Learning from Territories / Teaching Territories

Call for papers for the panel Sauntering, observing, experimenting - Territories’ narrations and walking practice, to be held at the 6th CIST international conference Learning from Territories / Teaching Territories, 15-17 November 2023, Condorcet Campus, Paris-Aubervilliers (France).

Central to the teaching of spatial disciplines (architecture, landscape, planning, human and social sciences), walking has become an essential tool for addressing the question of territory as a place of action and sensory reality. In France and elsewhere, field observation walking workshops are gaining popularity as an educational tool to renew the approach to territory. 

 

Celebrated by early 20th century philosophers and writers for its ability to link bodily experience to the inhabited world, walking is used as a specific method of reading and interpreting spatial dynamics; ruptures, thresholds, fragments, enclaves, landscape identities... This trivial everyday practice has been a preoccupation of transportation policies for more than a century, and remains a fertile ground for experimentation for many professions linked to the understanding and transformation of territories, and in particular those involving multidisciplinary approaches. Since the end of the 1990s, walking has become a way for professionals and residents alike to claim new practices of collective use and negotiation of public spaces.   

 

The session invites educational, reflective and critical communications that question the triple belonging of the practice of walking as an object of research, a method of in situ investigation, and an operational tool. We explore the contribution of walking to the critical reading of territories from an interdisciplinary perspective (geography, sociology, urban planning, architecture, living arts, etc.). We also seek to identify the avenues that walking offers us to question spatial relationships under an iterative look between scales (from the porch to the neighbourhood square, from the station to the rural footpath). 

 

The session is open to all pedagogical modes (theoretical, methodological and analytical teaching, initiation to research, etc.), from the bachelor's degree to the doctorate, to long-established lessons as well as to more recent ones. The session opens with multiple entrances that the walk offers to get closer in flesh and blood to the volatile and complex concept of territory. Questions of atmosphere, emotions, sociability and imagination are all possible avenues for deepening the debate. The call for papers is open until January 15, 2023. See the instructions for authors for more details