Walking as Anarchiving: An Aesthetic Analysis of the “Window on the World” Tour: Embodying Necropolitics

Abstract

While traditional walking tours often erase the contributions and perspectives of minoritarian communities from the social fabric of cities, an emerging trend of alternative tours seeks to remedy this erasure with creative, immersive pedagogies. Examining Migrantour’s Window on the World tour as a paradigmatic case study, this essay explores alternative tours as site-specific performances of inclusive urban place-making. Recognizing that such tours face gaps in historical archives and the absence of material traces in the built environment, my research asks: how do the immersive pedagogies of alternative walking tours use creative performance tools to animate neglected minoritarian histories and perspectives?

Combining participant observation with qualitative semi-structured interviews, my inquiry examines the aesthetic dimensions of Migrantour’s tour of Milan’s Padua neighbourhood. Designed and led by immigrants, this tour highlights hidden migration histories and cultivates intercultural encounters by sharing personal stories of the contemporary lives of immigrant communities. In addition to creative storytelling, it encourages interactive social and sensory engagement, presenting audiences with archival images, offering them foreign foodstuffs, and inviting them into the worship space of the Muslim House of Culture.

This essay’s theoretical framework demonstrates how this alternative walking tour creatively engages with the fluidity and multiplicity concealed beneath the apparent fixity of place. Drawing on scholarship exploring walking as a practice of anarchiving that “attends to the undocumented, affective, and fragmented compositions that tell stories about a past that is not past but is present and an imagined future” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 14), I argue that Window on the World participates in the contested politics of site as palimpsest (Kaye, 2000; Kwon, 2002; Turner, 2004) in order to shape more inclusive urban futures. By investigating the largely overlooked aesthetic dimensions of alternative walking tours, this essay contributes to the intersection of performance, cultural heritage, and tourism studies.