Alberto Ortiz Abad

Walking became important to me before I had the language to explain why. It began quietly, as something instinctive rather than deliberate. In the cities I have lived in, walking was never only a way of getting somewhere. It was also a way of thinking, of slowing down, of letting the world arrive at a different pace. I did not always recognise this as a practice. For a long time, it simply felt like the most natural way of being with a place.

Over time, I began to notice that some of my clearest reflections happened while moving. Certain questions became easier to hold while walking. Certain feelings became more legible. Streets, weather, edges, light, and the simple act of continuing forward created a kind of rhythm in which thought could loosen. Walking did not solve anything directly, but it often made things more bearable, more spacious, and sometimes more understandable. It offered not escape, but a different form of attention.

I have lived in eight cities so far. Some I left quickly. Some I stayed in long enough for routine to settle. In all of them, walking became a way of entering into relation with my surroundings. It helped me register distances, atmospheres, habits, and moods. It gave me a bodily sense of where I was, even when I lacked words for what made one place feel open and another withholding, one street calming and another estranging. Long before I thought of this as research, I think I was already using walking to measure closeness.

What interests me in this thesis comes from that long accumulation. It comes from the notion that living in a place is not the same as feeling connected to it, and that familiarity alone does not fully explain why some parts of a city begin to feel more inhabitable, more generous, or more one’s own. I have often known cities well enough to move through them fluently while still feeling at a distance from them. I have also felt unexpectedly close to places I could not yet fully explain. Somewhere within that gap, between use and relation, routine and presence, this enquiry began.

Walking has gradually taught me that attention is not passive. It has to be practised. Cities are easy to experience as background, especially when life becomes crowded by obligation, work, speed, and repetition. Walking, at least for me, has been one way of resisting that flattening. It has been a way of remaining receptive to what a place is doing, and to what I am doing in return. Not every walk is meaningful. Not every pause opens something up. But over time they have given me a method, or something close to one, for reading both the city and my own thresholds within it.

This thesis grows from that personal ground, but it also moves beyond it. It is an attempt to find a clearer language for something I have often felt only indirectly: that connection to a city is not constant, and not guaranteed, but may gather through certain conditions, rhythms, and permissions that become visible only when one slows down enough to notice them. Walking has been the way I learned to begin noticing.

‘At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored.’¹

This booklet invites a slower engagement with the city through walking, pausing, and observation. Rather than focusing on destinations or landmarks, it attends to the ordinary conditions that shape how places are encountered, remembered, and related to. Through a series of prompts, it encourages participants to notice what supports presence and what resists it; what makes a place easier to stay with, return to, or carry forward in memory.

The responses gathered through the booklet suggest that connection often emerges through modest spatial conditions rather than exceptional ones. Edges, thresholds, shelter, atmosphere, and the subtle negotiation between exposure and comfort repeatedly shaped whether a pause felt possible and whether a place felt open to relation.

The booklet remains an open invitation to explore one’s own sense of connection to place. Those interested in receiving a copy are welcome to get in touch and explore their own sense of connection through walking.

Special thanks to everyone who participated in testing the booklet and sharing their observations. Their contributions helped reveal how differently the same city can be experienced, while highlighting the qualities that repeatedly support moments of connection.

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1. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).

Participants include; Lily Whitehouse/  Tom Matthews/  Enbiya Sevim Yuecel/  Tamsin Le Roux

Living in a city does not always mean feeling connected to it. A place may become familiar through routine, repeated routes, and daily use, yet still remain oddly distant. Looking for Connection begins from that gap. It asks what allows a city to feel connectable, and how paying closer attention to those conditions might reveal something about one’s own sense of connection.

The work is concerned with the city at the scale at which it is lived. Rather than approaching architecture only through object, programme, or image, it focuses on the ordinary spatial and social situations that shape how a body moves, slows down, or remains in place. Edges, thresholds, planting, overlooking windows, street width, surface condition, the presence of others, and the pace of movement all begin to matter here, not as isolated features, but as parts of an environment that may support or weaken a sense of relation. The interest is therefore architectural in a broad sense: not only in what the city looks like, but in how it receives presence.

Walking provides the project’s primary mode of enquiry. As a slow and embodied practice, it allows the city to be read through rhythm, atmosphere, material change, and encounter. Yet the project proposes that pausing offers a sharper lens still. If walking lets the city unfold, pausing tests whether a place can hold the body beyond movement alone. A pause asks whether one can remain without discomfort, awkwardness, or the need to explain one’s presence. It turns passing impressions into situated observations and makes comparison possible.

This proposition is explored through repeated fieldwork in Glasgow, with a particular focus on the West End and the City Centre as contrasting urban conditions. Through mapped walks, photographs, pause cards, and written reflection, the project examines where and how connection begins to become legible. From this, connection is approached through the overlap between familiarity and affinity. Familiarity concerns recognition, orientation, and the knowledge that develops through return. Affinity concerns the felt quality of relation between person and place, whether a setting seems to suit, support, or receive one’s presence. The argument is that a city becomes more connectable where these two conditions begin to reinforce one another.

The value of the research lies in making these conditions visible. In a context shaped by speed, efficiency, and distraction, the project argues for slowness and attentiveness as a valid architectural enquiry. It suggests that the capacity of a place to support unforced presence is not incidental to urban life, but central to how meaningful relation is formed. In that sense, the project proposes a way of reading the city through its quieter acts of support, and of understanding connection as something that begins not in abstraction, but in the lived encounter between body and environment.