In between congested Asian city sidewalks, we found ourselves pulled into urban green spaces.
We walked many treeless roads from Bangkok, Thailand to Samsun, Turkey. On our weekly rest days, when we rambled into cities and found a hotel room where we could sleep in a bed and hang our laundry, we sought out those quiet giants.
This walk we’re on is shifting our preferences.
Before 2016, we would leave our backpacks in the hostel and, with explore-the-world enthusiasm, we would hurry around to see the main sites, the buildings worth seeing, the local hangouts, the things guidebooks recommended.
Now, with greater frequency, we gravitate towards open spaces, parks, and other places where we could get our much-needed dose of flowers, trees and green things. We crave stillness and reprieve in the cities we find ourselves in.
Here are a few of the parks, green spots and bursts of nature we found along the way and remember with fondness. They have helped silence the noise we typically hear when walking through urban areas.
All photos courtesy of Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot.
While we were in Bangkok mapping our route and getting our visa for Myanmar, we went for frequent walks around Lumphini Park, a big city park ringed with palm trees and high-rise buildings.Sirijit Park is the biggest public park in Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand. Like many parks in Thailand, public exercise equipment is a fixture here as well.After a busy day in the pulsing city of Yangon, Burma, it was nice to have a few minutes in Maha Bandula Park. It where locals have been coming to sit on the grass since 1867 when the swampy land was converted to a public recreation ground.We don’t remember the name of this park we stumbled into in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but it was a much needed moment of relaxation away from the traffic we could barely get around in this overcrowded capital city.Being in the Wakhan Valley in the Pamir region of Tajikistan was like strolling through a park every day. Walking alongside some of the world’s most majestic mountains remains among our sweetest memories of our Bangkok to Barcelona journey.The shady pedestrian passageways in downtown Dushanbe, Tajikistan invite locals and visitors to take it easy. They reminded us of similar middle-of-street green-canopied walkways in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.“Why would you stay in a hotel?” an Iranian woman asked us. “You can just camp in one of the parks. It’s no problem. Everyone does it.” We were tempted a few times to pitch our tents in one of the many parks we found in Iran, but on the few occasions when we needed to camp we found camp spots out of public view.While the seaside promenade in Batumi, Georgia pulses with kitsch touristic restaurants and bars, the park hugging the coastline was where we found our traveling joy.In Turkey, like in Iran, roadside picnicking is a common sight and municipalities have set up areas where people can break out their picnic baskets. We made good use of these green areas along the shoulder to have lunch along the way and to admire the Black Sea.Cities along Turkey’s Black Sea have converted their waterfront areas into parks and promenades. Here in Samsun they have a creative way of hiding functional electricity buildings in one of its parks. Perhaps they see open spaces as a gift to their residences? We certainly do.
Jennifer Baljko is an avid traveler, longtime walker and a lifetime learner. She’s a city dweller who recently became a tree hugger (literally, she throws her arms around trees and hugs them), but feels at home almost anywhere.
“[A city where] everything comes together . . . subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and...
The purpose of this essay is to share some considerations about the meaning of “just City” from the perspective of a lawyer dedicated to the reform of justice administration and, in particular, to the design of systems that promote, encourage and facilitate the approach of justice for the people. This...
My vision for a just city is one where design and its power as a tool against inequality is leveraged for the benefit of all residents. As the director of design programs at the National Endowment for Arts, and one of the U.S. government’s primary advocates for good design, I...
If you have never been to Baltimore, you should come to visit. From Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, you can ride the light rail to downtown in 25 minutes for one of the best deals in the country. If you ride the train between Boston and Washington, you can...
Beijing, China’s capital, has been experiencing serious air pollution in recent years. Greenhouse gas emissions from industry, coal heating, and vehicles are believed to be three major causes of the city’s air pollution. Beginning over a decade ago, Beijing Municipal...
Today’s post celebrates highlights from TNOC writing in 2016. These contributions, originating around the world, were widely read, offer novel points of view, are somehow disruptive in a useful way, or combine these characteristics. Certainly, all 550+ TNOC essays and roundtables are great and worthwhile reads, but what follows will give you a taste of this year’s key and diverse content. 2016 has been an...
I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be...
A review of Tim Ingold‘s lecture event “The Sustainability of Everything” at the Centre for Human Ecology, Pearce Institute, Glasgow, Scotland Sustainability is an overused word. It is much diminished by its occurrence in too many documents purporting to suggest...
Add a Comment
Join our conversation