not possess an agency within high concepts or analysis. Validity for him is rooted in experience and situated knowledge.

Beyond urban research, current social distancing requirements have presented a very real everyday connection to larger social and biological systems. Every day I must question my position within space along the spectrum from theoretical intention to body position. Every aspect of the everyday is brought into question. We are reminded that the everyday is the site of our bodies that determine health, our social and political formation, and how we relate to others. Everyday moments where all assumptions are suspended to provide a ground for new actions. (See Field of Care Essay)

Breathe

For those of you who have walked with me, and now for those of you who have made it up to this point in my 3-part essay, know this is the time during a walk when depth and distance cause my legs to hurt and my mind to dig deeper. A shift in pace typically takes place to sustain my drive and joy in order to reach new depths and distance. Deep and steadying breaths set in. My stride extends to stretch forward. Having arrived deep into critical theory and with horizontal questioning in place this walk can begin. Yes, we are arriving at a beginning not an end. A beginning where we are not concerned with the end but simply a conscious shaping of current movement. A movement to best consider extending and opening up in to a city. A city in which to breathe and to ground the experiences gained through the practice of walking. A walk in Mexico City.

Existence

My walks in Mexico City (2018) reconfirmed my walking practice and revealed a city embodied with situated knowledge. A historic and contemporary city that is constructed and produced strongly through everyday energy that reveals a palpable urban knowledge. A city produced and contested through detail, threshold, agency, surface, and joy. A city reveling in the critical and important mundane practice of the everyday.

Detail

Threshold

Agency

Surface

Joy

I walk everyday to be alive.

Further Reading

Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma, John M. Meyer. (2014)

Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape, Isis Brooks. (1998)

The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, James Holston. (1989)

The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau. (1984)

Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht (2012)

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway (1988)

Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord. (1967) Translation - Ken Knabb

On Walking (Revisited – Part II)

Why do I walk?

This is the common question I receive the first time someone hears that I had spent five hours on a Saturday walking. It is a simple question, however I struggle to articulate a concise answer. I hesitate to unpack it for people and share the intersections of meaning that form my walks. Often around the coffee machine I do not elaborate beyond – "I wanted to get out into the city for some exercise and space to think.” This current pause in the context of COVID and the past month spent walking my everyday provides space to unpack my walking and continue to work through aspects of critical theory and spatial practice.

This three part series covers the distinct aspects of my walking practice which give me strength. The first is a walking practice that informs the connection between my mind and body. The second is to establish spaces for engagement and spaces for social equity and justice. Finally, it is a method to ground spatial theory through everyday practice and how I know the world.

Part II

Movement - social justice in the city

Why I walk.

Walking has a long history as a form of political action. Through the act of walking our bodies are situated and move to claim space. The daily marches and recent occupations (#CHAZ/#CHOP) demanding racial justice in Seattle is the context in which Part II of this essay continues. Over the past months I have been able to listen openly to voices and perspectives which are often marginalized and silenced. Voices silenced by systems which are constructed to limit participation, to elevate select voices of a particular body, class, and race over the perspective of others. My experience is that to be able to speak, to be heard, and to listen a space needs to be produced and importantly claimed for dialogs to begin. Walking is a direct action to open and hold public space to form a public dialog. It is a direct placement of bodies within the spatial and social systems of the city to disturb the flow to be able to speak.

My walking practice over the years has been a way to produce spaces for thought and reflection. (Part I) A corollary question during this time has been – How do I make spaces for thought, reflection, and action within a group? It is untenable for me to exclusively walk in isolation and solely for and by myself. The question of why I walk becomes:

How can I walk with and for others?

I do not ask this question with ‘walk’ as a metaphor. This question is quite literal. A question to what actions I need to take with my body, mind, and person to be present – to be able to join others in the production of social and political space. There are two particular aspects of walking that inform how I continue to step forward. First, is the function walking has in producing spaces that are mutually defined and supported. Spaces which acknowledge multiple voices and are not dominated by a singular voice or perspective. Second, is walking in order to produce spaces of accountability to each other. These aspects of my walking practice are founded on the theories of the production of space and critical views of space resulting from dialectic and inter-sectional analysis.

Edward Soja, in Seeking Spatial Justice writes – “Understanding that space - like justice is never simply handed out or given, that both are socially produced, experienced, and contested on constantly shifting social, political, economic, and geographic terrains, means that justice - if it is to be concretely achieved, experienced, and reproduced - must be engaged on spatial as well as social terms.”

Along with other critiques of modernism and modern spatial theory, Soja calls for us to acknowledge the contested nature and processes involved to produce space and society. Space is not neutral, a given, fixed, or to use a classic modernist term, a ‘tabula rasa.’ Space, and for me the city, is a critical environment where the intersection of social formation is navigated and produced. The first step along making this road is to acknowledge that it is impossible for me to walk without support from others. It is impossible for me to walk without affecting others. I am not, as Judith Butler questions, “radically self-sufficient.” To conceive of myself as self-sufficient and without need or affect on others is a very radical position. Walking in ways that rely on the support of others and acknowledge that we need each other is how we are situated and should be considered the existing mode of society. It is not a radical request to to be heard, to be understood, and to be cared for. It is not a radical position to claim and hold space in common and in support of others.

I also look strongly to Henri Lefevbre to provide a foundation for my walks. His ideas outlining the production of space shifted my understanding of space from a neutral container or a site of collected objects to space as “acts of creation [which] are, in fact, a process.” This essay is not intended to be a re-stating of his base theories but it does emerge from a knowledge that space is produced through social production. A journey that consists of spatial practice, representation, and representational spaces. His theories also a direct critical question to people who want to “leave space untouched.” He asks: “Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body…?” He answers – No. He instead puts forward – “the operational or instrumental – role of space, as knowledge AND action, is the existing mode of production.” Spatial formation and thus walking is a way to operationalize an idea or knowledge. It requires a navigation which situates yourself in relationship to others. Others can mean their physical presense or the spaces and edifices which have been socially produced. By walking I am able to directly question both the “knowledge AND the action[s]” of a particular social or spatial condition or structure. The act of walking enables me to make myself visible and known in a gathering of others. A well known example of walking to socially produced knowledge and action in the city is the social movement and early gay pride marches. The marches activated and opened spaces in the city for a particular group to transform and make direct claims to social justice in the city, the street, and society. Claims to space in order to see and be seen. Movement to express an individual and social groups existence and right to exist.

Daily and weekly Black Lives Matter marches in Seattle over the past months are working in a similar vein. Voices which are often marginalized and ignored are making claims to space in order to communicate with the larger city, political structures, and individuals. Within the current rapid gentrification and radical displacement of black and brown people out of Seattle there has been relatively little effort by the city at large to acknowledge and comprehend the knowledge and actions of marginalized groups as they attempt to resist the structures of displacement, capital exploitation, and racial discrimination. Some call occupations and claiming streets in protest radical. Walking is a direct statement to society – ask John Lewis, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. If one has been silenced, structurally isolated, repressed, and not even acknowledged, what avenues are open. When a city is socially and physically produced to withdraw support for your well-being then it must be resisted both spatially and socially.

Let's flip the perspective and ask what is really the radical position. Over the past decade the capital and political structures of Seattle have acted to displace the black and brown population of Seattle. Statistics reveal that from 2010 and 2017, the Black population in the Central District has shrunk from about 34.1% of the population to about 18.4%, (U.S. Census Bureau). This rapid and radical transformation of Seattle serves capital accumulation and profit. The status quo of allowing these capital and spatial processes to function without question has completely transformed Central Seattle. Which is the radical act? Displacing a group of people with little support or care from society and space? Or, marching for 45+ days to claim various public roads and spaces in order to speak and be heard? To create friction within the spaces of the city to hold a political conversation and to make visible the questions and conditions that for years have been silenced? Direct action is taken to acknowledge the issue and critically to create the opportunity to change the relative silence in Seattle around displacement, needs, and lives. Move along in silence or hold a space to be heard? Silence and rapid displacement is the radical position to be resisted. Walking as direct action is what should be considered the existing mode of production. A march creates needed friction within the spatial and social systems. Walking becomes one instrument to make a role for space, as both knowledge AND action, to shape urban systems and change the social and spatial systems toward social justice in the city.

Acknowledge Others

Meaningful and reflective work to situate myself in a space with others is required for me to be fully present in a group and the city. This work is a way for me to resist stasis, fixed conditions, and objects and focus attention on the processes and appropriation underway. My commitment to be in a space with others is inspired by a set of questions and prompts articulated in a series of passages from Unlearning Walking (2014) developed by the Unlearning Walking Club in Vancouver BC.

These questions and prompts are set in dialog with images from my walking practice.

Unlearning Walks

Of the land:

Acknowledge the land you walk on. What intelligence is embedded there?

Becoming Landscape:

Walk through a landscape with someone. Guide each other to feel the land as your own body. Share narratives that lie between layers of this landscape.

Becoming Other:

Wander and intuitively let the natural being choose you. Spend time with that being. Let it teach you another way of knowing.

Becoming Another:

Observer a passerby. Absorb them into yourself. Feel the weight of their body, adjust to their pace, imagine their direction. Let a narrative unfold.

Accountable to Others

An accounting takes place as I walk. To arrive into a space physically, emotionally, and socially is more than just an acknowledgment but also an act of holding myself accountable. Walking with others works to remove a notion that we can achieve full transparency. That it is possible to make everything completely free of friction and that all ground and systems can be level or even. When I commit to being in a space together, no matter how contested, I have come to realize that to seek a friction-less, transparent and even space is a false goal. To seek this abstract ideal is to ask for me and others to be negated, unseen, or rendered smooth and featureless. Both Neil Smith (geography) and Ralph Emerson (literature) critically question the conditions of uneven development and visibility in the city. They examine the questions that confront a search for “absolute abstraction both from the social context and the events and objects under scrutiny.” This examination circles me around to confront the false promise of an abstract utopia as perfect space. When in fact to seek a utopia is to seek the promise of a Thomas More utopia – no where. For me to walk is not to seek out an ideal utopian social approach or existence but a commitment be accountable to the people and spaces created to connect and bridge the space in between me and others. To not expect a smooth ideal space but to expect to be held accountable to others within complex and nuanced social formation as I move with others from being nowhere to become now here. When we arrive together we both have to work to protect the ground created between and connecting us together.

A stencil designed while at Parsons is a small addition to the works of various artists that explore the dynamic shift in space and meaning to create a space that transforms nowhere to now here. This work is an act of diction and within language but the same act occurs as we place our bodies with others in a space. By making a space it is possible to change the meaning of a place. How bodies are situated and a space arrived into is a critical first step to create the opening that can move us from nowhere to now here. This opening is often a space for social justice.

What is possible when spaces in between are opened? My walking is often a literal answer to the question of where I stand on an issue or within a system. My role as an architect and a professor repeatedly ask the question of where I stand within structures of power, social systems, capital, patriarchy, policy, and the city. Both of these professions situate me structurally within the design of the city and society. One response to this question was formulated in collaboration with NYC organizers starting in 2011. I worked with organizers in The Free University of New York, Occupy University, and various student body organizations to occupy public spaces around the city as a stand against systemic policies which enclose education and reinforced historic repression, racism, and patriarchy through select knowledge production. The space needed for this work was not able to be produced or accessed within the university. To open up a space for learning and unlearning accountable to both the teacher and the student we moved our bodies out of the university system to occupy and hold public spaces that elevated voices and ideas often marginalized, rendered invisible, or held enclosed within the University. These spaces for organizing and connection also activated spaces which had long lost their former roles in political and social formation. New York City parks had become no place for education, politics, and ideas to be debated and formulated. Parks had transformed into commercialized passive recreation spaces rendered neutral within the larger political discourse and social formation of the city. Selected spaces were opened up on occasion to produce an education space that was accessible and accountable to each other.

image by Sara Bissen

image by Sara Bissen

image by Sara Bissen

image by Sara Bissen

Today, in Seattle, my walking is a small part of larger work with others to open up an active and direct conversation on what it means to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter. To open up an active and direct conversation on how to further change my actions and that of the city to be accountable to Black Lives. The tactics to claim space are claims to the city. They are claims to a just city. They are not the sole tactic necessary but needed direct action to produce the spaces and society that acknowledge and are accountable to each other.

I walk for justice.

(to be continued)

Further Reading

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1947)

Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces, Ed. Robert Hayworth & John Elmore (2017)

On the Brink, Jeff Shulman & Steven Fong (2019)

The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre (1974)

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, Don Mitchell (2003)

Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja (2010)

Social Justice and the City, David Harvey (1973)

Uneven Development, Neil Smith (1984)

Unlearning Walks, Catherine Grau & Zoe Kreye (2014)

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, John Lewis (1998)

On Walking (Revisited)

Why do I walk?

This is the common question I receive the first time someone hears that I had spent five hours on a Saturday walking. It is a simple question, however I struggle to articulate a concise answer. I hesitate to unpack it for people and share the intersections of meaning that form my walks. Often around the coffee machine I do not elaborate beyond – "I wanted to get out into the city for some exercise and space to think.” My current pause in the context of COVID and the past month spent walking my everyday provides space to unpack my walking and continue to work through aspects of critical theory and spatial practice.

This three part series will cover the distinct aspects of my walking practice which give me strength. The first is a walking practice that informs the connection between my mind and body. The second is to establish spaces for engagement and spaces for social equity and justice. Finally, it is a method to ground spatial theory through everyday practice and how I know the world.

Portions of this working through occurred during insightful and questioning conversations with students in my On Walking course taught at Parsons The New School for Design.

Part I

Body - a walking practice

Why I walk.

I started to walk close to 30 years ago after moving to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. After a couple years in the city I repeatedly found myself on long walks through campus or the city on Sunday afternoons. It was not a conscious seeking out but just an activity which emerged. Also, as a consequence of not owning a car, I found myself walking in lieu of waiting for the bus. Wait for the bus for 10 minutes to then ride for 10 minutes, or walk to where I wanted to go in the same amount of time. More and more I found myself walking. This continues to this day. When I want to go to Capital Hill from my apartment downtown the question rarely enters my mind to consider the train or bus. I just start to walk.

I have always considered walking as a benefit to my general physical and mental health. Walking is part of my process of working through ideas and problems. A key aspect is that with every step I take I am further removed from the physical and thus mental space I previously occupied. In effect, my body position and trajectory produces a new mental space. Distance and time is registered in my legs. I find it is after about an hour of walking when my physical work begins to be felt in my leg muscles that my mind arrives in a relaxed and clarifying state. It is through continuing to walk into this space that instances of insight, reflection, and needed pause occur. I do not stop at this moment. I continue to walk. A continuation that can last for the rest of the day on occasion. My walks start with no specific destination, direction, or time-frame. In essence, they are individual dérives by definition as I let my body and subconscious lead me through time and space.

Coupled to this act of opening up physical and thus mental space has for years been informed by the theories of de Certeau, Lefebvre, Butler, among others. These theories over time have grown to be present both in how I operationalize my walking to produce space and also how I approach design to support others in how they can produce their space. De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life articulates critical theory connecting spatial movement to the practice and production of our cities. My early walking and these theories were an important first step in forming my design perspective and how I understand the world. However, I never referred or conceived of my walking as 'a practice’ an aspect important to de Certeau's ideas. In fact, I consciously did not describe or make my walking into a practice or what I thought of as a project. To conceive of it and make it into a project or design work, I imagined, would negate the space of clarity and the value I gained through an open dérive or wandering.

An important shift from wandering to develop a walking practice occurred while teaching architecture history at Parsons. The shift in my attitude to distinguish between theories of spatial practice and my walking was a deeper look into the Buddhist Temple form. I made a connection which was always present but to this point I never completed. I tended to hold the agency in walking which De Certeau articulated either at a distance or deep inside of me as a means for individual agency within myself. My walking originated from a desire to consciously and subconsciously wander and get lost — to then find. Buddhist spatial and spiritual acts connected for me theories of agency and practice allowing me to shift walking from a process of finding to a practice of making.

My understanding of the Buddhist Temple form as an architectural manifestation of walking and spiritual practice strongly resonated with me. This re-emergence of the Stupa and various temples in my mind and teaching removed a fear within me that something will be lost with a shift from subconscious walking as dérive to a conscious walking as practice. As I taught the Buddhist Temple, an architecture which connects body movement to a mental state, many of my intuitive threads and experiences during years of walking connected. For the first time I began to comprehend that my body and my mind are engaged in a walking practice. This framing shift provided a new cultural and spatial vocabulary. A vocabulary rooted in Buddhist theory. I feel that I am engaged in a spatial culture practice not a religious practice. This is not to discount or negate the religious aspects of this practice but to convey the meaning I have gained.

An embodied experience of this cultural foundation to my walking practice occurred during a trip to Thailand in 2018.

Walking the rising circular path of Phu Khao Thong (Golden Mountain) in the Wat Saket compound my body experienced through my legs, my lungs, and my hands the spaces and ideas I previously could only imagine and study through written texts. Over a week walking Bangkok the words of de Certeau, read for so many years, took on new meaning.

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk — an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers… whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.”

(The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau)

The poem of Bangkok helped me establish a walking practice. A walking practice rooted to a cultural and spatial vocabulary of accessible experience and awareness.

“It is nothing more or less than seeing things as they are rather than as we wish or believe them to be. This liberation of mind - this direct awareness of Reality as a Whole - is fully accessible to anyone willing to attend to their actual experience.”

(Buddhism: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, Steve Hagen)

“Awareness… being awake, alert, in touch with what is actually happening. It’s about examining and exploring the most basic questions of life. It’s about relying on the immediate experience of this present moment.”

This critical vocabulary of my walking practice is now present for me to maintain and seek out the connection between the body and the mind. My health and design process is no longer in search of distance or removal for insight. My walking practice makes connections to hold me accountable to my body and experience as I live my life and engage in my design work. My legs, my breathing, my continual movement is ground for my thoughts and ideas. A nourishment that through movement, theory, and meaning manifests at the ground level.

The words of Paulo Freire provide a thread to conclude this first reflection and situate the next steps. Much of this growth occurred through the act of teaching and the insightful and re-occurring questions of students. This act of teaching requires continually questioning to push my knowledge and ability to articulate perspective and thinking with others. In a very real way a practice of walking with my students. Freire states:

“But I also know that without practice there’s no knowledge; at least it’s difficult to know without practice. We have to have a certain theoretical kind of practice in order to know also. But practice in itself is not its theory. It creates knowledge, but it is not its own theory.”

(We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change — Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, ed. Bell, etc..)

I walk to practice…

Further Reading

Buddhism: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, Steve Hagen (1997)

The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984)

Senses of the Subject, Judith Butler (2015)

We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Myles Horton & Paulo Freire (1990)

Field of Care

A working essay that considers the theories of Judith Butler and Neil Evernden as a step forward from social distancing to one of the care for others.

My walks in Seattle this spring have taken a different character to previous years of urban exploration. How people and spaces in the city relate to my body has become a prominent examination and negotiation in my everyday. The social formation of the city is no longer a subconscious or overlooked part of the mundane but an active mental and physical state. The writings of Neil Evernden and Judith Butler have become constant companions with me in the city as I examine this adjusted life. Both ask us to question our relationship to others and frame space in terms of care. This critical idea - care - will be instrumental as we reduce our social distance and reconnect within space(s) to begin to make a path forward.

During years of walking I found that my eyes tended to follow two distinct patterns. First, an expansive seeking field scanning up and around, side to side, and toward the horizon. A constant view into the urban fabric to comprehend patterns, form, and social production. The architect and geographer in me geeking out on a derive, so to speak. My second view was a very inward and downward view. Head slightly tilted down and focused within my next step and often fully contained within my body. Quite an introspective gaze. This posture was likely a result of years of walking in a slight pacific northwest drizzle. A slight tip of my head downward to keep my glasses just inside the edge of my gore-tex hood or slightly covered by the top of my head and thus relatively clear. Given our current mandated six foot social distance, I find myself committed to a shifted view. A view that looks into a middle distance and my immediate future space. As I navigate this new regulated everyday I continually and very consciously take up Evernden’s questions regarding field of self:

Where do we draw the line between one creature and another?

Where does one stop and the other begin?

These questions are at the heart of The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment, written in 1993. Neil elaborates these questions in an effort to understand and consider our bodies as more than defined by our skin, physical boundaries, or as clearly defined objects. We are defined as fields of self and fields of care.

What all this suggests is that our assumptions of separateness are unacceptably simplistic, and that we might more closely approximate the facts of our existence by regarding ourselves less as objects than as sets of relationships, or as processes in time rather than as static forms.

Neil uses schools of stickleback fish as example of how organisms define territory beyond a particular body. Phantom limbs as example of how our mental and physical definitions of self are not always aligned. And how, through the act of naming, our understanding of self is culturally defined and intrinsically linked to how our parents, a key other, are defined. These are quite complex phenomena which he explores in depth. For this essay, in short, field of self is as if the boundary of what is to be considered self has expanded to the dimensions of territory, mental image, or a socially defined relationship. We understand and project ourselves as being the size of the territory no longer an organism bounded by skin but an ‘organism-plus-environment’ revealed as a gradient of action. This ‘organism-plus-environment’ definition is supported by an understanding that the ‘true’ version of ourselves is that of the phenomenal body. Inverting the typical definition of self as object and within the theories of phenomenology to understand two important points. “One is that the phenomenal body is the one we live by; the other that the objective body exists only conceptually.” This directly questions that cultural idea that the “objective as real.”

My current socially distant walks along with a walk by Judith Butler in San Fransisco are helpful in navigating this theory of self and point to necessary steps needed to move forward together in a supportive and resilient way defined by care.

My field of self at the moment is strongly defined by three ways to navigate my relationship with others. The first is my physical body position and continual need to maintain a six foot distance between myself and others. At the scale and frame of reference of the body this is a very direct definition and spatial response. I can readily measure this distance with the span of my arms or my pace. There is a tangible aspect to this required social distance. I see someone coming about 1/2 a block away within my new middle distance focal length. I attempt to make eye contact and then begin to scan the area to find a route to pass. Typically this takes me past the curb and slightly into the street. As we approach we both shift to maintain distance. I say hello. I then move back onto the sidewalk and continue on my way. This 30 foot sequence is now very much a conscious calibration of my field of self. To care for my body and health I understand my field of self quite literally as a constantly shifting six foot radial zone. At the moment, a social understanding is being established in the city as to how far the effect of my body extents beyond my skin. A mutually understood relationship between various fields of self.

This gained knowledge and social formation generates the following question - What is the level of care I owe others and myself while in public? This everyday definition building is just starting to be honed and is producing new expectations of what constitutes self. This shift in social definitions is sustainable at the moment and very much accepted. As more people come together and regulations shift we will be asked to produce a new set of answers. At the moment we are able to project our field of self digitally and during the times when we get closer we shift to a set of specific body avoidance tactics. If distance is not able to be maintained we then establish tight barriers. We are digitally expanding our field of self vastly outward while simultaneously retracting and confining our near body/skin field of self definition when touch is a potential.

Retreat

On my walks I have come to understand this adjustment and how it clearly relates to others. We are socially producing a pedestrian relationship that is a form of adaptive ‘managed retreat.’ The strategy of ‘managed retreat’ at the urban and regional scale is a lively discussion to develop a response to climate change and sea level rise in particular. Generally, this strategy is available to any system or relationship given the presence of a new and immediate feedback loop. A clear response to an approaching un-known or known risk. The key mechanism is an increased distance from the other. As with sea level rise, the current distance needed to maintain a sustainable relationship in society is not a random distance but one directly defined by my field of self and field of care. My field of self in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic is defined by the phenomenon of my breath as projected beyond my body into the air and remaining on various surfaces a given time after my physical body has left the scene. This phenomenon is not limited to my casual walks down the sidewalk. A ‘return to work’ and more common close engagement with others will only focus more attention on the overlap of our fields of self and our impact on the health of others.

If we were to regard ourselves as a ‘field of care’ rather than as discrete objects in a neutral environment, our understanding of our relationship to the world might be fundamentally transformed.

This transformation is two fold. First is the acceptance of the fact that the environment is no longer neutral. This question has a long history in modern western theory. A critical theory lens requires us to acknowledge we inhabit and uneven environment one which is not a neutral abstract construct, empty, or ‘tabla rasa’. Second, we are confronted with a reality in which our care for others, and their care for us extends well beyond our discreet bodies. Current healthcare recommendations to reduce the spread of infection regulate a continual movement of my body away from others. The clarity achieved by this polity at the moment is because it is framed by the fact that my relationship to others is defined as a threat not just difference.

What is possible when we transform our relationship to others away from risk, difference, and self toward care? The dialectic relationship Evernden is talking about between self and care is a needed critical shift in meaning. Much of the discussion on ‘managed retreat’ is centered around a response to an approaching threat. This linear understanding misses the point. As I walk toward someone on the streets of Seattle I have come to realize that it is not they, them, or the other that is a threat to my field of self but I am also a threat to them and in being a threat to the them I become a threat to myself. Our respective fields of care intersect and become relational and in interest of each other. Our fields of care become mutually defined. I am not able to negate the health of others because in doing so I negate the health of myself. A productive framework is established. One not governed by a ‘managed retreat’ or drive to define myself through distance and separation but toward a ‘managed approach’ where I am defined by how I approach (care for) others and thus myself.

Approach

One can argue - wait we are already in the deep end and we must retreat. How a person is situated is a critical frame of reference and where we all begin. However, we must hold the relational definition of fields tightly at hand and recognize that it is not tenable to conceive of a neutral space that allows a singular retreat from the edge or others. We must transform our thinking to include the fact that as we retreat from one we perpetually approach an other. Every retreat is defined by another approach. We must resist the concept of a dual frame in a neutral landscape but one of mutually defined relationships defined by approach. If we manage a retreat from the edge, or someone, we also need to focus on the care for where we are headed and who we are approaching?

Before jumping fully on board with this theory of a field of care defined by perpetual approach we need to consider the strategy commonly used as scales shifts and contact is imminent.

As I walk the city, separation is a clear strategy being employed as people return and become more active. Our retreat found ultimately not sustainable and we must navigate an approach. The ‘new normal’ now being considered. At the moment we are able to stage a series of encounters defined by clear moments of approach, distance, and return to ‘managed retreat.’ When this becomes too dynamic, and socially distant relationships can not hold, we tend to fix the conditions and space. In the everyday this is experienced while in line at various stores, food banks, and shelters. We see lines set at 6-foot intervals. This spatial fix comes to define our relationship with others. To access a service, nourishment, or other social interaction the moment clear healthy movement and retreat cannot be maintained a momentary fixed condition is established. Fixed conditions are problematic and to ‘managed retreat’ they cannot be maintained in systems and human environments. Ultimately systems and space fail when they become fixed and static. Just as the built environment is not neutral and friction-less it also cannot sustain social production if it ceases and becomes fixed.

How do we approach this problematic social and spatial fix? A third strategy is typically employed to answer this question within our working definition of field of self. The first part of my exploration has been defined by movement. A move to shift orientation, relationship, and position as the principle strategy. As our movement becomes limited we constrain and fix space relationships. To release this untenable fixed condition we build barriers as a third strategy. In this case, a mask, gloves or other various forms of personal protective equipment (PPE). To care for ourselves (and others) we constrain our field of self to points very close to our skin/body definition. Thus, if movement and fixed positions are not options I wear a mask. I build a boundary to keep my self contained. Not the body contained within my skin but a barrier to contain my breath and fluids. It is this projection of my breathing and fluids beyond my body that the state currently defines as my field of self. The corollary to this in the built environment is the act of building a wall. This can also be seen as an analog to the urban question above regarding how to address climate change and sea level rise. If a managed retreat is not taken and we want to continue to be in contact with the edge at a geographic and urban scale we rely on structured barrier. We design an edge of tightly restricted interface.

The moment will come when our cities, spaces, and bodies are to the point where the now available retreat, temporary fixed positions, or a direct barrier will not sustain a way forward. One may question if they ever were able to.

What happens when we make our current moment not about retreat, barriers or static bodies but a perpetual approach defined as a field of care? This shift in logic or fundamental transformation as articulated by Evernden asks us to acknowledge that there is no moment where I am not approaching them, they, or the other. And simultaneously this means there is no moment where I am not approaching me, myself, and I. How I approach others and the world is a direct response to how I approach myself. My care for others is inherently care for myself. Care as:

an instance of mutualism in which the fates of two beings are so intertwined as to make them almost indistinguishable. Is a plant a plant, or a co-operative system of formerly independent creatures?

Mutualism results in an adaptive perspective. I am not tied to a particular strategy to respond to others. As I approach, I place myself in a position to understand who and what is approaching. To approach becomes an act of working to understand - What is my field of care? How does my field support the care of others and thus myself? From this situated knowledge I can then approach.

As we work to navigate fields of self we are also presented clearly with the body as the site of identity and value. Judith Butler is instructive in her Senses of the Subject (2015) and elaboration of the body as critical to understanding self, being, and the built environment.

Ultimately we must invest ourselves in the world. And in many instances this investment is so profound as to make any distinction between the visible body and the loved other ultimately trivial. Far from a simple case of spillage, this is clearly the inevitable mode of development for sentient beings. Whether we refer to it as attachment to the other or as extension of the boundaries of self, the fundamental fact of our existence is our involvement with the world.

Her ideas build upon this field of care framework to approach our questions of how we are mutually defined within others. She situates us not in a reactive mode where we perpetually adjust through retreat, fix, or barriers to our field of self (both physically and conceptually) but an active stance where we approach through care the world around us as we live.

So if we are to speak about desiring to live, it would seem in the first instance to be emphatically a personal desire, one that pertains to my life or to yours. It will turn out, however, that to live means to participate in life, and life itself will be a term that equates between the ‘me’ and the ‘you,’ taking up both of us in the sweep and dispersion.

To shift our approach to others and to life as one which does not “pertain to my life or to yours. It turns out that to live means to participate in life itself as a term that equates the me and the you.”

She puts forward a sharper critical definition of mutualism as one where “I cannot secure my needs without securing the other’s.” This critical definition is spatialized at the moment as literal marks on the ground. Again, we return to the moment when I stand in line to purchase my food and secure my various needs. I approach a regulated field of care represented clearly by lines on the sidewalk. These minimal lines are just the most recent addition to our urban environment to aid in our navigation of a mutual definition of self.

We hear talk of a ‘new normal’ into which we will somehow emerge. However, this is not a condition of emergence but an act of making. We are currently making a ‘new normal.’ Butler and Evernden compel us to remember that “we see in nature what we have been taught to look for, we feel we have been prepared to feel… Reality is transformed by what we are prepared to perceive.” To have agency in the production of any ‘new normal’ we must prepare to ourselves to see the world as a means to approach others with care. Critically we need to make a world not defined by perpetual retreat, fixed relationships, or barriers.

The production of space through acts of approach and a focus on a field of care are present in our everyday. It is just that on most days we do not see the mundane flow of our everyday as a critical act of making a field of self and care. Butler illustrates these critical acts on a walk with Sunaura Taylor in the Examined Life Series.

To choose life in our ‘new normal’ is a recognition that we need to approach others as from a field of care. To live and to sustain myself is an act of sustaining others through care. Our ‘new normal’ is to care for others and thus ourselves through everyday acts and the production of space embodied by a new ethic. Butler frames a next step forward:

It would be an ethic that not only avows the desire to live, but recognizes that desiring life means desiring life for you, a desire that entails producing the political conditions for life that will allow for regenerative alliances that have no final form, in which the body, and bodies, in their precariousness and their promise, indeed, even in what might be called their ethics, incite one another to live.

I continue to walk…