Urban Walks: Footsteps, Narratives, and the Storied City

Abstract:The article discusses the role of urban walks—tours with a guide organized for local communities—in the process of creating an embodied experience of the city that connects places, stories, the present, and the mediated, palimpsest-like past. It highlights critically two visions of the city ("bottom-up" and "top-down") and discusses the underlying assumptions from an anthropological perspective: Can cities only be read by residents, or can the act of walking be a meaningful cultural practice of writing and, first and foremost, performing the city? Our case study looks at Grochów, a district of Warsaw. We discuss urban walks organized by different local actors as an act of reading, writing, and re-writing the city and thus of recreating knowledge and memory of the "Grochów" kibbutz, which was active in this area between 1919 and 1942.