T2M/Cosmobilities 2017 - City Walks: Mobile Utopias, Urban Governance and Practices of Walking
City Walks: Mobile Utopias, Urban Governance and Practices of Walking
2017 T2M/Cemore/Cosmobilities conference – “Mobile Utopias: Pasts, Presents, Futures”
Lancaster University, 2-5 November 2017
In contemporary policy making, walking is made a cornerstone in urban utopias; it is given a central role in the repurposing of machine (car)-centered cities into human-centered, livable, and sustainable ones. But the potential to revive walking is framed by its history: it differs from place to place, depending on past, local processes of marginalization as well as the obduracy of walking practices. Indeed, the very act of walking may be understood as a mobile utopia in some urban contexts. The role of walking and its capacity to open up new ways of thinking about and understanding the urban may suggest pathways to alternative futures for the city. This “walking panel” will be dedicated to contestation between projections of, governance of, as well as actual walking in urban environments—past, present, and future. Looking to bring scholars from various fields together into an interdisciplinary discussion of walking—whilst walking—we invite methodological creativity, for example, contributions that in different ways make use of, reappropriate, redefine or question urban space.
We welcome proposals for walk and talk presentations from subjects including but not limited to:
• Walking as methodology
• Creative practices of walking
• Policy, planning, and pedestrianism
• Materialities of walking
• Privatisation of public space
• Multi-sensory experience of cities
• Walking and the rights to the city
Please send title and abstracts (300 words) to the panel convenors: Martin Emanuel (
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Ripe for a Museum of Walking walkshop if ever there was one.