To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

History begins at ground level, with footsteps.

The paths taken by strollers consist of a series of turnings and returnings that can be likened to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic devices”. A perambulatory rhetoric does exist. The art of “turning” a phrase has its counterpart in the art of “turning” course.

The perambulatory gesture … is in itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that are constantly altering it into the advertisement of the other, the agent of whatever may surprise, cross or seduce its route. These aspects establish a rhetoric; they even define it.

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.

First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.

It seems thus possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.

Walking affirms, suspects, guesses, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All modalities play a part in it, changing from step to step and redistributed in proportions, successions, intensities that vary with the moment, the route, the stroller. The indefinable diversity of these operations of utterance. They cannot be reduced to any graphic tracing.