Attending WALK21
As part of promotional activities around WLC’s partnership in WALC, I attended WALK21 in Lisbon. WALK21 is a yearly conference, moving throughout the world, promoting walking and walkability. With some 500 attendees, most of which are city planners, municipal administrators, and advocates, the 6-day conference is quite essential in the sector.
It’s also fairly pricey, but as I managed to get a speaking part, hosting a walkshop using Dérive app, my attendance fees were halved.
We (at WLC) figured it could be a good venue for attracting interest in either WLC, or WALC, a 4-year collaboration between 7 European partners, with a focus on marginalised communities, facilitated through artistic practice.
The conference has a lot to offer, and I had a lot of good and interesting conversations. But, artists were underrepresented, even though one I met, Raphaela Mak, presented an actual sound walk.
The walkshop I hosted was well received, even if attendance was limited. Then again, several other walkshops saw even fewer attendees.
Overall, the conference was quite interesting, also because I have more than a passing interest in urban design and planning, but its audience is quite a bit removed from the audience we like to reach with WLC, or with WALC for that matter.
Also because some of the other walkshops employed comparable techniques to what I did in my walkshop, it’s clear that quite a few of the conference participants would be served in their work with events like this. However, this did not seem to be a reason for the participants of the conference to also attend these walkshops. Many talk about citizen engagement and inclusion, but meetings and presentations seem to be preferred.
Next year’s Walk21 is in Tirana. I don’t see a justification for attending, but considering Tirana is reinventing itself as a very hip tourist destination, there might be opportunities outside of the conference that could feed into it.