In the face of divisive and hateful rhetoric, there has been a lot of discussion about the terrible condition of our cities. We often point to our damaged roads and ask why issues of infrastructure do not constitute our political discourse. The politics of our society and the architecture of our cities, however, are not different. They construct each other, and to understand this relationship, we need to walk more.Walking has always been more than a way of getting from one place to another. It is how bodies write themselves into the city’s script. The architecture of our streets is a quiet but decisive act of exclusion. Due to a lack of footpaths, when those who cannot afford cars are pushed into traffic, the city effectively declares that their presence is expendable.AdvertisementOn paper, our bureaucratic planning speaks this lingo. Policy documents such as the 2041 Delhi Master Plan speak fluently of walkable neighbourhoods, continuous footpaths and shaded streets that prioritise pedestrians. In this scripted future, Delhi is supposed to become a compact, pedestrian-friendly metropolis. But walking is still treated as an afterthought, and the footpath, as a leftover strip squeezed in once the width for cars has been secured. When walking is described as “last-mile connectivity” rather than the city’s ethical value, the pedestrian is downgraded from a citizen to a logistical problem.Against this state apathy, walking becomes an act that is both ordinary and radical. For the domestic worker walking from a bus stop to a gated colony, the student cutting across neighbourhoods to reach a metro station, and the street vendor doing a daily circuit, walking is not a lifestyle choice but a negotiation with risk and humiliation. Their walks urge us to acknowledge that the city must accommodate bodies that move at human speed.Writers and thinkers have long understood the importance of walking. Virginia Woolf wrote of the happiness she found in walking as a way of having “space to spread the mind out in”, turning errands into excuses to wander London. Walter Benjamin turned the figure of the flaneur into a theorist of the street — a slow-moving observer whose idle walking made the city legible and resisted the tempos of capitalism. Walking is, then, not just movement but a way of thinking — a way of allowing surfaces, crowds, and detritus to become philosophical material.AdvertisementBut this classical flânerie depends on the privilege of safety and anonymity. Garnette Cadogan, in Walking While Black, writes of how every stroll in American cities demands self-monitoring: No sudden movements, careful clothing, routes adjusted to avoid suspicion. For criminalised communities, the sidewalk can turn, at any moment, into a stage of racial profiling. The pavement is an intimate teacher and also a dangerous place. James Baldwin asked his readers to walk through Harlem, insisting that the realities of race, poverty, and abandonment are legible if one slows down and sees what the street is saying about society. Walking, then, offers deep knowledge of the city in exposing one to its most violent hierarchies.B R Ambedkar showed us that walking is a necessary transgression. His politics is full of charged walks: Processions to sites of exclusion like the Mahad tank, marches to assert Dalit access to public space, and the insistence that those historically confined to the village’s margins must enter its centres. Ambedkar’s challenge to caste was spatial as much as legal. It demanded that those treated as untouchable be able to walk where they chose and inhabit streets and institutions that had long been policed against them. M K Gandhi’s Salt March stretched a walk into a line of argument against imperial rule, transforming rural roads into a stage on which the colonised claimed moral authority with every step. Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights marches made “we cannot walk alone” both a warning and a promise. The street is, then, the forum of politics and walking is political speech.The width of a sidewalk is, therefore, an ethical measure. The pavement is the narrowest strip of public space — used by the least powerful. The walking body is the most fragile and vulnerable thing on the road. It is unarmored by metal or wealth, and exposed to speed, exhaust, and contempt. A society that cannot spare two honest metres of unbroken space for that body is telling you something fundamental about its morality. The width and comfort of a footpath reveal how much room our cities make for those who have no choice but to walk.The sidewalk is also where social empathy and political consciousness are practised. To walk is to move at the same level as everyone else — shoulder to shoulder, not bumper to bumper; to experience the city together; to be forced into small acts of adjustment like slowing down for an older person. These micro-negotiations of space train a kind of everyday ethics — a habit of noticing other people’s vulnerabilities and calibrating oneself accordingly. The width of the footpath, then, is also the width of public imagination. The more space we share with the most vulnerable, the more we can see their struggles as our concern and not just private misfortune, or worse, laziness. Conversely, when the sidewalk is squeezed to a sliver by driveways, empathy is designed out of the street.most readThe failure of Indian cities in this context is not simply technical, but moral. Footpaths are not decorative edges but the backbone of urban democracy. To walk is to demand continuous, safe, shaded sidewalks as non-negotiable public ground, to recognise that walking is not just the “last mile” but our first right.The politics of footpaths is the politics of citizenship. It decides who moves in fear, and whose comfort the state quietly prioritises in our street’s architecture. Until uninterrupted footpaths are visible underfoot and not just in master plans, the walkers of Indian cities will remain its most neglected citizens. The politics of exclusion, neglect and hate, hence, is not separate from how our cities are built. And our cities can also create the politics that excludes, neglects and hates. In the new year, then, to promote a politics of empathy and co-existence, and to reframe political discourse, start walking more.Zuberi is a doctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology