Walking Through Urban Transformation: Fieldwork in the Northeast of Paris

If anthropologists have been underpinning walking as a universal (Mauss [1950] 1999) and everyday (de Certeau 1980; Sansot 1998) practice, on the other hand recent decades of urban studies have pointed out the tight connection between the act of wandering and modern urban planning, against which walking became a tool for critics (Berenstein Jacques 2008). Moreover, walking as an exceptional matter is connected especially, but not only, in the built environment, with the development of mobility technology. The more we are technically able to move around the city, and the world, using transport systems (avoiding walking), the more walking became either a choice or a necessity by default, characterizing political view or social conditions.