What You See is What you Get.
During our end of august immersion week, I was first introduced to what it means to walk. In theory, the concept seems rather simple, but walking takes on a whole new meaning when done in a city like Chicago. The bigger meaning of walking was verbalized in the word of the “flaneur.” Although there are some discrepancies on what exactly defines the “flaneur,” it can in general be described as one who walks the city to experience itself in its real, raw way. A flaneur is someone who knows their way around but does not entirely mind if they get lost. A flaneur is used to their surroundings, but never forgets to take the chance to notice something new. When I first read about the flaneur according to Rebecca Solnit, I immediately thought that the flaneur could also be described as someone like me, we are both “transitional locals.” When I walk and explore the city, I fall into the crowd as a local, as usually I am usually on my way to work or school. Yet, we could also be classified as tourists, often seeing things through a set of fresh eyes. By thinking with my feet, much like the flaneur, I have learned that walking is much more than a form of transportation and has many social and political implications that come along with it.
The first thing you are going to do if you want to play flaneur in the city for a day is grab a map of some kind. And there is our first implication. During immersion week, we watched a video of a woman exploring a city, leaving behind her a trail of string. Depending on where she started and stopped, the trail of that woman’s string could look very different than another person’s. This is what map making is like. The differing perspectives of each cartographer can shift the purpose of the map. The map that I created for my field guide was centered upon the theme of noticing the little things while still being able to fit into the crowd. My map, along with many other maps, is a proposition to the reader. Is says that this was here at one point in time, go there again and see if you can find it once more. For me personally, I had the desire to fit into the crowd in order to give off the appearance of being a local. Before moving to the city, I heard all kinds of different warnings and ways to protect myself in the city. Surprisingly, many people told me to simply never walk around the city. However, I quickly saw a flaw in this plan as soon as I arrived on campus and realized that walking is really the only convenient method of traveling in Chicago. Cities can be extremely dangerous places, especially if you are a woman traveling alone, yet by trying to blend into the locals, it acts almost as a coat of amour. This goes along with the idea of “who can walk?” If woman are more prone to attacks while walking alone, and we are constantly told where not to go, where could one walk?
Leo Hollis perfectly exemplifies what I am saying in this essay, as he says in his article “by using an urban place against the grain of common practice, one owned it.” Growing up in a city that would be classified as unwalkable, or unattractive, it is a huge cultural shift coming to a city like Chicago where almost the whole city is designed to make having a car or driving inconvenient. By incorporating at 20-to-30-minute walk into your life in order to complete everyday errands, we are using the city against the grain of common practice. In South Dakota, driving and using cars are so engrained into the culture there, I could not even imagine suggesting to a friend that we walk somewhere instead of driving it. Even though I was born and raised in the same town, what I have noticed that just within the first few weeks of living in Chicago, I already felt more at home here than I did in Rapid City. I believe that I large part of this is due to walking everywhere as opposed to driving. When you are walking in a new place for the first time, you can tend to be hypervigilant and take in your surroundings more. That is when I started to notice the smaller things I would see on the side of the road, or a flower growing out of an unusual place. I got so used to seeing the same things on my everyday walk that I started to feel like it was my own community to be in, a place where I had the right to make my own mark for someone else to notice on their daily walk to commute to work or school.
What we get to experience in college at DePaul is very different from the typical college experience. Although it is true that many college students walk thousands of steps each day, it is quite a different feel when you are walking in your enclosed college campus when you compare it to walking in a dense urban area such as the loop. Over the past weekend, I was in Minnesota visiting a friend who goes to the University of Minnesota. When walking across their sprawling campus, it was quite easy for me to feel like I belonged there. If you were to see two girls in their twenties hanging around a college campus, you would assume that they go to school there. Along with that, because I could fit into the campus background so easily, I do not need to make a story for who I am and what I am doing. Being on your own in Chicago asks, “who are you and what are you doing here.” We are so lucky to go to a school like DePaul, where we can express our own individualities. When walking in Chicago, you need to be aware of your surroundings at all times. Chicago has a known reputation of a very violent city. I had always heard to be ware of the southside of the city, then when I would tell people that I was going to go to school in Chicago, I was given that same warning for all parts of the city. It was interesting to hear a story like Leslie Cortez who had grown up hearing “downtown is dangerous, the north side is dangerous.”
I decided to do my guide the way I did because I wanted to draw attention to the small things that I feel most people would not notice when walking in a city, especially someone who regularly takes the same route to work every day. Rob Walker once said, “there is much to notice in a city, perhaps too much.” When I first read this, it really stuck out to me because I feel that a lot of locals in the city do not take enough notice of their surroundings, and they can lose sight of what an incredible mystery it is to live in a city. People are so comfortable walking everywhere, and you begin to think of your small, couple block radius as your backyard. People are very comfortable in places where they feel like they have ownership of. If you look closely, you can find the remains of a story that took place during a whole different time, and was experienced from a totally different perspective than how you are viewing it now, just like the wooden brick alley.
I decided to include this video because I think that it truly exemplifies what it means to be able to take a daily walk. Just in this short time lapse video, I crossed and intersected so many people’s lives, and as did they in mine. The best part of living in a city is the intertwining of the people’s strings.
