Stuart Dybek’s short story cycle The Coast of Chicago (1990) problematizes city walking in the age of deindustrialization, as his young underclass characters traverse Chicago’s decaying streets and neighborhoods. Depicting the South Side district of Chicago, Dybek presents the city simultaneously in the grip of nature and in the ruins of the city’s industrial past. Dybek’s Chicago is a vulnerable city that is affected by job insecurity, unemployment, and poor housing, and whose immigrant residents are scarred by their lived and transmitted memories. Attempting to represent and symbolically resolve the alienating consequences of deindustrialization and urban renewal, Dybek creates a fragmented yet interconnected sequence of short stories and vignettes in which pedestrians reconnect the palimpsestic layers of urban life in Chicago. In this sense, the author’s imagination of the city affords proliferating networks, interconnecting nodes and meandering lines, and consequently prioritizes liminal structures and transit spaces such as viaducts, streets and railways. In The Coast of Chicago, walking in the city is an act of aimless strolling by the mobile members of disintegrating urban communities, and thus may also be thought to represent the shifting flows of capital that have been transforming the district. However, Dybek treats walking as a call for social action by sporadically disturbing the pedestrians’ movements for voicing the urban youth’s “right to the city” in Lefebvre’s words, thereby resisting the seemingly inevitable and unidirectional change imposed by economic and political power. Drawing from new formalist, spatial and urban theories, this presentation will aim to scrutinize the creative and participatory potentials of city walking in Dybek’s fiction.