Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on 'Running the City', a course that draws on running as a mobile participatory approach to research, and as a creative lens on the city, its generative rhythms, its gritty realities and inequalities, and its public possibilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on 'Running the City', a course based at the African Centre for Cities, which explores running, as a voluntary, mass participatory, collective urban practice. Through participating in running club training and running races in different parts of Cape Town, my students and I explored running as a lens on the city, its built environment, its roads and alley ways, as a creative way to track city mobility and movement. In this mix, running proved a generative way to map ordinary city objects, which constitute the fabric of the city and its visible and invisible borders. At the same time, running as a practice is relational, bound up in the body, its rhythm and movement, as well as a collective practice, a public expressed in city running clubs and road races. Drawing on field notes, interviews, photographs, and artefacts, and their intertwining in a collective course exhibit, the paper reflects on running as a lens on the African city, its generative rhythms and movement, its gritty realities and inequalities, and its public possibilities.