Walking / Strollology / Dérive

Walking has long been framed as both everyday practice and philosophical method. For Thoreau, in his essay Walking (1862), it aligned with wildness and freedom from the constraints of settled life. The Situationists later radicalized walking through the dérive, drifting through urban environments to expose hidden psychogeographies and disrupt capitalist spatial logics. Michel de Certeau described walking in the city as a tactic, a small improvisation that resists the strategic control of planners and institutions. Jane Jacobs, in turn, emphasized walking as the medium of urban life, and her legacy continues in Jane’s Walks—annual citizen-led tours that cultivate local knowledge, civic participation, and collective critique of urban space. Rebecca Solnit has further traced walking as a cultural practice of necessity, leisure, and reflection. Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt, coined the term "strollology", translated from German Spaziergangswissenschaft. In design discourse, walking foregrounds the embodied and temporal dimensions of landscape, revealing space not as fixed form but as lived sequence.

/ Zoë Tank

On a mild evening last April, Room 304 in Pratt Institute’s architecture school, Higgins Hall—an oddly grandiose double-height classroom space with a view of the Manhattan skyline—is packed. The Landscape Seminar Series—launched in 2022 in conjunction with Pratt’s Master of Landscape Architecture program—has invited the iconic land artist and activist Mary Miss to speak as […]

/ Urška Škerl

Dr. Anette Freytag is a relentless researcher, moving between academia, activism, and public engagement. She taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and the Technical University of Innsbruck before joining Rutgers University, where she is the Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Freytag […]

/ Zaš Brezar

Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]

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