Walking is the act of moving between two places. Like eating or breathing, walking is a universal act that fundamentally shapes human-environment relationships, while at the same time being contingent on skill, fitness, space, time, or season. Through walking, people can experience themselves as part of a changing environment. A historical perspective reveals that mobility and space are subject to change, both together and individually.

Walking Archive is a research and teaching project at the intersection of environmental history and environmental humanities that experiments with walking as a method as well as with digital forms of representation, collects data, and evaluates it qualitatively. The resulting digital walks created by students situate global environmental issues within local spaces in and around Augsburg.

In the following, you can find a selection.

As part of a collaboration with the Augsburg Fuggerei, the interdisciplinary seminar "Forest Spirits and Climate Change. Ethical and Historical Perspectives on Human-Forest Relationships" ( Prof. Schlögl-Flierl, Environmental Ethics, and Prof. Müller, Environmental History) brought students from the University of Augsburg to the Fuggerei forest in the summer semester of 2025. During a forest walk, students, faculty, and forestry staff discussed issues of sustainability, conflicts of use, and changing ideas about the forest as a place of use and recreation. At the end of the seminar, the participants also embarked on their own forest walks. You can see some of them here:

In the summer term of 2024, students looked at walking as a method in environmental history: How do we perceive our environment as we walk past? How does the nature of the ground influence this experience? What role playse speed or limited mobility? And how has the walking experience changed over time?

The project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Simone Müller and Prof. Dr. Stefan Lindl. The results were ArcGIS supported walks around the university campus, the city forest and the so-called Red Gate, which used to be Augsburg’s southernmost city gate in the Middle Ages. You can see and hear five of these walks in German here: