Walking & Reading

This paper reflects on the project Walking & Reading, conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023. The starting points for the project were two-fold: to approach common land literally by engaging with the specifics of Sheffield’s long history of access movements and campaigns, while at the same time taking heed of the historian Peter Linebaugh’s call to treat commons as a verb; an action, process, or way of being, by considering the kinds of practice that are involved in commoning. Over the course of two weeks this consisted of Walking: being guided by local experts, repairing and maintaining footpaths and bridleways, seeking out old and forgotten pathways to map, trespassing by walking and swimming on private land, & Reading: reading the landscape and our affective experiences of it, while situating and discussing literature and theory on topics including enclosure and commons, repair and maintenance, mapping, infrastructures and access while we walked. This conceptual and physical journey was eventually distilled into a series of small publications containing stories, poems, audio pieces and films held together in a ‘pack horse library’; a coat that was designed to hold publications acting as a roaming (or rambling), expanding library.