Walking is the most direct means we have of getting to know a place. You don’t just look but also hear, smell, touch, and feel the heat of the sun or the chill of the wind on your skin. The weariness of your body measures the distance. It is a corporeal knowledge of place, in person and in time. There is a literary dimension to walking that distinguishes it from mere observation. Once a walk has started, it is impossible to stop the flow of daydreams. Walking stitches together such internal narratives and our environment, constructing a psycho-geography. With each step, we imbue our surroundings with psyche and significance. 

I looked for her as I walked around the city. It took a few weeks before I finally spotted La Mujer Muerta, a subrange of the Sierra de Guadarrama that, from certain angles around Segovia, resembles the profile of a woman laid to rest. One day, there she was, with fresh snow forming her shroud. Once I saw her, she was always there, with or without the snow. I had not asked anyone to point her out. I felt that finding her on my own was part of becoming an inhabitant. As with the constellations of stars, La Mujer Muerta is attached to legends that correlate the formation of the landscape with human stories, as if the landscape were formed in sympathy with human experience. This anthropomorphizing of landscape is a collective version of the stitching together of place and narrative that is a part of any walk.

Some places are made from walking, some for walking. Segovia could be called a place made from walking. The 19th century saw the emergence of places made for walking. In both, the facade of things is set by the scale and pace of walking but in the latter, the archaic, collective connections between place and human experience are replaced by a different relationship. This is the space of the wanderer, as well as of the mall-rat. Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1840), the fantastic literature of the body fragmenting into autonomous parts, the detective novel, Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), the Situationist dérive, and Constant’s New Babylon (1959-74) emerge as nomadic symptoms or subversions of the dissolution of collective links between place and human, and the colonization of that space by the mechanisms of capitalism.

There is a third kind of place: places you have no business walking. These by-products of capitalism are not just places of acute disassociation but altogether de-humanized: highways and overpasses, “service” landscapes and districts, ruins of abandoned industrial settlements, places out of sight and out of mind; paced by the truck, airplane, satellite or drone. From walking, for walking, or against walking are categories that are psychological as well as geographic. They are neither mutually exclusive, nor are they permanent. Each has developed, in part, by consuming the former. As social interaction, roaming, and commerce migrate from the physical environment to a virtual one, it may be that walking takes on its most critical role today, as a means of investigation and act of resistance, in the last category. From a distance, these places may seem empty, but this is only because their contents have fallen out of our quotidian systems of signification. Walking these places means walking out of place, behind the facade of things, where we may stitch together a new psycho-geography from the fallout, the debris, and the life taking hold among them.