Landscapes in Motion: The Assignment

Survey's of routes miss what was: the act of passing by. --Michel de Certeau (p. 97)

For this week, you will be thinking about what is different about conducting an observation from a moving vantage point, versus a stationary one. To do this:
  • Identify a location to conduct a 30-minute (minimum) field observation.
  • Conduct an observation similar to the one you conducted last week, but this time, base your observation on your own and others’ movement through space. Take fieldnotes as you work.
  • As with before, if possible, take a photo or video of the landscape.
  • Condense your fieldnotes into a 300-500-word piece that describes the landscape that you chose and the movement through it (yours and others).
  • At the end, include an additional paragraph (not included in the word count) that outlines how you moved through the landscape and what that helped you see that you might not have seen otherwise.
  • You will take notes on your conversation about this piece (in class) and include the assignment along with those notes in your writing portfolio
  • As with last week, do not engage directly with people for reasons of health and safety. Do not do any observation that you feel will put you at risk in any way

Walking Ethnography

What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. --Michel de Certeau

You may be wondering how to do this, and why. In order to give you at least some initial answers to that question, take a look at this walking conversation between Duncan and Jason about walking ethnography:
Watching this video, what are the key claims that Duncan is making about walking ethnography? Why would an "accidental" method be a helpful way to think about landscape? What do you learn from movement that you might not learn through fixity? How might using different forms of movement through space (running, driving, riding a bike, riding a bus, etc.) shape the study of landscapes differently?

Maybe most importantly: what kind of things might you expect to learn about landscapes by moving through them that you could not discover by observing them from a vantage point fixed in place?

Our conversation hopefully gives you both some initial answers to these questions and a bit to go on on how to think about ethnography. But as you are thinking about doing this yourself, we'd like to dig further into the question of movement in and through landscape. To do that, we turn to the work of the ever frustrating unclear and enigmatic, Michel de Certeau.

Walking in the City (with Michel de Certeau)

Your next written observation, which asks you to consider what happens when you observe a landscape while moving through it. What does motion do for your observation? What kinds of things do you see differently? How does being in motion help you be attentive to motion? These are all central questions for your next writing assignment.
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De Certeau (that guy on the left, 1925-1986) was a French social theorist, philosopher, and historian. He is probably most famous for his book, The Practice of Everyday Life (published in English in 1984), from which the chapter you just read, "Walking in the City" is drawn.

So first, if you found reading "Walking in the City" really difficult, don't worry. I've read de Certeau for decades and have read this chapter dozens of times, and I find it really difficult. I also would not claim to understand or be able to clearly explain everything that de Certeau is talking about. Rather than aiming for complete clarity on this essay, lets instead, to think with some of de Certeau's ideas. How can they animate our conversation about exploring urban landscapes by walking through them.

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them).--Michel de Certeau (p. 101)

De Certeau's book at large is about the ways that people live their everyday life (or more specifically, the practices that make up our daily repertoires). His book is meant to be an answer to social theorists (like Marx and Foucault) who were largely interested in the structures and forms of power through which social, economic, and political life were controlled. De Certeau, while not rejecting the importance of studying such structures and forms of power, argues that we should attend also to the everyday, quotidian ways that people do things like walk through the city. Indeed, he suggests that paying attention to such practices helps us to see the ways that people live their lives in ways which are not completely determined by larger forms of power. Thus, de Certeau creates a series of binaries in his work that are meant to juxtapose broad structures and forms of control with and individual agency (which he sees as resistant to and transgressive of such forms of control):
  • Strategies (state power) vs. tactics (what individuals do)
  • Practices (things people do in the city) vs. representations (visions of urban life through which urban planning takes place
  • God's eye views (top down) vs. views from the street (note--there's a connection here to McDuie-Ra's discussion of "below the knees" views of the city)
  • Language (the system) vs. speech (the ways people use the system to creatively express themselves)

Bird's eye versus street level view of Beijing. What's the difference between the two?

Today's class: 2 breakout sessions

We'll set these up in class, but there are two main activities we'll be doing in breakout sessions today:

BREAKOUT SESSION 1 (first half of class): A DISCUSSION OF DE CERTEAU
This exercise will last for 20 minutes: Spend the first five minutes reintroducing yourselves (name, major, where you live, etc.). Spend the last 15 minutes answering these three questions

  • What are the similarities between de Certeau's arguments in "Walking in the City" and McDuie-Ra's discussion of "Walking Ethnography"?
  • Why does de Certeau keep on relating walking in the city to language and speaking?
  • What is the relationship between planning and walking? How, for de Certeau is walking a transgression of disciplinary (planning) power?

The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in the art of composing a path (tourner un parcours). --Michel de Certeau (p. 100)

BREAKOUT SESSIONS 2 (second half of class): LANDSCAPES AND POWER(S):
Last week we asked you to describe landscapes, this week, we are asking you to analyze them!

This exercise will last for 40 minutes.
  • Spend the first 10-15 minutes of this exercise sharing and discussing the spaces you all did your observations for today in
  • Choose a landscape observation from Newcastle and a landscape observation from Austin that illustrate some element of what de Certeau is talking about
  • Plan and record a 5 minute video in which you describe both of these landscapes and offer an analysis of them drawing on the themes discussed in de Certeau and in McDuie-Ra and Cons's conversation in the "Walking Ethnography Video"
  • NOTE--you should plan the video before you record it
    • Use Zoom to do your recording (you can save it locally to your computer)
    • You should describe both landscape in detail. Show the image, talk about what is happening in it. Your description  of each landscape should take approximately 1 minute
    • Your analysis drawing on course materials, should take approximately 3 minutes. Be sure to explain the idea or concept you are drawing on in your own words, and make it clear how it relates to the image.
    • You are free to organize the presentation how you want, but we would like to see the following distribution of work:
      • The people who did the landscape observation that you are discussing will describe the landscapes (1 minute each)
      • 2-3 other group members will introduce the concept and explain the analysis

Results of the Exercise