MISSION: LEARN, EXPERIENCE & DO
The Walk Discourse (TWD) started as a social practice art project and has grown into an educational platform and research laboratory that cross-pollinates neighboring fields. We are committed to fusing arts and culture within a multiplicity of sectors such as health, transportation, planning, justice, and the environment in order to build stronger, more equitable communities.
TWD offers a framework to learn and think about the role of walking in relation to art, society and the local environment. The Walk Discourse engages people through the active and playful practice of walking and exploring space, be it rural or urban. Through this connection of body and physical space we encourage our participants to study, observe and experience the local built environment.
TWD believes that learning occurs by doing, like philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey and philosopher Henri Lefebvre did. The Walk Discourse is a project deeply embedded in our everyday that emphasizes a bottom-up approach towards understanding the places we live in.
VISION: PROMOTE, ENCOURAGE & INSPIRE
TWD promotes walking art as a vehicle to stimulate social-just urban planning processes and use the power of community engagement through the arts to heighten civic engagement on a local level.
TWD encourages communities to realize that by walking the places they inhabit they can make sense of the environment and contribute shaping their neighborhoods through imagination, personal interactions and activism.
TWD inspires people to experience contemporary society and the urban and rural landscape through all senses (seeing, hearing, listening, tasting, feeling). Through this relationship TWD aims to promote human relationship building processes, a deep engagement with the communities we live in, personal well-being and active citizenship.
VALUES: INVEST, SUPPORT & EXCHANGE
Invest in the place we live in through art, research and exploration of places
Support society through active engagement that includes all senses
Exchange information about the environment we live in, in a playful manner
GOAL: BUILD, INCREASE & SHARE
To build a community through shared activities in public spaces to increase participation in democratic decision-making processes on a local level.
To increase the number of steps U.S. citizens make, daily, from approx. 5,000 to 12,000 per person.
To share the power of walking in public space as a tool to build community, support individual well-being, drive creativity and promote active citizenship.
Why Walking?
Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau (to name a few) have emphasized the importance of walking as a means to understand the society we live in, create a healthy life-work balance while also generating impactful creative thoughts that allow us to tackle life & work challenges. Walking allows us to articulate the urban system through the human body, it can be understood as a speech act of the feet. In the 1960s the Situationist International made use of walking art to unearth information about European cities, such as Amsterdam, Paris and Strassburg to impact social-just urban planning processes through the arts. It is the belief in community engagement through the arts, the possibilities inherent in social art practices and the wish to impact placemaking strategies through careful study of what is already present in our cities, that drives The Walk Discourse. The results are not concrete and tangible but rather a stimulus to built upon. TWD can be understood as a catalyst, it serves as an interdisciplinary laboratory for our community members.