Four reviews: walking in cities

The book argues persuasively that walking is not simply movement at a slower speed but a way of producing public knowledge. Its best chapters follow schoolchildren mapping dangerous crossings and delivery workers describing unofficial routes between buildings. I was less convinced by the author’s suspicion of benches and signs, which she sometimes treats as attempts to discipline wandering.

Clear information and places to rest can expand who is able to explore. The political question is not whether a city directs movement, since every pavement does, but whether its directions are visible and open to challenge. Her examples show that a sign can be enabling when it explains an option and restrictive when it presents one route as though no alternative use existed.

Her strongest argument is that direction becomes legitimate when users can understand its purpose and contest the assumptions on which the route depends.

This is an elegant book, though it romanticises the unplanned encounter. The author repeatedly contrasts walking with efficient transport, as if buses and lifts merely remove contact with the city. For many disabled or exhausted residents, such systems make participation possible.

The interviews partly correct the argument: several people describe combining short walks with mobility aids or public transport. I wish the author had allowed these mixed journeys to reshape the book’s central image instead of treating them as exceptions to the independent pedestrian. The language of independence is especially misleading when a route is theoretically walkable but usable only by someone with unlimited time, energy and confidence.

The mixed journeys in the interviews show mobility as assembled from supports, not as a moral scale running from dependent to independent movement.

The historical material is excellent. We learn how shopping arcades, factory gates and public parks changed not only where people walked but who could appear respectable while doing so. The contemporary chapters, however, rely too heavily on individual stories.

A resident’s inventive shortcut may be memorable without telling us whether the route is safe, legal or available to others. The author wants planning to learn from everyday practice, but she offers little guidance on how anecdote should be tested before becoming policy. The book would benefit from comparing stories with counts, observations and access audits, not to discredit experience but to learn when it can support general change.

Testing anecdote would strengthen instead of silence it by identifying when an inventive local practice exposes a repeated structural problem.

What distinguishes the book is its attention to maintenance. A path is not created once; drains block, tree roots lift surfaces and temporary barriers become permanent habits. The author shows that grand pedestrian strategies often fail through small neglected repairs.

Her criticism of planners is occasionally unfair, because budgets and ownership are fragmented, yet the emphasis is valuable. Walking policy is usually presented through new projects, while the ordinary labour that keeps a route usable remains invisible until it stops. Maintenance also determines whether an experimental route remains an option after the publicity surrounding its opening has ended.

The chapter on maintenance demonstrates that accessibility is temporal: a route available at opening can vanish through a sequence of minor neglected failures.