 Welcome to my talk on walking and digital participatory methods in host Olympic cities. I've been studying how hosting and staging the Olympics and other sporting and cultural events from marathons to food festivals, reconfigure urban space and transform interactions and the behavior of people, mostly residents, tourists, small businesses across these particular spaces. And to do this I have used a lot of different methodologies, most recently walking and digital methods to analyze these relationships, interpret why they occur in the way they do and activate new problems and insights by being present real-time in local settings. In this video I will outline what walking methods are, how one can embed walking methods as a data collection tool and why they can be valuable for those seeking to understand socio-spatial interactions primarily but not exclusively to urban environments, particularly to extreme environments that we'll be talking about. So this three-part video reflects a recent research article my co-author Professor David McGilvery at the University of West of Scotland and I wrote for the journal Tourism Geographies published in April 2019 in a special issue entitled critical and disruptive methodologies and we're going to provide the paper link below. So in part one I'm going to briefly outline the theory and the detail of walking methods. In part two I will illustrate the theory and practice by using a case study and the specific urban environment of the Rio 2016 Olympics with some reflections on London 2012 but also my recent work in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics. And in part three the final part I will reflect on the limitations of this approach generally and specifically with regards to the Olympic cities as an extreme case or extreme environment that serves as a container for complex forms of interaction and organisation. I'll then close part three by crystallising how David and I brought this together in a research project and coupled it with the digital research dissemination strategy. We called the overall approach the Rio zones approach. So part one I'm going to cover the specific physical embodied methods and how these afford the collection of various different data sets, real-time walking observation, photo, video content and field notes. And really talk about how these methods can produce a deeper disruptive interrogation of the socio and spatial processes and implications of organising in these extreme environments. For example a host Olympic city. So by doing so we hope to help create new lines of inquiry and various different data sets that either can be used on their own by a small research team or as part of wider data triangulation efforts with alongside survey work interviewing and stuff like that. So firstly a bit of background and detail of walking methods. Walking methods have been popularised in recent years across a variety of disciplines and fields including anthropology, human geography, sociology and applied in the context of tourism. Walking can provide access to entangled relationships that exist between humans, non-humans, natural and social environments according to Engold of a Gunst 2008. Walking enables observation of course, experience, sense-making of various phenomena and according to Spring Gay and Truman 2017 it's useful for activating problems and concepts in the midst of an event. So a key principle and strand of walking methods focus towards walking is a means of theorising the world through the consideration of everyday pedestrian practices of others. Urban environments are complex environments rich in data and can by walking and associated activities like riding bikes, being in the back of a taxi or other modes of public and private transport. Increasingly, novel mobile methods are being used to generate corporeal, sensual and effective matters. Depending on the temporal frame, mobile methods can enable the observation of issues unfolding at a street level if only for a short amount of time and they include sensory dimensions. These are key as the city is increasingly viewed as a place where heightened collective sensory experiences are managed and curated, particularly with the proliferation of events as a policy tool. A key principle outcome of events as an urban stage that can be modified at will through light, sound or other stimuli and identifying such dynamics key in helping to unpack the systematic description of events, behaviours and artefacts in the social setting chosen for study. So there's also different types of data that you can collect through walking. Of course, observation, participant observation sets. You've got photography, videography that can be geotagged and tagged to the particular time that it's taken place. You can collect lots of field notes and narration, audio narration in the field itself. You can conduct interviews, Vox pops with people in the particular space that you're looking at and you can micro blog. You can go on Twitter, you can share insights and have that dialogue between those that might be interested in your research. In part two, I'll provide specific examples of how all those different types of data have been embedded within this Olympic city context in part two. And the Olympics and other major and mega events like the FIFA World Cup bring significant change to urban locations over a long period of time and greatly impacts the socio-spatial processes, interactions in everyday lives and livelihoods of those that live in and around these hosting environments affected. They are fertile ground for collecting data and for activating social problems in the field. So this is the end of the first part and then we'll go on to part two to continue this three part video series on walking and participatory digital methods. For more theory, references and resources, these will be shared alongside the video.