Walking is a simple and direct way to connect with the city, no matter what name you give it. No matter what name you give it, whether it’s walking, jogging, or the fancy City Walk, City Walk, often translated as urban wanderlust, has been on fire on social media again lately. Because it’s not a new thing, it originated in Europe and has been popular in China for the past few years, emerging earlier in cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. After all, who can’t enjoy a walk? Before there was this word, I called myself street skaters. City Walk is a younger version of rolling down the street and walking around, but it’s a more cultured walk than a stroll. Walking around the old town of Guangzhou, when you are tired of strolling, you can just find a store to eat beef mince; in the park of Chengdu, you can watch the uncles and aunts playing mahjong, and you can buy a bowl of roasted brain flower on the side of the road; in Hangzhou, overlooking the scenic beauty of the West Lake at Chenghuangshan, and then have some snacks at the Dama Lane. …… This is City Walk.
“What is the function of the Weather Tower on the Bund” “How much do you know about the legend of each building” …… You’re walking along the road, the weather is fine, and there’s a knowledgeable guide alongside you to give you information. This is the City Walk, where you can “read” about a city with maps, historical photos and real-life scenarios, or chat with residents you meet, and find out stories you can’t find on the internet by digging into a certain street name. This is also called City Walk.
Therefore, the form of City Walks is not rigid. One can either walk at one’s own pace, between a starting point and a destination of interest, with no fixed route between the points, and meet people unexpectedly like opening a blind box. Or one walks a themed route systematically with a professional guide to learn about history, geography, people and customs.
Some people explore spontaneously and look for walks to hitch a ride, while others enroll in a group to follow a tour product. Ctrip and other platforms can be found in the search, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hangzhou, Kashgar and other places, travel agencies, has launched a half-day tour or one-day tour of City Walk. generally 10, 20 people in small groups, prices ranging from one to two hundred. High-speed trains and airplanes have long been the norm, and travel and mobility are commonplace. With two points of departure and one destination, walking is more rare. For City Walk, the process is an end in itself. In a way, City Walk should be de-Netflixed. What you focus on is no longer the tulips of the Wukang Building, but the smoky vegetable farms, tailor stores, old houses and sycamore paths, like the movie “Love Myth”, which passes through a lot of details and scenes of life. Yet often, one still needs guides and tips on which places best represent a city, which landscapes have hidden history behind them, and which stories must be heard. The users of Dianping and Xiaohongshu will give some recommended routes, listing which places are suitable for visiting, taking photos or eating and drinking, or just shredding like writing a diary to record a day with a sense of looseness. Currently, there are upwards of 340,000 notes on ‘City Walk’ on Little Red Book.
City Walks abroad have a much longer history, sa-based tour company, offers a variety of private tours by travel designers. Themes include hippie heritage, middle-classification, immigrant culture, urban agriculture, fair trade, sustainable fashion, and country biking, with tours ranging from 1.5 to 3 hours and limited to 15 people.There are quite a few fun and angular programs. Tours That Matter, an Amsterd
The tour designers are all connoisseurs and even have academic backgrounds in law, philosophy and human rights. In addition to the routes given, you can also customize a more personalized program, just decide on the theme and area, and the tour designer will help you design a specific route. This type of service has been established because in well-known cosmopolitan cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Florence and others, the attractions are not the only reason to support the tourism industry, but the longevity and diversity of the city itself is what makes it so special and different from other cities. The pedestrians coming and going, the little stores on the side of the road, the art galleries and museums not far away, already form a coherent, vivid and personalized travel picture, without the need to be exhausted between the disconnected places of interest.
Douban recently had a popular post – “Mom and Dad parted ways with me in Italy because they were unhappy with the Special Forces itinerary”.
The City Walk is a wonderful way for tourists to blend into the streets like locals and for locals to reacquaint themselves with their doorsteps. Get out and walk more often, there are always surprises in store.
As mentioned in “2023 Xiaohongshu Annual Life Trend: Commitment to Real Life”, the normalization of risk has made young people more aware of the importance of their surroundings and neighborhoods, and the popularity of City Walk seems to have reclaimed what anthropologist Xiang Biao calls the “disappeared neighborhood”. Because of the restricted travel radius, the trend of local travel, from camping to hiking, has intensified in the last three years. It’s not exactly a second best, as many popular cities suffer from ‘over-tourism’, and the three years since tourism hit the pause button have been a respite, giving municipalities a chance to rebuild tourism in a sustainable way.
The Czech capital, Prague, receives 9 million international tourists each year, making it the fourth most visited city in Europe after Paris, London and Rome. However, when most of the tourists flock to the old town, it is difficult for the locals to continue living in the same place. Alternatively, Czechs come to Prague for events such as concerts, but usually don’t stay overnight due to tourist crowds and rising prices.In 2020, Prague launched a series of incentives to entice Czechs to explore their capital city. In an interview with The Guardian, staff at Prague’s city tourist office noted:
Residents have been complaining that the city no longer belongs to them …… When locals are happy, tourists are happy. Similarly, Amsterdam plans to reduce the number of tourists overall this year and has launched a ‘Stay Away’ initiative since March this year to turn away visitors who come only for wild parties and cheap hotels.
Locals and visitors alike need a city that is rich and peaceful. Amsterdam wants to be known as a city of bars, clubs, and hangouts, but also as a city of world-renowned museums, galleries, and concert halls. Only by maintaining a good balance will anyone want to continue living in the city center 20 years from now. Slightly less popular, ‘Aboriginal tourism’ is also on the rise in some countries. Aboriginal people, the original settlers of an area, often hold on to and pass on the most indigenous and unique cultures.
In 2020, the Aboriginal Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC) launched a campaign called ‘Original Original’ that involved more than 630 Aboriginal communities. It was a dismal year for tourism, but it was also a year of revitalization. That summer, ITAC conducted a survey and found that 88% of Canadians wanted to embrace nature and rebalance their lives by taking an Aboriginal trip.
However, there was one obstacle to realizing these expectations: tourists wanted authentic Aboriginal experiences, but couldn’t tell which ones were real, so ITAC took on the role of a bridge, launching a certification mark in 2021, which is awarded to businesses that are at least 51% Aboriginal-owned and adhere to the values. Currently, 300 businesses have completed certification and many routes are already available: canoeing on Ontario’s Whitefish Lake, pitching a conical tent in Saskatchewan, exploring lava beds and alpine meadows in British Columbia. ……
What Aboriginal tourism should ideally look like is one that doesn’t treat Aboriginal life as a posed prop, but rather one that connects with Aboriginal communities, honors their culture, and truly benefits them economically. These customs and landscapes exist, but lack the opportunity to be seen and developed, just as the hutongs and old buildings are scattered around, but marginalized by the traffic and bright lights.
City Walk, aboriginal tourism, and locals-centered municipal renovation all embody a concept of sustainable development in which people, cities, and communities live in harmony, with rational development and planning of resources, which is meaningful to the entire tourism industry.
They are also a search for the essence of tourism. For tourism, ‘leaving’ is a norm, but it is not just about going away to places you have never seen before, it can also be about discovering different cityscapes in the environment where I was born and raised.
City Walk, which seems to be full of relaxation, cannot escape the “petty” side, and has even been called another Netflix activity and trendy item in addition to camping, Frisbee, and cooking tea around the stove.
If you want to take consumerism to the extreme, there’s already a formula for wearing it online: tops of Beginner’s Bird, bottoms of lululemon, feet of Salomon, wrists of Apple Watch, ears of AirPods, and MacBook Air in a tote bag. ……
The extremely exaggerated portraits reflect a paradox similar to the sense of relaxation: if you’re really happy with what you’re doing, where’s the need to think about what you’re wearing, how you’re wearing your makeup, what angle you’re taking photos from, what copy you’re writing for your circle of friends, and how hard you have to work to look like you’re just relaxing? The fact that you have to work hard to look effortless is once again validated.
A term often used in contrast to City Walk is the ‘Special Forces style tour’ that is so popular during May 1st. It’s a kind of ‘extreme challenge’ with a tight schedule, lots of sightseeing, and little money to spend. Wake up at two o’clock to see the sunrise, take the high-speed train overnight to catch up on sleep, walk 20,000 steps for a few days in a row, and visit eight attractions a day in a row. …… The Special Forces style of traveling in a pinch is certainly a walk in the park, but there is no other choice. In the face of limited vacation, unlimited things, had to arrange the route to the full. It’s not easy to embark on a journey, but FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) goes hand in hand with it. From City Walk’s petit bourgeois style to Special Forces’ extreme carding, travel is sometimes too labeled. Buying tickets and taking photos at the spots, we are sometimes just walking along the planned paths, looking for fixed spots to take photos.
Many scenic services are also hand-me-down, highly overlapping popular commodities. Bamboo milk tea is mass-produced and fleeting, “I miss you somewhere” signs are ubiquitous and tenacious, and no matter which scenic spot you walk down the food alley, there are basically cyclone potatoes and bombing squid. This will be fine, popular cities and scenic spots are often crowded people, after this line line, not to mention what experience, people have been numb. During the first of May, the country’s domestic tourism reached 274 million people. However, in April this year, DT Finance, a survey found that nearly half of the people do not intend to travel on May 1, 76.1% of the people were discouraged by the flow of people, 57.1% of the people were discouraged by the price of hotels and lodgings, air tickets. There are also 26.5% of people worried that traveling is too tiring, after all, after the vacation will have to adjust the rest.
There are many reasons not to go out and travel far, but travel can be very simple, seemingly strong sense of contrast between the special forces tourism and City Walk, are practicing the same thing: to break the daily order and blandness, so that the senses are exposed to deviate from the conventional sound, light and color.
When the human being who passes through the subway car, head down and eyes glued, returns to the street, he or she is actually practicing a state of non-everyday, but it also points to an aesthetic of the everyday, where the fireworks of the street are already moving enough. After all, not everything has to be a curiosity and photogenic.
“Walking, hiking and climbing mountains are all defiance against the ordinary. It doesn’t matter if you think of City Walk as an ordinary walk or a money-saving trip. Just go out and embrace nature.