Author Archives: admin_TW

Leon Yates talking walking

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Urban designer Leon Yates was the author of the City of Melbourne’s walking strategy: he provides an insight into what makes a great Australian street. 19′ 8″ 9 MB

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In 2015  took the decision to leave the field of urban design to set up an ice cream parlour and community cafe in Bichinoe, Tasmania – I sea scoops opens on 1 October, 2015 you read about it on Facebook, and get a free scoop by mentioning you heard Leon first on Talking Walking!  Name an urban designer flavour!

STOP PRESS Having run an ice cream parlour for five years, Leon has retrained as a conservationist and nature trek guide.

Listen to Leon’s 20×20 Vision for walking in 2040

Jacky Kennedy talking walking

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Jacky Kennedy lives in Toronto, Canada, and was the Founding Director of Canada Walks at Green Communities Canada and has been a long time walking and cycling activist. Jacky became involved in the walk to school movement in 1996 as a parent concerned about the traffic safety at her son’s school, herself contributing as a driving working Mom! Over the next 18 years Jacky championed the Active & Safe Routes to School initiative in Toronto, helping the expansion across Canada through the development and implementation of a Canadian School Travel Planning model. Jacky was instrumental in bringing the prestigious Walk21 international conference series to Canada for the first time in 2007 to Toronto, leading to the creation of a series of Walkability Roadshows and the creation of Canada Walks in 2009. Prior to her retirement in December 2016, Jacky worked to ensure the sustainability of School Travel Planning in Canada and continues to provide expert guidance to this work.

Over the course of her 20 years advocating for walking and walkable communities in Canada, Jacky has observed a marked shift in attitudes and behaviours with many more people adopting active human-powered mobility for many of their shorter daily trips and municipalities across Canada developing pedestrian plans and prioritizing children’s mobility.  This will mean an increasing proportion of local government spend will be for improving pedestrian infrastructure.
Active-and-Safe-routes-to-schoolThe interview took place beside the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London in May 2008.27’32” 12.9 MB

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In October 2013, Jacky made a 5 year walking forecast, you can listen to it here

What has Jacky done since our interview and what has happened in Canada

“Walkability roadshows conducted across Canada in 2009 and 2011;  in Alberta we held 5 community workshops and trained Alberta Health Services to deliver them, which they continue to do and presented on at Walk21 in Calgary in 2017.

Walk21 Vancouver 2011; Walk21 Calgary 2017 – Advisor to both.

Development of the WALK Friendly Communities designation program http://walkfriendly.ca. See the Showcase document for the communities awarded designation to date: http://canadawalks.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WFO-Showcase.pdf.

ASRTS:
In 2010-12 GCC had three years of funding from Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. To develop a Canadian School Travel Planning model and implement it in every province and territory, getting new programs off the ground and helping to strengthen existing ones. That work has continued through today with so many incredible successes: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/CLASP-2012-National-Results.pdf.

Today the ASRTS program in Ontario is moving to a very sustainable level with 3 years of funding to work with school districts to implement school travel planning. An example of how this came to be was work I directed with Heart & Stroke Foundation resulting in this report: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Active-School-Travel-Provincial-Priorities-Report.pdf. Ontario government has now provided funding to GCC to greatly expand the STP model.

There’s lots of detail on how STP has evolved in Canada here: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/school-travel-planning/

I led GCC’s work with University of Toronto on several ASRTS and STP research initiatives, and one on cost-effectiveness of STP is covered in the book: Walking: Connecting Sustainable Transport with Health; Edited by Corinne Mulley, Klaus Gebel and Ding Ding; Emerald Publishing – Chapter 6 Walkng To and From School (me and George Mammen, PhD).”

Jacky retired at the end of 2016 but continues to provide advice and guidance on sustainable and active transportation.

Listen to Jacky Kennedy’s 20×20 Vision of walking in 2040

Viv Corringham talking walking

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An interview with Viv Corringham a British vocalist and sound artist, currently based in New York City, USA, who has worked internationally since the early 1980s. Her work includes music performances, radio works, audio installations and soundwalks. She is interested in exploring people’s special relationship with familiar places and how that links to an interior landscape of personal history, memory and association. 22’52” 10.7MB

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What has Viv Corringham done since our interview?

“My series “Shadow-walks” continues into its second decade. So far the project has occurred in twenty six places in Asia, Europe, Australia and America. The process is straightforward. I arrive in a new place and ask local inhabitants to take me on a special walk, one that has been repeated many times and has meaning or significance for that person. While walking together, I record our conversations and the sounds of the environment. I then go back along the same route alone, trying to get a sense of my previous companion’s traces on the walk. Then I sing what I feel using wordless improvisations. 
The many hours of recordings made in the place are then taken back to my studio, selected and edited together to become the final work, the Shadow-walk. These raw materials are my singing, the conversations and the environmental sounds. 
I began Shadow-walks after finishing a different project, one that required me to walk the same route repeatedly over several months. When I no longer did this daily walk I was surprised to notice my sense of nostalgia for it. It had become my “special walk” with some significance for me. I began to wonder whether this was a common experience for other people too; if a walk is repeated over and over again, does it become meaningful for that person as if they had left some part of themselves there? James Joyce wrote that places remember events. I find this idea very engaging – as if everything that happens leaves traces that we might be able to sense. If a person walks through certain places repeatedly, along the same route, does that act of walking leave a trace? In a sense Shadow-walks is an attempt to make a person’s traces, their shadow, audible through my singing, improvising voice.
It is important to me that these Shadow-walks are presented in some way in the places where they were made and to the people who walked with me. I have made them into audio-walks, concerts, radio works, an iPhone app and sound installations. In Athens I presented one as a walking, singing performance through the streets. In 2018 I toured in Hong Kong, China, India and Taiwan with a solo work called “Shattered song, shadow city”. It is based on Shadow-walks from five different countries and uses a multichannel setup plus live vocals. In 2019 I made Shadow-walks in Prespes Greece and in Mexico City, as well as leading several sound-walks and walking in Venice on an artist residency to create a musical tribute to Pauline Oliveros called “Listening for Pauline and IONE”.

Alexandra Rook talking walking

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An Interview with Alexandra Rook, Project Director of WalkLondonlogoWalk London, overseeing 350 miles of strategic walking routes in and around the capital. 18′ 30″ 8.7 MB

Download notes of items mentioned in this episode:Alexandra_Rook (Updated December 2018)

Since her role as Project Director of Walk London, Alexandra Rook has worked as a practice manager for an architecture practice and now is working for the Urban Design Group, a body of professionals working in the built environment.  We interviewed Robert Huxford, its director and you can listen to that interview here.

Jamie Wallace talking walking

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Jamie Wallace is the social entrepreneur behind on-line walking route finder Walkit.com            20′ 30″ 9.6 MB

walkitlogo

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Hamish Fulton talking walking

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An Interview with Hamish Fulton: Hamish studied St Martin’s College of Art in the mid 1960s, and has been categorised as a conceptual artist, a land artist, a sculptor and a photographer, but he sees himself as a Walking Artist. 13′ 51″ 6.5 MB

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Hamish at Banff, in the Rockies, at the time of the interview

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What Hamish has been doing since our interview:

 

 

 

 

Elinor Whidden talking walking

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An interview with Elinor Whidden, sculptor, video and performance and walking artist who has tackled two key North American obsessions, the motor car and the western frontier. 20′ 25″ 9.6 MB

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What has Elinor been doing since our interview

“Elinor Whidden has been a practicing visual artist since 2005. She uses sculpture and performance to deconstruct colonial narratives, particularly as they relate to contemporary car culture. In 2006, she deconstructed an entire 1995 Ford Taurus, fabricating canoes, knapsacks, paddles and rucksacks, which were then hauled in a two-day portage around Niagara Falls by nine modern-day Voyageurs. In her persona as Mountain Man she has re-traced the colonial paths of the fur trade in urban settings by leading walking tours in Vancouver, Kamloops and Sudbury using her collection of Rearview Walking Sticks. In 2013, Elinor recreated a Depression era “Bennett Buggy”, outfitting participants in horse costumes fabricated from scavenged mufflers to drag a car through downtown Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  Her most recent work, Head-Smashed-In-Engine-Block-Buffalo-Jump, is an enormous pile of Buffalo skulls and bones formed from scavenged car parts.  Working from early photographs that document giant mountains of Buffalo bones waiting to be shipped by train for use as fertilizer and in bone china, these Buffalo reference both the grandeur and decline of dreams related to the Western Frontier and Henry Ford’s utopian vision of “a car in every drive way”.  The colonial greed and disregard for the land that fueled the extinction of the North American bison is manifest today in the towering piles of scrapped automobiles and in our incessant thirst for oil.   Whidden believes that reconciliation is only possible when we look critically at the ways in which history continues to repeat itself.
Since 2011 Elinor has also collaborated with artist Maggie Hutcheson as DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC MEMORY. In collaboration with communities of service users and staff they combine street performance, creative writing, visual/installation art, testimony and ceremony to tell the unique stories of specific public institutions in Toronto. They have commemorated the first publicly funded daycare in all of Canada in collaboration with parents, daycare workers and childcare advocates; celebrated the first Canadian organization run by and for HIV Positive Women with the organization’s founders, past members and staff; mourned the closure of a palliative care hospice with nurses and support workers, and much more. In each case, the DEPARTMENT encourages participants and audiences to reflect not only on their own stories but on broader questions of how we might foster a more caring, liveable and inclusive society.”

Listen to Elinor Whidden’s 20×20 Vision for walking

WalkWalkWalk talking walking

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Walk Walk Walk is an artist’s collaborative who describe themselves as an archaeology of the familiar and the forgotten – is a live art project of Gail Burton, Serena Korda and Clare Qualmann. The interview opens with Serena talking about walking and Gail describing their focus. 17′ 32″ 8.3MB

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Peter Tombrowski talking walking

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Interview with Peter Tombrowski video documentary maker, author and walking resident of Calgary in Canada, talks about his philosophy and way of life, that he describes as Urban Camping. 18′ 45″ 8.8MB

CarLessPeter and his wife Andrea are making a movie called “Car Less in Calgary” – you can watch the official trailer through their Facebook page by clicking here.

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Peter Tombrowski has made a 5 year walking forecast – listen to it here.

Bernadette Kowey talking walking

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Interview with Canadian walking activist, Bernadette Kowey, Regional Director of the British Columbian Way to Go project. The interview was recorded while taking two walks beside the sea in Vancouver. 21’12” 9.9MB

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