The Walk Against Distracted Walking Walk

Each year thousands of people are injured, some fatally, by the phenomenon known as ‘distracted walking’, whereby pedestrians navigate the city streets while gazing at their smartphones. There is another cost – when we walk distractedly we close ourselves off from our environment, anaesthetising ourselves to its stimuli and rendering us less capable of noticing the ways in which the city is being transformed by construction, destruction, gentrification, privatisation, etc. This walk is a walk against distracted walking. It will entail both reflection on the problems of urban walking in the current dispensation and an invitation to participants to use their phones to film or photograph aspects of their environment that might easily be missed or overlooked – turning these weapons of mass distraction against themselves.

Image: © Duncan Hay