Introduction

This book explores how the temporal realities revealed through urban walking can act as a method for dialogical, cognitive and empirical mapping. The urban walking includes both real and fictional accounts of areas in and around London. Walking is situated as art, writing, pilgrimage and protest; walking as constituting boundaries and transgressing boundaries; walking as personal and public; walking as compliance and defiance; walking as wild, mediated and constructed; walking as interpretive, generative and embodied. The book speaks of how the city exists as many cities, multi-layered, constructed from a myriad of overlapping cultural, social, historical, political and economic paths. Walking through the streets of London is a powerful tool for architects to unearth how physical and immaterial forces are interwoven, a slow, forensic exercise that reveals elements of unnoticed livelihood, traces of profound mutations, and scars that will hardly heal.