What affective experiences are made available to bodies by moving through urban environments?

My thesis explores concepts of space, place, nostalgia, imagination and everyday practice. It argues that pedestrian movement plays a significant role in urban meaning-making, offering nostalgic or imaginative experiences that resist the dichotomies that sometimes proliferate urban literature. If, as many accounts suggest, place is pause and space is motion, the lived, moved experiences of urban life are lost in this binary. However, by dwelling in the minutiae of everyday practice, this thesis attempts to shift conversations around these concepts from the abstract to the concrete. To do so, it emphasises the importance of geographically and culturally specific accounts, drawing particularly on my experiences in my home city of Sydney, Australia, and in Lisbon, Portugal. This ethnographically-inflected approach reveals that movement, space, place and meaning are inextricable from each other. In other words, human ‘being’ in cities is never the smooth, slick experience it was designed to be, and in doing so, challenges the framework through which we think about urbanity.