Walkers are “practitioners of the city”, for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Rebecca Solnit

Our cities have become accelerated environments evolving with a focus on efficiency of movement and transportation connections. Today we have the possibilities to encounter the city at various speeds, even though large parts of the city structure have been navigated predominantly by foot in the time they were constructed. Navigation that is relying on smart devices forms an added layer within the reality of our physical space of encounter. The development of new technologies steers the chasing for efficiency and this accelerated pace in our daily lives distances us from physical reality. The work in this subject group questions the potential of reconnection through embodied experience from several distinct positions. Together they ask how reconnection through embodiment could raise awareness of the natural or digital environment that surrounds us

It is hard to imagine a society that would deny the body just as we had progressively denied the soul. This, however, is where we are heading.
Paul Virilio

While navigation has become an increasingly virtual experience, where we manoeuvre simultaneously on virtual platforms and in actual space, the notion of desire in guiding our movement may lead us back to ourselves and stimulate personal involvement. By working with space in dialogue with the broader context of the environment, reconnecting urban architecture attempts to establish new relationships to nature and embodied experience.

This environmental relationship takes a different form in each of the studies. Working with the weather and local managing of rainfall for the design of new sheltered and unsheltered paths in the city is one of the tools that are being proposed. Working with the position of the sun for the design of fractured landmark follies suggests walking and exploring the city as a landscape garden that reminds of cycles of time and our position on this planet within the solar system.

Unsettling our visual perception of movement by altering our sensation of speed, directly addresses the perspectival body in movement. By means of scaling depth and layering of landscape elements, the landscape that surrounds the city becomes reconnected with the city centre, while at the same time the experience of speed is enhanced at a slow pace.