Walking Dialectics: proximity, intimacy and place in the city’s new metrics

A new pandemic lifestyle puts walking back on the map, quite literally. Walking has become for some the only possible daily routine, a newly acquired central habit, a desperate need to escape. First, anxious, quick walks around the block, which then led to more distant and confident strolls. To many of us, walking became a way of accessing new places in old cities, of redesigning the cities we took for granted in new maps, slower cartographies made of bodies moving under the promise of a new, human-silent yet nature-thriving spring. Walking unfolded new senses of place, circumscribed by health-bound metrics of proximity and intimacy, or the lack thereof. We began to avoid passing too close to our peer human companions, but we let ourselves come perhaps closer than ever to wet stone walls, blossoming trees, bustling birds and squirrels. Where our former walking led us through the shorter routes possible with the certainty of an internal compass, the new pandemic walking serendipitously took us to new city frontiers.