Streaming My City

I try to get back into regular walks. Their good for my health (physical, mental, and emotional). And they are, in lack of a better word, productive. Walks let me work through things, be it emotional tensions or intelectual problems.

There is a small river running through my city Biel/Bienne¹, the Suze². It’s not much, and it has been pretty heavily worked on. We live near a river lock, where two even smaller streams branch of. I decided to walk the right-hand stream, when facing the lake towards which the Suze flows, until where it unites with the Suze again. From there it’s just a few steps until the lake, where I spontaneously decided to take the left-hand stream back home. The whole thing became a bit longer then anticipated but it was really nice and I got a good feeling for the streams and the city.

It’s really fascinating to observe how the streams interact with the city and vice versa. How buildings, streets and bridges adapt, where the streams are closed off, or where there are little windows to peek into the underground water system. I know a few places where you can simply lift a piece of metal and see the stream under the sidewalk.

I quickly redrew the walk on the swisstopo map website³ and compared it with a historic map, which was also nice to see. Especially since the river system already seems to be in place, but slightly differently.

Contemporary Map

Historic Map (1864)

Suze and Beavers

This is not the first time I’ve been interested in this river system. I made a audiovisual work in 2023 as part of an anthropology course on multimodal ethnography with non-humans. I figured that I didn’t upload the video and added it today to Exploring Human and More-than-Human Relationships.