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Workshop on Urban Hitchhiking
October 8 @ 09:00 - 12:00
We would like to inform you about an upcoming event organised by the faculty of Spatial Sciences on a very creative practice!
Academic Workshop: Urban Hitchhiking: Thinking-With the City
Time: 8 October 2026, 9:00-12:00
Location: Room 125, FFaculty of Religion, Culture and Society, Oude Boteringestraat 38
Workshop Facilitator: Lauri Jäntti (Visiting PhD Researcher, University of Helsinki, Department of Geography)
Instruction:
The score is fairly simple: first, take a sign that says, “May I walk with you for a while?” Then place yourself amidst the ebb and flow of urban life along a busy pedestrian route, raise your thumb, and seek eye contact with random passers-by. Wait until someone approaches you, and then let the journey begin.
In this workshop, we will experiment with urban hitchhiking as an artistic proposal for cultivating an openness to unexpected encounters in the city. Unlike conventional hitchhiking, the aim is not to reach a particular destination but to share a moment with a stranger and, however briefly, become part of the trajectory of their everyday movement through urban space. Where the encounter will lead, how long it will last, and what might emerge from it remain deliberately unknown. The workshop invites participants to cultivate an openness towards others, the city, and the unfolding of the encounter itself.
The workshop begins with a short theoretical attunement drawing on non-representational geographic thinking and introducing urban hitchhiking as a practice of thinking-with the city. From this perspective, thinking is understood not as something that takes place solely within the individual but as a profoundly relational, embodied, and spatial process emerging through affective encounters with the world. By opening oneself to unexpected encounters, urban hitchhiking becomes an opportunity to explore how both the city and the self can unfold as a site of experimentation, wonder, and the questioning of the already known, making space for difference and for thinking the world anew.