Readings:
Garnette Cadogan, “Walking While Black, Literary Hub, July 8, 2026: https://lithub.com/walking-while-blackLinks to an external site.
Elihu Rubin, “Catch My Drift? Situationist Dérive and Urban Pedagogy,” Radical History Review, Issue 114 (Fall 2012), 175-190
This week’s readings were particularly interesting to me as I near the end of my time in New Haven. I grew up in St. Louis (not walkable other than some pedestrian-friendly pockets), then spent 5 years in New York, and have now been in New Haven almost three years. One of my first impressions of New Haven in fall 2022 arose when I walked from my apartment downtown to the Ikea to get things to set up my new apartment. The walk there and back felt like it took hours, when really it was only maybe 20-30 minutes one way. The route I took was vast and car-centric (unsurprisingly), and I was aware that the speed at which I was walking did not match the speed for which these roads were intended. I still don’t have a car in New Haven and was hoping that by the time I finished school here, I would enjoy walking, but still walking downtown is exhausting and feels endless.
Similarly, in St. Louis, I was getting my hair cut at a seemingly cute or “quaint” area in the suburbs which created the illusion of walkability. After my appointment, I was trying to kill time by walking, but found that it was utterly impossible to walk around the area and I found myself having to climb over shrubs just to get to the shop down the block. This area (as most are in STL) are made for vehicles. This realization really surprised me because the architecture and rhythm of shops tried to suggest a walkable typology, but was not pedestrian-friendly in reality.
My experiences in downtown New Haven and St. Louis are non-walkable for two different reasons which calls to attention that walkability must both consider “attractions” and also scale / vastness.
A point of both connection and contention between Cadogan’s article “Walking While Black” and “Catch My Drift” are the notions of safety and self surveillance/awareness. In Cadogan’s piece, these arise from the over-policing and racism black men face while occupying public space in the United States, contrasted with the anonymity allowed to him in Jamaica. The circles through which Cadogan is forced to jump to walk in cities like New York and New Orleans become a form of self-policing; “a pantomime undertaken to avoid the choreography of criminality.”
A parenthetical of the Cadogan article: “(And it is not lost on me that my woman friends are those who best understand my plight; they have developed their own vigilance in an environment where they are constantly treated as targets of sexual attention.)” is tied to Elihu’s reporting back on his experiences of his students. Part of the nature of the derive assignment is to go and explore; in many cases to places students haven’t been before. While notions of perceived safety explored in the conversations reported on the derive are mainly due to an unfamiliarity of an area — leaving the “Yale Bubble” — the Cadogan piece shows that for some groups, even places travelled daily can become dangerous. It isn’t necessarily dependent on the desirability/sketchiness of a given street; Cadogan was jumped by police in Columbus Circle, a part of New York where tourists, finance guys, and park goers pass through daily without issue. The randomness, the unpredictability of something bad happening completely changes the way Cadogan and many others perceive the act of existing in public spaces.
While there are spatial/psychogeographical aspects of the notions of safety and self surveillance (in Jamaica Cadogan feels much more comfortable despite being seen as crazy by his friends for his risks), it seems to be on a much different scale than explored in Debord’s “Theory of the Derive”. While yes, individual streets do often feel safer or sketchier than the ones a few blocks away, something that is absent from Debord’s writing (and I would venture to say from his experiences) is this overall heightened sense of awareness some must take on when navigating spaces, whether on a stroll, a journey, or a derive.
Cadogan talks of serendipity, describing it as “a secular way of speaking of grace”, where through the faithful act of walking, purely for the sake of the action, we stumble upon a richer, perhaps truer understanding of both the self and the world. I interpret this in part as praise for the uncertain and the undefined, where through walking we find ourselves in unplanned circumstances that require alternate modes of interpretation and reaction. It is, in some ways, a phenomenological description, whereby exposing ourselves to something unexpected, we are required to acknowledge a similarly unexpected mechanism of perception. There is a moment of metacognition embedded in this kind of interaction and I find this to be a particularly beautiful sentiment and something that resonated with my dérive. While walking, I found that my most consistent guiding principle was the desire to move in a new direction, one where I had not walked before, seeking out unexpected urban scenes. I eventually found myself somewhat turned around in the small residential streets of Fair Haven, and my reference points became the icons of the New Haven skyline. I found myself seeking them out to orient myself, with an entirely new attitude of perception that uncovered a new wayfinding role for the monuments of our city.
In many ways, there is something liberating in having meaning and direction on a walk. It provides context for why and where and when, and disarms, at least to a degree, the suspicion that is associated with purposelessness. In Cadogan’s piece, this is obviously not the case, as he becomes the target of aggression and mistreatment even when moving through the city with intention and purpose. The joy of a dérive, as it is classically defined, or even in the wandering that Cadogan describes, is that it allows for an unbiased discovery of the world, but it also requires the world be equally unbiased in its reception of the wanderer. I walked through New Haven in the mid-afternoon, a relatively non-descript wanderer by all accounts, and certainly cannot claim to have experienced what Cadogan describes. But I did uncover the urge to move away from the busier parts of the city, away from people and potential onlookers, not out of apprehension, but because I found the constant relationship with others “rendered inaccessible the classic romantic experience of walking alone”. I’d be curious if that is something others found as well and if it influenced their walk.
Over spring break, I had the good fortune to visit Vienna, Austria. One of my close friends recently moved there and I took our spring break as an opportunity to visit her. Therefore, I had the opportunity to take my dérive in a foreign country and a place completely unfamiliar to me. What struck me the most across my walk was the monotony of urban forms. Except the Ringstrasse which cuts through the center city, I found Vienna to be mostly block after block of apartment houses broken up by an occasional square with a church or other public building. In section, these apartment houses are doing the exact same thing – residential apartments stacked above commercial or retail space, totaling no more than five or six stories. But even though their guts might be the same, the exterior facades of these buildings could not be more different. I found them to be a European take on a decorated tenement, though much more rooted in the classical tradition. Because of their decoration, a repeating form does not feel so monotonous as one transverses the city. In order to illustrate how decoration can break up urban monotony, I have assembled a collage of a series of windows across the city. Each window takes a completely different ornamental attitude, but they are all the same opening punched into the façade of a Viennese apartment house.
Yet because the urban forms are so similar throughout the city, I think my central takeaway was that Vienna is a place where neighborhood character is not dependent not on urban forms. Urban life did not depend on whether or not the city had rowhouses or tall skyscrapers. The vitality of neighborhoods seemed to be driven by the presence of third spaces, not the building typology itself. In other words, because the city blocks mostly look the same what really impacts the feeling of the neighborhood are the places that activate the ground level. As Debord says in Theory of the Derive, the derive allows us to “draw up the first surveys of the psycho-geographical articulations of a modern city.” The dérive illustrated to me that successful urban environments are not just the byproduct of regulating building form. Filling cities with third spaces that are easily accessible is essential to the healthy urban environments.
One insight I gained from this week’s readings and the dérive exercise is that within the physical capability of the body, walkability is more psychological than physical. This realization makes me reconsider the walkability diagrams that many architecture students, including myself, created during my undergraduate studies. In those diagrams, we would select a point and draw a circle with a specific radius to represent how far one could walk in a certain amount of time. My experiences have shown me that walking the same distance can feel different and thus take different amounts of time in various cities or parts of a city.
In the chapter “Starting to Look,” Jacobs emphasizes how merely seeing our urban environment without understanding it can lead to mistranslations. Our observations can make us uncomfortable due to our preconceived biases, backgrounds, and learned behaviors. As I conducted my drift, I became increasingly aware of and guilty about this phenomenon.
My plan for the drift was to walk without a map, beginning to the west toward the West River, then turning left and venturing deep into The Hill with a rough agenda of observing the structures attached to buildings, including pipes, water meters, antennas, and electric wires. Initially, everything went well while I was within Yale’s bubble; the pipes were neatly organized, and the equipment looked new.
However, as I moved further away from Yale, the things I intended to observe began to change. Some pipes were broken and hanging from the walls, electrical wires were carelessly draped, and satellite TV antennas started to appear, clinging to the sides of houses like mushrooms. These small signs and misalignments began to sharpen my awareness of my surroundings.
I became more conscious of the little occurrences around me. For instance, I noticed a few people gathering in front of a bodega three blocks away, which triggered a sense of unease in my mind. Acknowledging that this reaction stemmed from my own biases, I reminded myself to stay calm and continued walking. To my surprise, I even received a warm greeting from a stranger. However, this pleasant encounter did not prevent my mind from signaling danger. The more I walked, the more I noticed damaged infrastructure, spilled garbage cans, and all the “negative” aspects of an urban environment.
The question remains: how do we confront this psychological challenge, or is it something we can ever truly address? Every moment spent at Yale is a reminder of the urban renewal that segregated the city, reinforced by the Yale alert emails and the blue emergency lamp posts that signal dangers if you step outside the school boundary. Can we make a difference if all students and faculty start walking more, venturing outside the “safe haven” that is Yale?
Garnette Cadogan’s piece brings together so many ideas and themes that we have discussed in class, all wrapped in deeply personal and extremely relatable prose. Some things that stood out to me was the politics of “the street”. To understand a city fully is to understand the streets and I think in the United States understanding the country is understanding the racisms that built the institutions. I guess you could say that racism is part of American cities pyschogeography. As someone who is interested in public space and creating spaces that bring people together I often wonder who it will really benefit. When beautiful public spaces are created the same people are often still afraid or worrying about participating in those spaces? Are there ways to create healing spaces that could help communities confront the past that remains?
These readings also really emphasize that cities geographies are not only mapped by city planners, but mapped by the people who live there. In many of the urban classes that I am in we discuss what is missing and what is needed to fix some of the legacies of racism, redlining, urban renewal, etc but we don’t also talk about what is there. What are these areas now after these processes. I’d be curious to make community members that are part of these urban greening and other new age urban renewal projects map their communities first.
My derive journey took me through a part of New Haven I havent not explored much of. The Westville, Beaver hills and Edgewood neighborhoods brought out a different side to New Haven then the East Rock, Downtown and Dwight that I stick more closely to. Every pocket felt different from one another and different from the other areas of the city I know well. While this isn’t unique to New Haven its still interesting and I think can highlight how neighborhoods are really created by the people who live there. The places that I didn’t like or respond well to on my walk were ones that felt artificial or lifeless while the areas that attracted me were either natural or felt like they had a sense of character. I think its interesting that some students think that this disconnected them from social and urban problems, I think it reminded that some of our “solutions” to urban problems are misguided.
My Derive took me through what might be one of America’s most intentionally planned pedestrian zones: a winding path through the heart of Washington DC from the Watergate Hotel to the Hirshhorn Museum and back.
During this walk, I found myself thinking about Jacobs’ ideas surrounding walkable cities. In “Starting to Look”, Jacobs suggests that in walking through a city, seeing is not understanding. I found it fascinating to think about this along a path that is almost aggressively picturesque. In a sense, there was a sort of unsettling feeling of walking past some of the country’s most significant monuments while remembering that the city through which I was walking sits atop wildly unstable political ground. I then started thinking about Cadogan’s pieces and the concept of safety. I spotted the first red hat while I passed the Washington monument and it instantly pulled me out of my formalist daze and dropped me back into the reality of where I was. I had failed to consider the fact that there were people who were in this city to be close to him. I made some snarky comment to the person that I was with, something snarky, I’m sure, and we kept walking. Around the corner was the second. We continued along the mall, passing all of the Smithsonian branches, I counted 7 hats waiting in the impossibly long line outside of the Air and Space museum. On the next corner, two teenage boys donned their caps backward while they inched closer to the capitol and filmed a tik-tok. The interior of the Hirshhorn at least seemed appealing enough to keep the far right away. On the way back, I chose a different route, winding through the north of the mall. One more hat by the Museum of American History, classic. turning right we briefly walked along the whitehouse lawn. No thanks. I’m not sure when the codeswitching started, but at a point, my indignance for their presence morphed into caution. As distracting as the monuments might be they were outweighed by the vitriolic ideals and documented actions associated with that one cultural signifier. I walked a little closer to my counterpart – an imposing straight white male. It doesn’t matter if he went to the GSD and voted for Hillary, nobody was going to mess with him. As the tomboy in dickies with my keys dangling from a belt loop, I suddenly felt clockably queer and sensed the need for an ally. The takeaway from this walk was not only the proof that the United States has placed a great deal of time and money into the creation of an inarguably impressive walking zone in which to showcase its many treasures, but that the unease associated while walking through potential enemy territory can happen even in the most affluent and tourist-driven zones. That and who knew the far right had a thing for aeronautics?
Red hat tally: 16