“What did you see when you walked outside today? Did you notice anything new? In fact, did you notice anything at all?” These are some of the questions that led to the development of the ‘Mywalks’ website at Northumbria University. This site is worth looking at because of what it encourages us to do.
Highbury Grove School student on a tour of the Royal Opera House © Michele Turriani
This is how the late Duncan Fuller, the originator of the site, described ‘Mywalks’:
“It is about making us think about our emotional attachments to, and feelings created by, our day-to day surroundings… [It’s] about (re)connecting ourselves with our urban environments…; about developing relations with things over time, in the mind and beyond, in our day to day interactions, with taken-for-granted things in taken for granted spaces, about our living geographies…” (‘Living Geography’, Geographical Association, 2009)
Journey through a space
At the heart of this approach, which is one that young people can be encouraged to engage with (and contribute to the ‘Mywalks’ project), is the simple idea of a journey through a space.
The idea that the process of learning can be likened to a journey is not new, although it can be argued that more formal educational processes have tended to emphasise the destination, than the experiences of the journey itself.
Many journeys are habitual, like the journey to school, or at least very familiar such as a trip to the shops. What is interesting is the possibility of making this everyday experience extraordinary through the use of observation – ‘Mywalks’ uses a number of prompts to stimulate this. For example,
What do we hear?
What intrigues us?
What makes us laugh?
What disgusts us?
What makes us ask ‘why’?
What makes us speed up?
Fitzwilliam College student on a How Places Work programme © Alys Tomlinson
Recording the built environment
Teachers and young people can think of many more such prompts. The response to the prompts can take many forms, but taking photographs is a great way for us to record our response to the built environment. Alternatively ‘sound scavenging’ can be used to record the audio ecology of an environment.
Serial vision
One particular technique that can be practised with young people, to help them read the urban environment, is ‘serial vision’. This is in response to the fact that usually we see buildings, even buildings we know well, from only one perspective. But there are lots of perspectives.
Young people can be asked to look at, draw and photograph buildings from different angles. Not only can this help them develop a different view of a place or a building, and this develop their understanding of a local area, but it provides the basis for developing an empathetic understanding of others and their perspectives.
Ultimately this curious attitude to buildings and places is a fine basis for participatory democracy – when young people can find ways to articulate their feelings about places both as they are perceived and how they may become in the future.
Resources
Create-a-scape by Futurelab
by Architecture Week
Shooting buildings by the Wallace Collection
Discovering cities series by the Geographical Association
Investigating the local area: Our street by the Geographical Association
by CABE
Space explorers: Activity ideas by Northern Architecture
