Description
Engaging the compelling example of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (a prototype of the modernistcity novel narrating numerous city-walks) this paper examines how walking can reveal aspects
of the way we perceive and appropriate the urban environment, offering an understanding of
the city as perceived and sensed by the body. Unlike the traditional analytical and scientific
tools of architecture and urban design that tend to understand the city in quantitative terms,
this qualitative approach, made possible by literature’s very nature, valorizes the everyday
urban experience of the embodied walker and allows for a phenomenological reading of the
space.
Foregrounding the physical environment of Saint Petersburg during the autumn of 1905 without
any fictive elaborations, the novel reveals its importance for human consciousness and shows
how the walkers appropriate the rational and functionalistic urban design of the Russian
Capital. Founded in 1703, Saint Petersburg was many times used as an urban design paradigm
during the 19th C., thus understanding the walker’s interaction with the city as demonstrated
by the novel, can cast a light on this century’s positivistic urbanism in relation to its users.
Moreover the novel captures a new figure of city walker at the very beginning of the 20th
century, which as research has shown combines features of the Western European flâneur and
his late successor, the badaud (P.Barta). Looking closely into the novel’s walking descriptions,
the motives that make the characters walk, their thoughts and decisions as triggered by the
city’s form and architectural elements, this paper attempts to trace more systematically the
characteristics of this new walking figure. Since this walker is not a non-participatory passive
observer intrigued by the phantasmagoria of the city anymore (W.Benjamin), the paper
examines the more open and creative relationship he experiences with the urban environment,
one that manifests his perception as action.
| Period | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Event title | MODERN WALKS: HUMAN LOCOMOTION DURING THE LONG 19th CENTURY |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Chapel Hill, United StatesShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |