Tag Archives: urban planning

Safest Way talking walking

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Not everything goes according to plan. Andrew Stuck is to meet the two young co-founders of the route-finding app Safest Way. The rendezvous is at the café kiosk at the Kingston Gate of London’s Richmond Park. The weather forecast says it’s going to be rainy and windy. Hardly ideal conditions to record an interview on a walk, in a park.

As it happens, Andrew learned that Ilya Ilyankou wasn’t going to join his co-founder Alesja Gilvear until sometime after the meeting time. At the kiosk there’s a man of similar age to Andrew, also waiting. When the person who Andrew thought might be Alesja approaches, Andrew was somewhat caught out that it was the other man that she greeted and not him. However, this turned out to be Ed Parsons, a digital geographer, who happens to live locally, from whom Alesja and Ilya have been receiving advice.

So, as you’ll learn from this interview they begin as a threesome and then Ilya does eventually join them.  

36’17” 17.4MB

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Anastasia Polychronidou talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is with Greek dramaturg, Anasthasia Polychronidou, at the Walking Art Encounter in Prespes, in western Macedonia and they are trying to keep out of the sun.  There is not a lot of shade, but they’ve discovered that if they walk in a circuit around the local chapel, at least two of the sides of the building offer them a little respite from the extreme heat. 

“The Shared and the Personal”, Anastasia’s recent work focuses on the socio-political aspects of performance, particularly for women artists, in public spaces in her native city of Thessaloniki. The interview opens with Andrew asking her, about what has brought her to Prespes. 21’54” 10.3MB

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Photo credits: Feature image – Andrew Stuck, Gallery centre – Yiannis Ziogas; Others – WAC23

Emma Jackson talking walking

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It’s a sunny summer’s day and Andrew Stuck is on the Waterlink Way, a green route for cyclists and pedestrians that follows the valley of the rivers, Ravensbourne, Pool and Quaggy, flowing south to north through the London Borough of Lewisham.

Andrew is in the company of Emma Jackson, an urban sociologist at Goldsmith’s, University of London and the Director of the Centre of Urban and Community Research, as she tells him about how she uses walking in her research and in teaching her students. They talk about the research centre and how she herself studied there, as well as what urban sociologists do in general, and specifically, when the pandemic restricted their explorations.

Emma is keen to impress on how every walk is different, even if you’re following a familiar route, as the Waterlink Way is to both of us.  As if to endorse what she is saying, something unusual does occur. 22’52” 10.7MB

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River Ravensbourne
A collage from a workshops with people by the river.
Fly tipping on the river bank

Graeme Miller talking walking

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Twenty radio transmitters were concealed along a three-mile route beside the M11 / A12 link road in east London by artist Graeme Miller, who in 2003 created a trail of sound that celebrated the everyday lives of the householders whose homes were destroyed along the route when the motorway link was built. Unusually for a Talking Walking interview, Andrew Stuck is sitting with Graeme Miller, rather than accompanying him on a walk. It is a weekend in September, at which “LINKED”, a work he made almost 20 years ago, is being reprised, and he is having to man a kiosk on a roundabout, from which he is handing out radio receivers. As will be revealed in the following conversation, Graeme creates work in which “listener walkers” become the performers. 22’18” 10.5MB

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Credit: Graeme Miller
Credit: Graeme Miller
Credit: Graeme Miller

Emma Griffin talking walking

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Emma Griffin is a transport journalist, turned pedestrian activist, and maker of Footways maps of London, that identify calm and pedestrian-friendly routes and streets for us on foot to enjoy. One such route is the canal-side towpath, that Emma and Andrew Stuck walk along when they meet at Haggerston in Hackney, or so it should be, however, they have to share the path with inconsiderate cyclists. Emma argues that cyclists are part of the solution towards a more pedestrian-friendly London, as are Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and the real battle is with the car drivers. 26’09” 12.3MB

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Billboard in Aldwych
London Central map
Obverse of Hackney map

Pam Rouquette talking walking

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Active travel and environmental activist Pam Rouquette has given Andrew Stuck a walk as a birthday present.  The route that we take is around the city of Salisbury and links up places which are significant to Pam.  25 years ago in 1997, when she was still working as a community physiotherapist, she was a member of the Salisbury Walking Forum and became involved in a healthy walks initiative called the “Doorstep Walks”.

Pam has been the driving force behind healthy walks in Salisbury, ever since. She has led hundreds of group walks for different ages and abilities, devised scores of walking routes as well as being instrumental in creating a popular walking map for the city and surrounding areas. As you will learn from this slightly unusual interview, Pam has also had a hand in maintaining foot paths and in securing spaces for wildlife.

Over the years,  Andrew has tried to entice Pam to be interviewed for Talking Walking and each time she has turned him down, modestly saying that she has little to tell. However, Pam is one of the most inspirational, and quietly determined people he has ever met, so as unobtrusively as he could, he took his recorder with him on this birthday walk.

The birthday walk begins on the bank of the River Nadder, we have reached this point by passing through a narrow railing-fenced alleyway between business units on the Churchfields industrial estate.  We are less than 10 minutes walk from the railway station. 28’28” 13.6MB

  • Pam Rouquette on the banks of the River Nadder
  • River Nadder with view across the Harnham Water Meadows
  • Following Pam along the Broken Bridges path
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Feature image – View of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Path on Harnham Hill

Andy Howlett talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham, in the heart of Britain’s West Midlands, walking beside the River Rea with psycho-geographer and documentary film-maker, Andy Howlett, who recently completed “Paradise Lost” an essay-film about Birmingham’s Central Library and the death of modernism. Just before the first pandemic lockdown, Andy joined forces with Pete Ashton and Fiona Cullinan to create a walking art collective called Walkspace.  Despite the lockdown, WalkSpace has grown exponentially, attracting artists, walkers and writers from across the region and support from the British Council.  Andy talks about his own enthusiasms as a documentary film maker, as well as adventures by the Walkspace collective, that have included, a mapping project involving ‘extreme noticing’, a search for the geometric centre of Birmingham and a moonlit night walk in which magic spells were cast, as part of a series called ‘Walkspace erratics’ as well as a forthcoming international exhibition on ‘parallel walking’. 28′.10″ 13.2MB

In search of the Brumphalos

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Riccardo Marini talking walking

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Riccardo Marini’s accent belies his Italian upbringing.  When Andrew Stuck met him a dozen years ago, he was Design Lead for the City of Edinburgh and Andrew was a researcher for the Academy of Urbanism. Since then, working first as a director for Jan Gehl Architects and now as founder of Marini Urbanismo, he has worked with cities to make their commercial cores more people-friendly.  They are in London’s West End, in the midst of the mid-morning hubbub on a chilly December day, so Ricardo’s cogent, forceful and passionate argument for putting pedestrians first is even more pertinent.  24’16” 11.4MB

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Wendy Landman talking walking

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Andrew Stuck was attending the Made of Walking gathering of artists at La Romieu in remote south west France, when Andrew was surprised to meet American walking activist Wendy Landman, an executive director of WalkBoston, one of America’s longest running pedestrian advocacy groups. She is here, on an invitation from her college friend and artist Carol Mencke.

WalkBoston walk audit in action in the snow

Wendy discovers that the walking artists at Made of Walking are grappling with many of the issues that Walk Boston has encountered too.  In the blazing sun, they walk along gravel paths, seeking shade, and discuss how walking and pleasurable walkable places are now seen as key elements of quality of life for increasing numbers of Americans.  And how through subtle change in vocabulary, from talking about art to talking about delight  – the delight of walking and of delightful places – hearts and minds of politicians can be won over to the cause of better conditions for those of us who travel on foot.  25’21” 11.9MB

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Tim Stonor talking walking

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Tim Stonor is the Managing Director of Space Syntax Limited, a firm of architects and planners that are specialists in the scientific analysis of pedestrian behaviour. Their work looks at movement at every scale of the city, forecasting where people will walk, cycle, drive or be driven, should a change in the street pattern or built environment be altered. They have had a hand in the redevelopment of public realm in many traditional cities, not least in London’s prime public squares, but they have also developed forecasting techniques to predict movement patterns in future cities.

The discussion ranges widely, considering how we get around now and how digital technologies will alter the way we will navigate the cities of the future. The interview was recorded in St Andrew’s Gardens in Bloomsbury, just a short walk from Space Syntax’s offices, in June 2013. 24’33” 11.5MB

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Bill Chandler talking walking

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Bill Chandler was Chair of the Victoria State Urban Arts Unit in the mid-1980s and founding member of the Australian Urban Design Forum Inc, for which he remains the convenor. In the 1990s, Bill was Chief Planner, Urban Designer and Marketing Director for the early stages of the Melbourne Docklands Development. Trained as an architect, town planner and engineer, Bill now heads up his own consulting company advising clients from the private and public sectors, and community groups.  He chairs the annual Australian Urban Awards, is a Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia, and received an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to town planning and urban design. 18′ 53″ 8.9 MB

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Listen to Bill Chandler’s 5 year walking forecast recorded in 2013.

UrbanVoices

What Bill had been doing since our interview:

Bill Chandler is the editor of Urban Voices, a book celebrating 25 years of Urban Design in Australia, which not only looks back but forward to the future – download a brochure. you can order your copy from here.  You can download his CV here.

Bill Chandler passed away in July 2022 – we really valued his openness and generosity in sharing his knowledge and encouraging us in our work to improve people’s lives through urban design.  Although our time together was all too brief, we had a lot of fun.