Attending WALK21

Purple in orange
Give that wolf a banana
Dinner time
At dinner
At the conference
Green

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. 

Related:  Seven eyes

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.