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Paper short abstract

Through ethnographic reflections on walking Cairo after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and later Berlin, this paper shows how streets are inhabited as living archives where memory, loss and political possibility are negotiated, tracing how fractured urban spaces are inhabited, erased, and reimagined.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how walking operates as both method and practice in fractured cities. Through personal trajectories, interlocutors’ narratives, and sensory encounters with streets, walls, and buildings, I explore how urban space is lived, remembered, and contested across political rupture.

I approach the city through a dwelling perspective, treating streets, walls, and buildings not as static backdrops but as relational terrains shaped through movement, care, and contestation. Focusing on practices such as marching, lingering, photographing, and remembering, I trace how urban space is continuously made and unmade through acts of togetherness, rejection, and remembrance. While revolutionary streets once functioned as sites of collective intimacy and political imagination, they later became spaces of erasure, securitization, and decay. Yet even under conditions of defeat and fragmentation, walking persists as a modest but generative mode of dwelling. It transformed into quieter practices of remembrance—searching for leftover graffiti, retracing routes of protest, and engaging bodily with spaces marked by loss. These acts function as grassroots modes of care that resist state-imposed forgetting.

By walking across different moments and cities, the paper highlights how memories of protest travel translocally, reactivating past affects in new urban contexts. Rather than presenting walking as resistance in a heroic sense, the paper foregrounds its fragility and ambiguity as a practice of dwelling within fractured urban landscapes. In doing so, it shows how creative and imaginative practices of inhabiting the city can challenge polarized conceptions of public space, not by overcoming fracture, but by learning to dwell within it.