If you want to understand a city, ignore the brochures and look at its pavements. Ten minutes in the company of someone pushing a pram, using a wheelchair or carrying heavy shopping will tell you more about a city's priorities than any official report.
Last month I tried a small experiment. I walked the one-kilometre route from my home to the local health centre alongside an elderly neighbour who finds walking difficult. Over that short distance we were forced off the pavement nine times. Sometimes it was a car parked with two wheels on the kerb, sometimes a shop display spilling across the path, sometimes a lamppost planted squarely in the middle. At the end, my neighbour said she felt less tired than unwelcome.
The pavement is not leftover space
For decades, planning made a basic mistake: draw the road first, then hand whatever narrow strip remains to pedestrians. The pavement was treated not as the centre of the design but as its remainder. Yet everyone in a city is a pedestrian at some point in the day. The driver stepping out of the car, the student walking to the bus stop, the pensioner heading to the shops.
A city is as civilised as its slowest walker finds it.
The fixes are not grand. Consistent kerb heights, proper ramps at every corner, poles and signs moved out of the walking line: these are obvious first steps. Steady, predictable enforcement against obstruction matters just as much. What is needed is not a one-week campaign but a system that works every single day.
Some cities are acting boldly. Wider pavements and lower speeds around schools, market streets closed to traffic at set hours, neighbourhood routes lined with benches and shade trees. What these examples share is that they make walking a pleasure rather than an ordeal.
I understand the worries of shopkeepers. A customer who cannot park outside looks, at first glance, like a lost sale. But observations from many places suggest that people linger longer and return more often on streets built for walking. Pedestrians look in windows. Passing cars do not.
The pavement is the most democratic space a city has. It asks for no licence and no ticket. Reclaiming it is the simplest and cheapest way to rebuild a city for everyone who lives there.