Taking a walk through the city
Exploring Kitchener on foot reveals rich layers of history and change
— Take a walk in the city and you are bound to see something interesting.
A bit of concrete near a shop, in which shells are embedded, with round holes from which buttons were once punched, from the days when Berlin, as the city was then called, was the button capital of Canada.
A busy city street that is the oldest in Kitchener and was once a trail running alongside Schneider Creek, used by Indigenous peoples.
A high point of a lane where you can see the many cranes studding the Kitchener skyline as the city, once again, undergoes change.
Bob Sharpe has been walking in downtown Kitchener for decades. For 15 years, the retired professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University has taken students for walks downtown. Walking allows them to directly see the concepts of urban geography unfolding in the real world, to discover and experience what he calls “community knowledge, not just book knowledge.”
Now that the pandemic has got all of us out walking more, Sharpe has embarked on a new personal project, “My 15-Minute City,” a series of short videos about walking in an urban setting.
Using a GoPro and a wireless mic, the videos take people on walks around downtown Kitchener and touch upon several themes Sharpe explored in his academic work: how cities change, how different spaces are used, what makes a city safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable — a community as described in the United Nations’ sustainable development goal about cities.
Walking “is such a human thing to do,” he said. It’s great for your mental and physical health, but it’s stimulating in other ways: as you walk, you experience the places you are in with all your senses in a way that’s impossible in a car. And it allows wonderful moments of discovery.
“This project is meant to stimulate people’s appreciation of walking in an urban space, to show that even in the mundane, everyday, material world there are some surprising and interesting things,” Sharpe said.
A walk through the city can touch upon ideas about pollution at the site of a former coal tar dump; urbanization as former parking lots give way to gleaming new condos; colonialism; the need for green space; and change and urban design, as old brick-and-beam factories once seen as eyesores become hot properties for tech offices.
Cities are so interesting for walking in, Sharpe said, because they’re constantly changing. They’re also home to a wide variety of different people with different experiences and things to contribute, a fact made plain by the many different languages that can be heard on a walk through Victoria Park on a sunny day.
His walks with students have also taught him. He recalls extolling the vibrancy of the new patios cropping up on downtown sidewalks when a visually impaired student told him the patios posed a real challenge for her to navigate, which led the class to examine ways the city was accessible and inaccessible.
He and his students have run into the mayor — a Laurier grad — on a walk. On another, they met a homeless man Sharpe knew. Some of his students were astounded that the group had stopped to talk to a man who at first looked very rough. “This person turned out to be quite nice, and very knowledgeable about the community. They learned something.”
“It’s that type of moment, totally unplanned, that can happen on a walk,” Sharpe said.
Sharpe will be working on the videos over the coming months and will post details about them on his blog, bsharpe-walking. blogspot.com, where he shares ideas and articles about walking.
Kitchener is a quirky sort of city, with its idiosyncratic street layout and its jumble of old factories built next to workers’ homes.
“Not everybody likes this place,” Sharpe notes. “It’s not a really beautiful city. But the more you get to know it, and hear its interesting stories, and discover its places, the more it becomes fascinating.”