“Walking is Political” says Will Self

Will Self, again (see post on 29.3.12), this time in his guise as professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University. A mite too long to be a Quote of the Week, but worth reproducing here, is an extract from an edited version of his inaugural lecture, subheaded by the Guardian as being about the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control.
“….deprived of mechanised means of locomotion – the car, the bus, the train - and without the aid of technology, the majority of urbanites, who constitute the vast majority of Britons, neither know where they are, nor are capable of getting somewhere else under their own power…..to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.”