Macpherson offers a necessary critique of the methodological enthusiasm surrounding walking interviews. Rather than assuming that walking automatically generates authenticity, intimacy or superior data, she treats the method as a relational space whose possibilities depend on terrain, rhythm, distance, bodily disposition, cultural context and the social relation between walker and researcher. The iconic idea is that walking both opens and closes avenues of inquiry. Movement can generate new spaces of disclosure and forms of rapport, but it can also exclude, fatigue, distract or constrain. This shifts methodological attention from walking as universally beneficial technique to the situated conditions under which particular forms of knowledge become possible. The paper draws on landscape perception, phenomenology and the mobilities paradigm while retaining a strong reflexive stance toward embodiment. Its wider intellectual bridge is to relational epistemology: knowledge emerges through the changing configuration of body, route, landscape and interaction, not from movement in the abstract.
URBANISM MEETS ART