Cities are often defined by their landmarks, speed and noise. But walking through places without a plan revealed something for me: it’s not that much about where you go but more about how you experience it.
I come from São Paulo, a city that rarely pauses long enough to be observed. Growing up there means learning to navigate the urgency of traffic, crowds, and time. For years, I assumed that was the intrinsic condition of urban life: speed and chaos as identity.
Travel unsettled that certainty.
In Cork, the pace softens. Cappadocia space opened into something almost surreal. And yet, in cities like Berlin, Dublin, or London, I encountered something more complex: different intensities, but a strangely familiar emotional logic. Not recognition of place, exactly, but recognition of feeling.
What happened is that I started paying attention to how we move through them, instead of how they are similar or not to each other.
This perspective also connects to broader questions like. How do we represent cities beyond their iconic landmarks? What it means to document urban life through cities can be “just as psychologically restorative” as nature, precisely because of the unexpected encounters and details that emerge along the way. As said by Anita Chaudhuri in this article for The Guardian.
Similarly, readers writing for the same outlet describe wandering as a way to uncover “layers of history” and everyday life otherwise overlooked.
Other publications echo this shift. Urban life can be framed through atmosphere and lived experience rather than spectacle. Even traditional travel platforms like Time Out or Lonely Planet, once centred in must-see lists, have increasingly adapted to more experiential forms of storytelling.
This clip captures what I am trying to say here. Less about must-see and more about feeling a place through its streets, people, and daily rhythm. Not all of us can afford longer stays, but even in 3 or 4 days, it’s possible to move at the city’s pace instead of an itinerary.
Wandering without a plan becomes a method of seeing. It resists the logic of following routes, rankings, and highlights, and gives privilege to attention. A turn down the “wrong” street, A pause at an unremarkable corner, a moment of just looking. Being present.
This video is a collage of cities I’ve visited in the last year. Not exactly as destinations, but as lived experiences, and movement, attention and everyday encounters.
What stays is not a catalogue of destinations, but impressions of it. Cities begin to blur somehow. Not into sameness, but into continuity. Different rhythms, scales, and sounds!
Have you ever noticed how walking down a busy street can sound completely different from one city to another? How does the soundscape of Istanbul not feel like anywhere else in the world? Or what is it like to walk through Moore Street in Dublin City Center, with the voice of local traders blending with a zillion other accents from across the globe?
In that sense, moving through cities without a plan is not just a way of traveling. It is a way of reading them.
