The Walking Project: Desire Lines, Walking and Mapping Across Continents

Walking Detroit: Blair, Afeni Ngozi Hill, Erika Block, Karl Eric Longstreth and Maria Perez. For many other pictures from The Walking Project, click here.

The Walking Project is an interdisciplinary performance, mapping and cultural-exchange project collaboratively developed by my company, Walk & Squawk, with U.S. and South Africa-based artists during a series of residencies in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal from 2003 through 2006.

The Walking Project uses the paths people make across vacant lots in Detroit and across fields in South Africa — desire lines — as springboard to explore the paths we walk and how they are formed through culture, geography, language, economics and love. It looks at how people make their own paths; how and why people’s paths cross; and how changing patterns of movement can alter perceptions, attitudes and lives.

In the past year I’ve been exploring the use of locative technologies to create alternative maps of desire lines by converting GIS (geographic information systems) data into audio and visual material for the Web, for physical installation and for live performance. Apart from the technology, I’ve been thinking about the stories maps tell, not only about the places they locate, but also about the people who make them. Denis Woods writes that maps are as important for what they don’t include as for what they do include. As I’ve been learning about the process of map-making, I’ve thought a lot about information and the way it both shapes and becomes “place," and I’ve stumbled upon a mother lode of material about this emerging field, from tools and technologies to projects, policies and politics.

Maps

Our sense of the world is informed by narratives of the places we inhabit, so it’s not surprising that kids are fascinated by maps — creating cities with shoe boxes, blocks and Lego, towns of Fisher-Price animal barns, complexes of Barbie’s Dream Houses, or fantasy worlds from the Hogwarts maps of Harry Potter. This fascination typically evolves into practical skills of map reading and navigation that are basic to western cultural and civic literacy.

Beyond this core navigational function, however, maps are stories and often works of art. Cartographers are storytellers who make choices that reflect specific goals and perspectives. Even a standard AAA highway map tells a story about urban planning, civic engineering and the rural/urban/suburban nature of a particular place. Maps of a single place made by people from different cultures tell very different stories — such as the Toas that map the song lines of Aboriginal Australians, juxtaposed with a more familiar map of Australian towns, roads or topography.

Toas: maps of Song Lines source: Ask, vol 4 no 4, (April 2005)

One set of a region’s stories can be told by looking through maps from different times in its history. The same series of maps also tells stories about the history of technology and culture with paper, inks, language, symbols and data, in both analog and digital formats, through the evolution of tools and materials used to create the maps. Cartographers can affect communities and territories through the information they choose to include – or not include – on a map. People use maps to navigate, to orient themselves, to help make decisions about where to build, where to live and what to do with built and undeveloped spaces. Which is part of what makes maps so powerful.

Mapping has become a way to navigate more than just physical territory. There are Internet maps, mind maps, DNA maps, maps of neural and social networks. There are maps of emotions and bodies, maps of personal histories and imaginary places. Maps are tools for “information visualization," both predating and staking a place within digital visualization technologies that help uncover, organize and contextualize vast amounts of information. Which is what makes maps even more powerful.

As Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) has said, “information is culture.” Conversely, culture is information. Maps help us navigate culture by visualizing information that addresses those big, fat, universal questions: Who are we? Where are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? How do we get there?

Maps, in all their shapes and forms, help us navigate these questions — not only by answering the more literal “where” and “how," but also the who and why. Artists/storytellers/cartographers create visual media with which most of us have experience, going back to childhood and within our daily lives. This familiarity imbues maps with a sense of the ordinary that makes them highly accessible.

Access, Location and Personal Mapping

In the past several years, there has been a surge of “locative” activity among social scientists, geographers, urban planners, community-development workers, artists and political activists, in addition to ongoing work by businesses and government agencies. Individual and community mapmakers and annotators have been prolific in adapting new technologies to contextualize (and re-contextualize) their personal geographies. This locative fecundity is related to a convergence of technological, cultural and political factors.

Technology: Global Positioning System technology was developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), using satellites maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense. Until only five years ago, GPS information was available to nonmilitary users on a limited and selective basis (including for law enforcement purposes). However, as Brian Holmes writes, “Since [President] Clinton lifted the encryption of GPS signals in the year 2000, the infrastructure has functioned as a global public service: its extraordinary precision (down to the centimeter with various correction systems) is now open to any user, except in those cases where unencrypted access is selectively denied (as in Iraq during the last war). With fixed data from the World Geodetic System — a planetary mapping program initiated by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1984 — you can locate your own nomadic trajectory on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, anytime and anywhere on Earth.” Where am I going? How do I get there?

The convenience and security of having a navigation system in your car or on a remote hiking trail isn’t the most significant implication of public access to GPS. The significance takes us back to mapping and those big, fat, existential questions. It’s cool to see the GPS tracks you made superimposed on an aerial map – to see your traces on the earth. It’s cool to be a red dot on a map of the planet. It’s even cooler to be able to connect the red dot to a picture of your best friend’s house and a description of the day you broke a window there and got that scar on your left hand. And then see how it intersects with someone else’s memory from the same neighborhood. Who am I?

Since the introduction of Google Maps and its accessible Application Programming Interface (API) in February 2005, there have been numerous “Google map hacks” — including projects that combine photo tagging and annotation features from Flickr with pinpoint mapping features of Google, such as Geobloggers and Memorymaps. Paul Rademacher has created a housing search tool that links listings from Craigslist to maps generated by Google. There are open source projects using flash or java programs that make it fairly easy for both programmers and nonprogrammers to annotate maps and parse geographic information. The technology has evolved to a point where it’s hackable and accessible through new devices, increased bandwidth and online data-storage options that facilitate these projects.

Culture: Digital photography, video and audio, combined with text applications such as Weblogs, have created a generation of active culture makers and “remixers." Culture is shifting toward participation/interaction/creation. While by no means eliminating cultural consumption, we now have the tools to create, comment on and interpret our own cultural products. Our growing fluency with these tools brings new approaches to the process of making maps and annotating physical space for art, community and politics.

Politics: Judging from listservs and event announcements, the most active community of independent mappers (at least per capita) seems to be in the U.K. This is no accident. Geospatial information is licensed to corporations who sell it back to the citizens whose tax dollars paid for it in the first place. As Jo Walsh recently wrote in an e-mail to the “geowanking” listserv: “All of you working in the U.S. are in a situation where maps are free, where geodata is free and open. Why hasn't some kind of revolution happened, showering the world with proofs of the economic and social value of putting state-collected data into the public domain?”

Reclaiming the territory: While mapping for art, education or propaganda isn’t new, the toolbox has grown and the capacity of the distribution networks available to artists, activists and everyday folks has multiplied exponentially. Many questions can and should be (and have been) raised about using technologies such as GPS, which are developed and controlled by the military. But the expansion of tools, participation and audiences allow us to reclaim and re-purpose this technology from its military/surveillance origins for creative and community-building processes.

Back to The Walking Project

The Walking Project involves universities and community organizations that serve K-12 and college students, elders, people with disabilities, artists and general audiences in the United States and South Africa — literally and figuratively connecting people who live 8,700 miles apart.

In June 2004, we concluded a research residency in Detroit with two performances of the work-in-process and related events, including:

• Paths We’ve Walked — an installation by elder artists tracing their personal histories of Detroit
• Walking Detroit — a workshop exploring techniques used to create the piece
• Walking Jam Session — a free-form jam with musicians, djs, poets and actors improvising on the theme of walking
• Walk the Walk — a voter-registration drive to honor those who walked from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to ensure the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Activities that are part of this summer’s KwaZulu-Natal residency and next year’s premiere of the performance in Detroit include:

• a humanities convening developed by university students
• more jam sessions with musicians and spoken word artists
• a printmaking exchange
• university student exchanges
• a curriculum guide
• workshops at schools, galleries, universities and community centers

The Walking Project explores the paths or "desire lines" made by people who walk across vacant lots in Detroit and across fields in South Africa — and what connects them. We look at how people make their own paths; how and why people’s paths cross; how they are formed through culture, geography, language, economics and love; and how changing patterns of movement alter perceptions, attitudes and lives.

Desire lines

are those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass, often with nearby sidewalks — particularly those that offer a less direct route — ignored. In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as tramped down paths in the snow. I love that these paths are never perfectly straight. Instead, like a river, they meander this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn't linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward.

— (wordspy.com)

Much like the desire lines we’re investigating, our ideas about the practice and possibilities of performance have evolved with The Walking Project. We have been asking ourselves how this work operates both off and on stage, how the growing body of research can be applied across disciplines, and how it crosses, or maybe even erases, boundaries between art and everyday life, between people from different places, and across hierarchies of “experts” and “community participants”.

What started off as a bike ride along paths through abandoned housing lots in Detroit has led to a series of walks along desire lines in neighborhoods in the city and KwaZulu-Natal, generating conversation, photographs, stories and connections between the two places.

We have shaped a series of workshops and improvisation sessions around the themes of walking, geography and place. We’ve been collecting stories from elders, high-school students and the people we’ve taken walks with in rural areas and urban neighborhoods. We’ve been making connections between walking and thinking, evolution and history, class, race and political action.

The inspiration for The Walking Project comes from the observations of my co-director, Hilary Ramsden, who divides her time between Bristol, U.K., and Detroit:

I moved to Detroit from Ann Arbor in September 1999, determined to keep my bike as main transport in spite of (or perhaps because of) the many raised eyebrows and just plain incomprehension of friends and acquaintances. However, I was not prepared for the hostility of the four-wheelers towards two-wheelers — I was sworn at, screamed at to get off the road, motorists swerved around me as if shocked by my very presence … the only alternative was to cycle on the pavements. ...I had already noticed the lack of pedestrians but it wasn’t until I tried to ride the pavements that I began to understood some of the reasons for this — many roads had no pavements at all, many were cracked, badly pot-holed, overgrown with grass and, most surprisingly, suddenly ended for no apparent reason. Had the construction workers run out of cement? Then I began to notice footpaths that seem to appear from nowhere and disappear into the tall grass of abandoned lots. And I saw people walking along them. People who were walking with a purpose. These were paths off the grid, made by people who need to get somewhere on foot. Something stirred in my memory and it took me a while before I realized that it reminded me of South Africa.

The first time I went to South Africa I spent three months working at a convent school in the then homeland state of Bophutatswana, in the middle of the Orange Free State. Early every morning from my window I would see heads suddenly appear over the horizon of the veldt. People would emerge apparently from nowhere, walking with great purpose, and would then disappear into the grass or another rolling hill. I discovered they came from the many surrounding huts and villages that were not visible from my room. Many people were walking to wait for a ride to take them to work, others were walking to school or another village.

Detroit is a strange city. Once a rich, booming industrial city, it fell into notorious decline and it is now a mixture of wealth, modernization, renovation and extreme dilapidation and poverty. It is the city of the motorcar where highways have carved up the landscape and separated people who were once neighbors. And it is a city where many people do walk — on paths they have carved over the years, to stores, neighbors, to a chair under a tree, to a bar. Paths that do not follow beside the broad streets and the sidewalks that city planners designated for pedestrians. These paths are made by people who may not have a car, who need to get somewhere fast and on foot. I began to wonder what paths connected these people to the people in South Africa.

The Walking Project has drawn connections between walking and political protest — from antiwar marches around the world to anti-eviction marches in South Africa and water-rate protests in both Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal. It has juxtaposed Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience in the Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, train station in the 1890s with paths to safe houses that were part of the underground railroad system in Detroit, as escaped slaves passed through the city on their way to Canada. And it has connected workers losing manufacturing jobs in the U.S. with workers losing jobs in South Africa.

Through our research for the piece, we’ve learned about new political movements in South Africa, responding to struggles for economic justice and basic survival. As global markets have opened up, those who controlled resources during apartheid were in a better position to profit, while those who had no resources are getting even poorer, losing their jobs in areas such as clothing and shoe manufacturing to the flood of cheaper imports, and, ironically, fighting ANC-controlled city governments against eviction from the substandard housing they were pushed into during the forced relocations of the apartheid era.

The project has stimulated a personal rethinking of Detroit, the place where I grew up, which I used to consider the most pedestrian-hostile city in the country. Exploring desire lines has meant learning about its walkers, who are largely invisible, despite the paths they etch into the ground, reshaping a landscape that, like the city itself, is disintegrating on a daily basis.

This disintegration comes from neglect and redevelopment — the paradox of abandoned shops, crumbling houses and imploded department stores alongside speculative housing developments, new sports stadiums (while old ones stand vacant) and a new downtown office development by a single corporation, as office buildings all around it are empty. As old sites decay, new sites emerge alongside them and clear away history, with little documentation of what came before or any real urban planning process to help shape what will come next. In its very real, desperate need for economic development, Detroit is in the midst of a messy reorientation that fails to take stock of what already exists. (A Web site cataloguing the Ruins of Detroit, http://detroityes.com/index.html, offers some documentation of “what was." While the city had two million inhabitants in the 1940s, the 2000 U.S. Census puts Detroit’s population at just over 985,000.)

We’ve participated in six exchanges between South Africa and Detroit since 1997 (three in each country). These residencies have generated questions about whether Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal are on parallel paths of redevelopment and redefinition, in spite of the vast differences between these two places. And while there may not be any answers, the conversations recur enough for us to keep exploring.

Rebecca Solnit writes about "… the way walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it; the way each act reflects and reinvents the culture in which it takes place." These networks of desire lines are personal, often intimate, maps that tell stories about these shifting communities. They demonstrate differences, but they also illuminate similarities.

There is something worth capturing here — beyond the ephemera of our performances and the shifting geographies of KwaZulu-Natal and Detroit. As Denis Woods writes, maps offer “…a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way. We are always mapping the invisible or the unattainable or the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-is-not-here-present-to-our-senses-now and, through the gift that the map gives us, transmuting it into everything it is not … into the real.”

From a series of ongoing GPS walking workshops, in collaboration with Karl Eric Longstreth from the University of Michigan Map Library, we are building a database of geocoded drawings, notes, photographs, video and audio material from walks in both countries, with walkers from many different backgrounds, each gathering their own locative information in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal. After The Walking Project performance premieres in 2006, we will develop mapmaking tools for this database.

We’re interested in digging deeper into the intersections of performance and community interaction while a creating a meaningful expansion of the ways thiswork moves back and forth across geographic, disciplinary and demographic borders. The next phase of The Walking Project uses locative technology to augment our work process, providing new tools with which collaborators near and far can create maps of desire lines and other ephemeral territories we encounter on our walks, imbued with local stories and significance, using alternative audio and visual representations rather than traditional cartographic concepts.

We are combining a process for visual and collaborative theater-making that is about telling the stories of unmapped paths, with visual and collaborative locative media processes, which, as Ben Russell writes, annotate space and provide “... a new site for old discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other people ... a context within which to explore new and old models of communication, community and exchange.”

These new maps will be generated by mixing and layering audio and visual material from the database we’re building. People can make an infinite series of new “map mixes” that can be stored and added to the database for someone else to sample. This “map mixing” will happen in three different formats: live performances with DJs and VJs; an interactive montage for installation in public spaces; and an interactive web experience. New maps will be added to an online gallery as they’re created.

Of course, part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience. If I had mapped that landscape, we ask ourselves, what would I have chosen to show, and how would I have shown it? The coded visual language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our worlds we each have our own dialect.

— Katherine Harmon

The opportunity to add new material, create, mix and remix maps allows us to act on these “what ifs” while putting the invisible and disintegrating territories of The Walking Project on a map of our collective choosing.

Erika Block is a playwright and director whose work has been produced in Great Britain, the U.S. and South Africa. As co-artistic/producing director of Walk & Squawk, she has directed and co-created nine shows for the company. Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communications Group Career Development Program for Directors. In 2002 she was the only artist selected for Crain’s Detroit Business’ 40 Under 40. She has an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University and is a Masters candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She’s come to the realization that she’s been what the technology folks call an “interaction designer” all along.

Walk & Squawk facilitates collaborative creation processes with both professional artists and community participants, We take source material from everyday actions and attempt to make pieces that reflect the voices of all the artists involved as we explore the material together. The result is often described as collage – a nonlinear tapestry of images, text, movement and sound. We blur boundaries between disciplines and work to create an environment that provides opportunities for invention and surprise, imagination and play.

After its premiere in Detroit next year, The Walking Project will be available for residency-based touring. Block and Hilary Ramsden will also facilitate community walking and mapping workshops separately from the performance.

Links:

walksquawk.org (for more on The Walking Project)
blockwork.org (for an overview of locative media resources)

References:

• Holmes, Brian, "Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure" Springerin, Issue 03/04: World Provinces (www.springerin.at)
• Harmon, Katherine, "You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination," New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004
• Russell, Ben, "Transcultural Mapping Online Reader" (www.locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?intro/Russell)
• Solnit, Rebecca. "Wanderlust: A History of Walking," New York: Penguin, 2001
• Wood, Denis, "The Power of Maps," New York: The Guildford Press, 1992

Web sites:

Flickr - http://flickr.com
Geobloggers - http://www.geobloggers.com/
Google Maps - http://maps.google.com/
Memory Maps - http://flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap/
Paul Rademacher - http://paulrademacher.com/housing/
Jo Walsh - http://mappinghacks.com/

Original CAN/API publication: June 2005