Cities on the Move: Navigating Urban Life

This paper explores the imaginative and analytical potential of ‘journeys’ in understanding the fabric and fabrication of cities and urban lives. Journeys foreground navigational skill offering a grounded way of thinking about contemporary mobilities and the interpenetration of distant worlds. This paper suggests some of the ways in which journeys matter and make matter, in flesh and stone, co-creating social interactions, social relationships and, ultimately, the social morphologies to which all of these things accumulate, drawing some of the small quiet contour of the contemporary global world. It suggests that journeys provide powerful intersections from which to observe, ask questions and act. These explorations are developed by taking some of the people I have met in the course of my research over the last years out for a city walk in Montreal, Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Addis Ababa and its Somali borderlands. Evoking a deeper aesthetic sense of these journeys than words alone make possible are the accompanying photographs of three artists/photographers 1.