The Gentle Art of Urban Tramping

Abstract

Our project is to apply Bennett’s philosophy of enchantment to the industrial city. We thought to reframe the project of critique she urges as a set of material—that is, spatially enacted—investigations of our home city Melbourne. A methodology detailed in this chapter, we crafted an idea of ourselves as ‘urban tramps’ who might attempt this critical inquiry. The tramps were to be freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the mindless objectivity of industrialism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. We set out to sojourn through urban landscapes with the same sense of wonder and critical attention that nature-walkers might embody while sauntering through the bush. Nature can enchant and disturb, but so can the city.