Guided walking tours, a practice of place : an exercise in thick comparison between Berlin and New Delhi

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Guided walking tours are peculiar forms of urban walking that have an intentional and designed performative nature, which is accomplished through the engagement of a ‘guide’ and ‘participants’. The narrative structure of the walking tours connects different tourist sites, heritage sites, and sites of memorials together and employs diverse practices of narration, historical imagination, and walkability as an epistemic practice to produce knowledge. This predesigned narrative material, however, is not directly absorbed as knowledge but is used by participants for their own process of sense and meaning-making that occurs together with walking.

With the epistemic focus on walking, the thesis investigates the under-studied sense-making processes from the members' perspective. This is achieved by an ethnographic participant observation study of walking tours in the cities of Delhi and Berlin. The thesis addresses a wider objective through a methodological and reflexive practice of thick comparison within urban ethnography to develop and create a praxeological mode to understand how comparison within transnational research can be initiated and practiced beyond pre-defined quantified parameters. The idea is to keep practices at the center and, through thick comparison, produce comparability as opposed to following and adding to the already existing normative and hegemonic national-based epistemologies.

The thesis, with a post-colonial approach, attempts to show how the comparison between Delhi and Berlin can reveal urban nuances and practices that add to a thicker and more diverse understanding of urban theories and concepts while rendering them ever-evolving. In doing so, the project makes a case for thick comparison as a mode of research expanding it beyond a method and engages with the post-colonial discourse through empirically praxeologising the object of research. The central notion of my dissertation is that sense-making and knowledge production during walking are always indexical, temporal, performative, and situated in place and, therefore, can be best studied through the analytical concept of practicing place.