Walking in Cities

Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist. His work explores the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal, regeneration and social organisation as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine master plans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. He has exhibited his work internationally and is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2012). Joseph-Lester is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art.Ahuvia Kahane is Regius Professor of Greek (1761), A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2017) and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include temporality, complexity theory, ancient literature and the relations between antiquity, modernity and contemporary critical thought. His book Epic, Novel and the Progress of Antiquity (Bloomsbury) is in press. Forthcoming work includes (ed.) A Cultural History of Time in the Ancient World (Bloomsbury), Orality and the Formula (de Gruyter), and “Ancient Narrative Time” (in A Handbook of Ancient Literary Theory, Oxford).Simon King is a London-based writer and walking artist undertaking a practice-based PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. His research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement. He is the co-founder with Jaspar Joseph-Lester of the cross-disciplinary Walkative project at the RCA and has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble to create participatory group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology.Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014); Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016); and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.

"Walking in Cities is timely, imaginative and illuminating. It will speak differently to different audiences; but speak it will. It reminds us that walking is a profoundly ordinary act with significant power, an act through which cities disclose their structures, tensions, and possibilities. In a period defined by disruption, it argues quietly but powerfully for the value of slowing down, looking closely, and recognising the layered stories beneath our feet, and often by donning a different pair of glasses."Mahroof Mohammad, The British Society for Literature and Science

• Introduction Part One: Politics of Space 1. Development and Standstill: Pandemic Energies in Somers Town 2. Political Geometries 3. Fear and loathing in ZA 4. Hong Kong: An Uneasy Walk Part Two: Digital Walking 5. Isolated Together 6. Traversing the New Byzantium: How Los Angeles was remade by a changing economy. 7. We Will All Only Be Here 8. London Experienced at a Safe Distance Part Three: Art and the Urban 9. Lockdown Art Practice; 12 months in Berlin 10. The Rise of the Infinity Pool 11. Wanderlust Brixton 12. Pandemic Landscape. Fieldnotes from London Heathrow Part Four: Dialogue and Collaboration 13. A Covid-19 crisis. From a Delhi perspective and a half way between London and Delhi 14. Swimming in Venice 15. Court Circular SE11 Part Five: Night Walking in Lockdown 16. Meditations on a nightwalk 17. Melbourne: Mantra Bell Hotel