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The 'compact city' implies a return to the urban morphology of the nineteenth-century city, one in which most people walked, predominantly for utilitarian purposes. This article, however, details a leisure practice—the bourgeois promenade—as it unfolded in Stockholm. Employing a diverse set of texts and visual sources the article seeks to understand how this genteel urban practice was enabled and performed in the midst of a growing working-class population with which they shared the streets. It suggests that new street lighting and smoother pavements redirected vision from the ground to the people around, opening up for walking practices that foregrounded the visual over other senses—one being the bourgeois promenade. It further highlights the multiple rhythms of the promenade and the upper middle class' efforts to create hierarchies of walking on city pavements and in urban parks. In sum, the article shows that leisure mobility was central to the very idea of nineteenth century urban life. Meanwhile, its exclusive character cautions against the one-sided imaginaries of strolling and consumption in today's endeavours to recreate the compact city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years waterfronts have progressively become the focus of local administrations, consultancy agencies, and private developers concerned with public health, city branding, and real estate development. Subsequently, they turned into central stages in which cities and societies can be represented, contested, and inverted. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning their capability to function as counter-spaces in the fast-changing dynamics of citizens' encounters and recreation in global cities. This paper employs mixed methods to examine the context-dependent association between space and behaviours. The comparative analysis of four waterfront parks in Venice, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and New York sheds light on heterotopic sites' production and use. Two models emerged: transient spaces of compensation and time-accumulating spaces of illusion. Beyond the novel research design, the significance of this study lies in validating Foucauldian-Lefebvrian heterotopology as an authoritative analytical paradigm for a critical interpretation of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the development of Tel Aviv's seaside in its formative years. The proximity to the sea aroused in the predominately-European founders' aspirations of creating a seaside resort town, inspired by European models familiar to them. Four models of inspiration for the emerging city and the role they played in Tel Aviv's early urban and architectural plans will be discussed: (1) Odessa on the Black Sea; (2) English seaside resorts: Brighton; (3) Nice on the French Riviera; (4) German health spas: Baden Baden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is located within the wider field of decolonial practice where those of us who were previously marginalized from 'mainstream' knowledge production by colonialism and its structures address the question of how we navigate ways of knowing from our own point of view. The paper places the concept of 'walking about' in relation to the Khelobedu saying 'go sepela ke go bona', both of which have parallels with the methodologies that Walter Benjamin espoused through the figure of the flâneur. The paper tracks my walkabouts as I follow the travels of several Balobedu from north-eastern South Africa to Berlin in 1897, by travelling to Berlin and other contemporary art centres myself. The practice of travelling offered opportunities in the form of dream as a khelobedu text, introduced me to installation art and led me to experiment with the idea and practice of the camera obscura, allowing me to confront some of the limits of photographic documentation. Overall, the paper argues that 'walking about' as a methodology resolves some of the difficulties with ideas of visuality associated with khelobedu and with mediating a text that demands a critical awareness of the relationship between the senses. The camera obscura, as a space that houses a body, becomes this medium and the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Extensive laboratory experiments were carried out to investigate the efficiency of low (vertical) crown-walls on the reduction of wave overtopping on sea-dikes. It is shown that the reduction of wave overtopping discharge by crown-walls is inadequately described in the TAW-2002 guidelines. A new approach for the wall influence has therefore been developed, explicitly taking into account both the wall height and the promenade width. The approach can straightforwardly be incorporated in the original formulations of TAW-2002 to significantly improve the prediction of wave overtopping on sea-dikes crowned with this type of walls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of his enormous literary production, eighteenth-century French writer Rétif de la Bretonne wrote a sprawling, sixteen-volume work called Les Nuits de Paris, a picturesque and moralistic description of life among the Parisian lower classes. Covering the years 1789-93, the last two volumes, often called Les Nuits révolutionnaires, are of particular interest since they narrate the author's daily walks in Paris during the French Revolution. In Rétif's text, written in a journalistic style, history appears only as it is played out, contemplated and interpreted on the street and by the street. The author argues that Rétif reshapes both the "témoignage" and the "promenade" genres by welding them together. The result is a strikingly modern understanding of the importance of reporting history-in-the-making at street level, as ordinary people experience it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most experimental and exciting work using sound and spatiality has come from the art world. This essay traces how an exciting hybrid of sound art and walking - the sound walk - has evolved over the last century. Examining the latest examples of sound walks in London and New York, and reflecting on the author's experience of creating a sound walk route, this essay focuses on the potential of this medium to create flowing, multi-sensory and embodied ways for social and cultural geographers to research the outside environment. The essay concludes that the medium could also be useful for presenting site-specific cultural geography to the public in an accessible and inclusive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]