Walking is the locomotion between two places. Like eating or breathing, walking is a universal act to which humans have given special but different meanings over the course of time. For ancient philosophers, walking was a way of thinking. In the Middle Ages it was an expression of spirituality and in modern times walking is closely associated with street protest. In the 1980s, this developed into strollology – the art and science of walking.

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: