Down on the Coal Harbour Seawall … Art!
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Above, a few examples from Philosophers Walk – “a sequence of philosophical and proverb based statements inspired by walking.”
And that’s just one piece from Wild New Territories:
Wild New Territories is a series of exhibitions, outdoor works, performances, and workshops co-curated by Ron den Daas and Kathy Kenny. The project explores the interplay between the urban and the wild in contemporary art and is being presented in three different urban contexts: Vancouver, London and Berlin.
Not overly profound, is it, but the quotes make tangible what walkers (and runners and cyclists and skateboarders and babies in prams and maybe even dogs on leashes) intuitively know: walking is a good thing. All the more amazing, then, that we tried to design it out of our cities, and how much we love the places, like the seawall, where we can.
Behavioural psychologist, James Sallis, in the Globe and Mail:
Are some cities better at others at being walkable?
Every older city is walkable, period. If they were built before cars they had to be. So we know how to make walkable cities that are fantastic and beautiful.
How does this translate into healthier behaviour?
The brain is not our friend when it comes to physical activity. We are kind of programmed for slothfulness. As we age, some of the neurons that connect movement centres and reward centres die off so we lose our ability to get pleasure from activity. That’s why we need spaces that invite people to be active. We need to feed the pleasure centres of the brain through our designs.
And through our art.
