Space and Place: Walking through Kamloops

Using philosophy and social theory, this essay examines walking as a privileged means of revealing physical and social environment of a small city. My regular walk from downtown Kamloops, British Columbia, to Thompson Rivers University frames exploration of social, historical, and bodily construction of and place. We all have some idea of what it means to have a of place: it is idea of what and who belongs to a certain place, of some noteworthy features of place, or location of that place relative to its surroundings or relative to other places. In same way, we have a rough idea of what is, if only because we live and move in space, and our very bodies are spatial, having not only size and dimension, but also orientation (left, right, up, down, forward, back). In this essay, I explore my experiences of walking through a particular small city--Kamloops, in British Columbia, Canada--to illuminate how space and place are revealed through walking. Walking unfolds and reveals space at a different pace and with a different rhythm from driving in a car, riding in a bus or flying over in a plane. There are no barriers between walker and surrounding world, no elaborate technique to be mindful of as walker one in front of another. The body and senses of walker enter into intimate proximity with environment not achievable through other modes of transport. The walker is more apt to notice details that escape glance of driver hurtling by or bus-rider engrossed in her book, more able to actually feel contours and textures of landscape, more exposed to scents and smells of automobile fumes and vegetation, more attuned to play of light and shadow, heat and cold, which are as much felt on skin as seen by eyes. A walker does not skip over much, sees things close up, and makes herself vulnerable and accessible to local people and places (Solnit 128). Walking is then perhaps a privileged mode of encountering space and place, as walker is a part of very fabric of space being traversed, exposed to natural and social forces it contains and revealing those forces through body's reactions to them: there is a sense of place that can only be gained on foot (Solnit 9). Walking is act that reveals different aspects of object in much way that, Merleau-Ponty says, body's senses and capacities for movement and action reveal different aspects of material we inhabit (98-153, 243-98). It is active engagement of body in world, not merely passive spectatorship but rather, as Rebecca Solnit argues, making and working, a way of knowing through body and body through world (29). Walking can become an investigation, a ritual, a meditation (Solnit 3), mode of investigation par excellence of what Guy Debord calls psychogeography, the study of precise laws and specific effects of geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on emotions and behaviour of individuals, because of way walking reveals ambience of a street or neighbourhood (5). What is space? On face of it, it is simply of width, height, depth: traditional three dimensions we use in measuring a room or a piece of furniture. In this conception, space is quantitative: it is measurable, whether in inches and miles, or in centimetres and light years. What makes space measurable is that it is single, uniform, and homogeneous. Every region of space is continuous with other regions (there are no gaps in space), every space, as space, is just like any other space (all space is empty, and lacks any differentiating qualities), and every region of space can be measured in same way, whether we are talking about a living room or a galaxy. Such space is symmetrical and reversible: distance between two points is same in both directions. …

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