For community leaders

Building a walk for your own neighborhood

A walk is a route through real places, ideally chosen by someone who lives there. We can compute where Neptune falls from anywhere; we cannot know that the corner it lands on is where the Sunday market sets up, or that the building behind it used to be the ice house. That's the part only you have!

What we're looking for from you

1. Choose the Sun — the object everything else is scaled from.
2. Place the stops, and write a line or two about why each one is there.
3. Pick the artist who makes the postcard. You know who's good locally.
4. Maybe spend a day walking it on camera with us, if you're up for it.

This whole site is a small independent project, so we won't be able to personally visit each and every city — but the goal is to capture a walking tour of the most interesting locations.

Start by laying it out

The builder takes about ten minutes, needs no account, and does all the math. Pick your Sun, set its size, and it shows you exactly where each planet lands — then you drag each stop to somewhere that's actually worth going.

Submitting a walk covers the mechanics: what makes a good Sun, the photos we ask for, what we turn down, and where we can publish today. Read that one for the rules. This page is about the judgement calls it can't make for you.

How far you can move a stop

The builder gives each planet a band you can drag it within.

Inside the band, always take the better place. If you're deciding between a "correct" point in an empty parking lot and a spot a hundred feet away outside a local bakery, pick the bakery. The point of the tolerance band is to give you the flexibility to make the walk enjoyable.

What makes a stop worth including

People will stand at each of these for a few minutes, take a photo, and read what you wrote. So the test isn't "is this a landmark" — it's would you stop here if you were showing a friend around.

• Places with a story attached. The mural and who painted it. The corner the parade turns. The building everyone still calls by the name of a shop that closed in 1998.
• Small businesses that are part of the place. The bakery three generations of one family have run. The record shop. The bar where the union used to meet.
• Things people walk past without seeing. A date stone, a boundary marker, an odd bit of infrastructure.
• Somewhere to sit, eat or shelter, especially on the long outer legs. The gap between Saturn and Uranus can be an hour, and little treats along the way make a long walk much more tolerable.
• Free and public, wherever possible. Most stops should cost nothing to stand at. Often a planet will land on something with a paid activity associated with it. That's fine as context, but the stop itself has to be reachable without a ticket.

Interfacing with businesses

Walks pass through the commercial world. If we're sending people to the front door of a bakery, it's reasonable to anticipate some sales. But there's a difference between pointing at a neighborhood staple and advertising a business.

The intent here is to share interesting places with people who might not otherwise visit them. If you're going to include a local business's frontage in a walk, it's best practice to give them a heads-up that they may have some people swinging by their storefront.

Writing the stop notes

Each stop carries a short note. This is the writing people actually read, standing there, having just walked a mile to reach it.

• Two or three sentences. Longer doesn't get read on a phone in the sun.
• Say the specific thing, not the general one. "The tiles inside are original 1912" beats "a historic building."
• Say what to look for. People are standing there wanting to be shown something.
• Write access notes where you saw them. "Step-free at this end", "the ramp is on the north side", "twelve steps up from the street and no alternative."

Choosing the artist

Where possible, we like to rely on community leaders to connect us with artists who represent the neighborhood. We're trying to find and curate art from local people, and locals have the best insight into who those are.

• Someone from the place. Not a rule, but it seems to be what works.
• Any medium. Painters, printmakers, illustrators, collage, photography, textile, tattoo artists, sign painters. It ends up as a 5×7 card, and that's the only constraint.
• Follower count doesn't matter for making the artwork. A muralist everyone locally can name beats a big account from elsewhere.

Send us a name and a portfolio link and we take it from there. We pay artists a fair wage up front and work from a mutually agreed contract; the brief and the money are between us and them, so you're not managing anybody. The full brief is at the artist guidelines. One thing to flag when you recommend someone: we don't accept work made with generative AI, at all — the policy is here.

Filming day

Some walks get a video: we walk the route together, talking about the places you chose. It's the main way anyone finds out this exists.

If that interests you, mention it and we can start the conversation. If you've got your own video resources and want to shoot a version yourself, reach out too and we'll make sure we're aligned on what we're looking for.

Where the money goes

Once a walk has covered what it cost to make, a share of what's left goes back into the community it represents — to a local organization chosen with you and the artist, not by us. The library on the route, the school whose mural is at Mars, the group you already work with.

Getting started

Draw the walk. Submit it with a contact address and we'll write back promptly.

Or write to us first if you'd rather talk it through before spending an afternoon on it. Both are fine.