Welcome to Walking Almaty!
When I moved to Almaty to study Kazakh in the summer of 2013, I became a voracious walker. I was living with a host family on Seifullin and Mametova, one corner of the downtown core, and my university was a long diagonal away, on the opposite side of the center. Every day I walked bаck and forth to school, three miles each way, and every day I found a new route, a different way to zig and zag across town. As I tried to make my new home familiar, there were patterns in the public space that baffled me: What was this ragged stone, full of fossils, that was used on the faces of all the buildings? What was the story with all the little canals lining the streets, and why were some full of water and some full of trash? Why were the trees all painted white? I had studied Russian and Kazakh, but urban Almaty seemed to be written in a language I couldn’t understand.
Walking Almaty is a project that emerged from all these wonderings. It’s a project about learning to read a city’s visual landscape, and my tool is systematic classification. I’ve taken the forms around me and filed them into dozens of folders, taking thousands of photos to document everything I deem a phenomenon. I’ve now been in Almaty for almost three years, and if you look at the map below you can see that I’ve obsessively walked hundreds of miles, in every corner of the city. As I've walked, I've written reports about the different neighborhoods I've visited, and I've even started working with local Almatians to make a new kind of map of the city space.
More recently, I started giving Walking Tours of Almaty that have become a big hit on Trip Advisor. Won't you join me?
I know information on Almaty is scarce, and I love letters, so in any case, please don't be afraid to write!
- Dennis
DennisThorstedKeen@gmail.com
Walking Almaty is a project that emerged from all these wonderings. It’s a project about learning to read a city’s visual landscape, and my tool is systematic classification. I’ve taken the forms around me and filed them into dozens of folders, taking thousands of photos to document everything I deem a phenomenon. I’ve now been in Almaty for almost three years, and if you look at the map below you can see that I’ve obsessively walked hundreds of miles, in every corner of the city. As I've walked, I've written reports about the different neighborhoods I've visited, and I've even started working with local Almatians to make a new kind of map of the city space.
More recently, I started giving Walking Tours of Almaty that have become a big hit on Trip Advisor. Won't you join me?
I know information on Almaty is scarce, and I love letters, so in any case, please don't be afraid to write!
- Dennis
DennisThorstedKeen@gmail.com
Covered Ground
When I first started walking, I would draw in my routes at the end of the day using the smart route maker on a website called MapMyWalk. Later, I started using the MapMyWalk app on my iPhone, which used GPS to more accurately trace my every step. By putting these two data sources together in a map I built using Google Fusion Tables, you can see every block I've walked (and photographed) in Almaty. I estimate it's at least a thousand miles so far!
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