Viewpoint: Walk This Way: Reconsidering Walking for the Study of Cultural Landscapes

In the summer of 2018, my son and I walked across Los Angeles. Julian was off to Drexel University in the fall, so I planned the week-long journey across the city to give us some quality time together before he moved away from home. I imagine he would rather have spent the week in San Diego at Comic-Con, but he agreed to join me in late June to walk in the Southern California heat from Pasadena to Marina del Rey. We covered about ten miles each day, carrying everything in our backpacks, and staying at a new motel each night (Figure 1).

The trip was a success on many levels. Unplugged from the incessant demands of social media and email, Julian and I talked nonstop as we walked through a range of landscapes: wide residential streets lined with bungalows and palm trees, homeless encampments beneath roaring freeways, and shoddy apartment complexes in Hollywood. We talked as we stopped to eat lunch each day, often sitting on the curb outside of a seedy liquor store or as we washed clothes at laundromats in Koreatown and Venice.

The walk also helped us see the landscape in a richer and more granular way. We noticed small changes in elevation or terrain, heard music coming out of parks or churches, smelled the cooking in apartments and restaurants, and saw the buildings and artifacts that are nearly impossible to perceive when driving in the car. As Julian put it early one morning, we were seeing the "things between the things," the elements that truly comprise the cultural landscape: sidewalk drawings, street furniture, drainage channels, porch decorations, and dog paths inscribed in a dirt front lawn—a world difficult to see via digital representations on our computers.¹

In the following weeks, I began to consider how walking is an essential, yet rarely discussed, methodological tool for many scholars who study vernacular landscapes. Walking helped them see new patterns in the environment, prove their assumptions about places, and develop new questions that guided later work. In hopes of writing about the value of walking for our field, I began to earnestly research the topic, using three modes of inquiry.

I began by embarking on a series of long walks in rural, suburban, and urban environments as a way to consider the value of walking firsthand. These included two daylong walks in Los Angeles,

Figure 1.

Map of the author's walk across Los Angeles. Map by William Littmann.

covering about twenty miles each, and walks of fifteen to twenty-three miles in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, the Sacramento River delta region, and along the Willamette River in Portland. While some of these walks were completed in landscapes that were largely unknown to me, others, like one in Downey, California, allowed me to revisit landscapes that I had once studied closely and assumed I knew well (Figure 2).²

The second approach involved interviewing scholars of cultural landscapes about how they use walking as a mode of research. Although many scholars associated with the Vernacular Architecture Forum employ walking as a research tool, few address these efforts in print or in presentations.³ In a similar vein, I looked for evidence in the writings of a previous generation of scholars who were known to incorporate walking in their research, notably W. G. Hoskins, J. B. Jackson, and Peirce Lewis. Though committed to walking as a practice, these writers used a diverse set of approaches to walking, ranging from an unplanned and meandering walk of multiple hours—also known as a "bimble" in British slang—to more strategic and planned approaches that explore the landscape in a rational fashion.⁴ Lastly, I noted the importance of walking in other fields, particularly in geography, visual studies, cultural criticism, and gender studies, as well as in twentieth-century art movements, particularly used by the Situationist International group in postwar Paris.

As someone who has long enjoyed longdistance cycling, I felt comfortable creating long walks across the urban landscape that lasted between...