Urban Orienteering

We have become too reliant on navigation technologies which have obscured our relationship with our surroundings. While apps like Google Maps enable a high degree of knowledge about one’s neighborhood to be at one’s fingertips, they undermine exploration and radical immersion in one’s surroundings. Immersion is our natural way of existing in our spaces, prior to the rise of technological mediation. These days, the sport of “Orienteering” has formed to encourage fitness and engagement with nature and the outdoors, and some adventure in this style in the city, but we can also envision the significance of “Urban Orienteering,” where we focus on the city, its machinery, and its steel and glass, since these are now our home. Hip-hop, punk rock, skateboarding culture, parkour, …. and radical solidarities await us in the modern city, but we won’t locate these vital spaces and places and concepts in our mapped reality. Encouraging walking, public transit, and wandering, and regulating the place of cars and dangerous vehicles is the pathway to a new commons for a new era of radical interdependence of all life in a technologically-enframed consciousness. We hit SDG’s # 3,4,5,7,9,11,13 and 16.