Wayfaring the City: Walking as a Method for Place-Based Research

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Walking as Sensory Methodology

Abstract

Objectives
Based on a research study of urban public space development in the El Chorrillo residential neighborhood of Panama City, Panama, I address the concept of walking as methodological inquiry. Conceptualizing the city as kinetic and multisensory, I discuss the ways in which the builtscape is never static but always “moving” in relation to people and activity, and how such a conception necessitates the development of corresponding sensory methods such as walking. Our research and subsequent recommendations for Panama’s urban planning office drew largely from our walks through neighborhoods, often with residents, in order to document lived experiences in El Chorrillo, such as spatial practices, biographies, environmental perceptions, socially-perceived boundaries, and place-based identities that would inform subsequent urban development planning in that neighborhood.

Theoretical Framework
Theoretical concepts such as wayfaring (Ingold, 2011), an orientation toward journeying as process rather than end-state, and emplacement (Pink, 2009), the integration of body and environment, present an ontological and epistemological stance that privileges movement as a form of being and knowing the world, and was used as a means to frame this study.

Methods, or Modes of Inquiry
Methods include Kusenbach’s (2003) street phenomenology, a technique for gathering aspects of lived experience in situ, as they literally move. Walking interviews involved researchers accompanying participants, asking questions, listening and observing participants’ experiences and practices as they literally move through their day. The guided tour method (e.g., Sheller & Urry, 2006)involved participants as guides through spaces and places of meaningful importance. Ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews and artifact collections as well arts- and design-based research methods such as photography, collage, sketches, and maps were used in relation to walking, pertaining to spatial practices, memories, and knowledge.

Data Sources or Evidence
Data was drawn from a one-month research study in the El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama City, Panama, conducted by two professors and their students enrolled in a university community field research course. Our collective expertise in community design, public space, education, ethnography, and arts-based research framed our approach to working with 10 undergraduate and graduate students from our university as well as 20 Panamanian architecture undergraduates. Data included artistic and design-based approaches such as, architectural sketches, maps, photography, and drawing as means of rendering the complexity of emplacement and lived experience derived from our walks.

Summary
Walking has been touted as an important method of sensory ethnography, as a means for focusing on questions of perception, place, space, knowing, and memory, that might pertain to the politics of space- and place-making. While survey mapping had been previously conducted in El Chorrillo, our research was the first of its kind. Through the method of walking – and the corresponding methods of documentation and interviewing informed by our walking, we documented and presented data to the urban planning renewal office, revealing the depth of neighborhood identity, places of particular meaning, and important pathways in an effort to inform responsible, community-based urban redevelopment.

Author

• Kimberly Anne Powell, The Pennsylvania State University