60 308 Exploring the city through walking (Autumn 2025)

This is a course exploring practices of walking as a way of knowing and engaging with the city. Most of us experience our neighbourhoods and cities through walking. Walking is thus a crucial part of living in a city, but is an experience that is given little attention in urban planning and architectural practice. This course digs deeper into that. The overall aim is to explore what kind of insights practices of walking can produce and how these might add to more established forms of knowledge within architecture and design, urbanism and landscape. This is amongst others important as cities are increasingly planning for walkability and the joys of walking. The course will also take up issues of walkability as a feature in discussions about sustainable cities.

The theoretical component of the course will consist of readings on the history of urban walking, as well as introduction to tools and methods for recording and documenting explorative practices of urban walking. The more practical component of the course will consist of a set of explorative urban walking sessions combined with testing out ways of recording and documentation.

Knowledge:

• The students will acquire theoretical and practical knowledge about urban walking as a tool for learning the city.

Skills:

• The students will acquire skills in various methods and techniques for both documentation and reflection on practices of urban walking as a tool for exploring the city.

Genreal competence:

• The students will acquire competence in the history and theory of urban walking that prepares them to write up an essay on urban walking as a tool for engaging with the physical, architectural and social environments of cities.

The course will be organized as a combination of seminars (first part of the day) and more concrete fieldwork in terms of urban walking sessions in different parts of Oslo (second part of the day). The seminar sessions will consist of a series of lectures, discussions of (weekly) readings, and reports on ongoing fieldwork. Some of the seminars will be organized as outdoor events and combined with urban walks. The more concrete fieldwork sessions will be organized both as collective events, group work and individual work. In the last part of the semester the students will write up an essay based on their fieldwork into practices of urban walking.

Compulsory attendance requirements:

Students are expected to join in on the weekly seminars and urban walking sessions. Presentations and assignments are compulsory.

Compulsory work requirements:Students are expected to read a selection of the curriculum for each weekly session. The students will also be given the task of preparing seminar presentations (1–2 times throughout the semester) based on the curriculum. They are also expected to carry out shorter field work assignments (4–6 times throughout the semester).

Form of assessment: Project assignment

Grading scale: Pass/fail