On Sidewalks
The discreet arteries of a vibrant city
Today’s piece is a guest piece from Anandi Mishra, a writer and communications profession who works in the space between urbanism and the environment/sustainability. Anandi writes a blog, Street Haunting, about everyday urbanism through sustainability, lived experiences and popculture. Her writing, like mine, is a fun combination of personal, whimsical, observational, and analytical. I’m happy to publish her in this space. Check out her personal publication and subscribe to her!
Sometimes I wonder if I’d be a different person if I had grown up in a city with better walking infrastructure.
“It’s never been more fashionable to write about walking in cities. Books on psychogeography have become a cottage industry, their authors held up as philosophers of modernity,” writes Lauren Elkin in her 2016 book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Since then much ado has been made about walking cities, and I’ve myself contributed a fair share of essays on the subject. Yet, I feel one specific aspect of walking gets ignored: essential walking infrastructure, without which these ruminative, necessary, literary walks would be impossible. The sidewalk.
Over the years I’ve pursued the public and private pleasures of ambling through cities, and it remains my go-to mode for daily commute. But oftentimes I feel that we don’t pay as much heed to the sidewalk as is necessary. Coming from Delhi, a city that’s designed for cars, I’ve negotiated the sheer lack of pedestrian infrastructure for so long. Since childhood, I’ve had to measure my footsteps, often having to walk directly on the streets, as moving vehicles criss-cross. These were not walks taken for pleasure, but to get groceries, reach school, or arrive at a friend’s place. On the pleasure-pain scale during these outings, the pain undoubtedly outweighed the pleasure.
But after living in cities in the UK, Germany and now, Sweden, I find my walks animated, charged. While out on my two feet, I’m achingly alive to the din and hum of the city, the crowd that passes by, as I walk. While on these aimless solitary walks, I’ve been pursuing the pleasure that was denied to me in my home country. It wasn’t until recently when I saw this Urban Mobility Explained rhapsodic video, beautifully titled The city stops without me, that I realised that it was these very sidewalks which made my walks magical. In their absence, I did not know this pleasure, and now in their presence, there’s no other way to walk but by enjoying each step after another.
The video quotes from Trottoirs! by Isabelle Baraud-Serfaty (French).
“I’ve become an interface between the physical and digital worlds.
I make the city function.
Without me, no markets, no shop windows, no terraces.
Beneath my surface, water, fibre optics and electricity flow.
I connect the visible to the invisible. I am the discreet artery of a vibrant city.
And the more crowded I become, the more contested I am.
Everyone wants their place. I am becoming a space for all innovations, a testing ground.”
My feet on the asphalt, grubby with leftover winter gravel, dotted with leaves, broken twigs and leftover candy wrappers – the sidewalk becomes my stage. It gives me a platform to perform this stroll before an imagined audience. Aided by the sidewalk, I become the cynosure of all attention, my tread nothing less than the rampwalk of Bhavitha Mandava for Chanel in the New York city subway.
It’s surprising even to me that it’s taken me this long to arrive at this marker of movement. Even as the sidewalk has been around all this while, I’ve somehow paid more attention to other, larger signifiers of comfort rather than this immediate, pulsing element.
On drunken nights after a yacht party last summer, my husband and I deboarded the tram around 2am, the world cloudy and shaking from our eyes. It was the sidewalk, even if dimly lit, that shone the direction home. On our way we met the friendly neighbourhood cat, said high hellos to blooming daffodils and passed by a cyclist trying to fix his chain. The sidewalk has always been there, like a friend you take for granted, a meaningful sustaining, nurturing relationship.
The sidewalk near the tram station closest to my house is a wider patch where in spring, city officials dutifully scrub out a neat section for a garden. Manicured, neat, and cycling-friendly, the sidewalk comes with three park benches where I’ve seen many bedraggled workers sit with their lunches, older folks soak in the sun, and parents play with their children. It’s also the pitstop where, mid-run, I pause to check my stats on the watch, or just catch a breath, or just linger aimlessly.
In the afternoon sometimes when I step out for a quick dash to the grocery store, it’s just the gravel underneath my shoes, me and the running companionship of the sidewalk. After being headphoned-in for hours at a stretch, when I step out I prefer to listen to the crunch of the gravel and see the running poetry in the fluttering leaves, the rolling pebbles, the winding turns.
These ubiquitous sidewalks go by different names: footpath in India, pavement in the UK, gehweg in German, trottoir in French, trottoar in Swedish. One of my earliest memories when I moved to Gothenburg in the summer of 2024 was seeing schoolchildren near my house cross roads without even looking up from their phones. A culture shock? As screen-addled as we are, the fact that pedestrians – school children included – can simply assume that cars WILL stop at the red light and no impatient cruiser would suddenly jump the light, felt truly alien to me. I’d never be one of those, it’s sheer audacity, I mumbled to myself.
But 21 months later, here I am. I cross junctions with practised nonchalance and ease of a Scandinavian walker – entitled, informed and confident in my strides. I wonder how this habit will shapeshift during my annual trip back home to Delhi where one can never be safe on the streets unless they’re in a car (the irony!).
As public seating morphs and disappears in parts of the world, the sidewalk might be our last chance at an entirely free-of-cost component of public infrastructure. And if the sidewalk has so far been untrammeled by the public administration, it’s because it’s as essential to our cities as water or air. Even the oldest, dilapidated, withering sidewalks have something to offer for every day use.
Whether decked with tiles, or littered with toffee wrappers, these sidewalks transport us even before we board our choice of mode of commute. Sometimes after a bad, tiring, long day, an undecided walk on the sidewalk often comforts me. They are not just symbols of connectedness, they literally make connections. And while they might look like an everyday feature in our lives, it’s only in their absence or misuse that we realise their importance.
It’s April here in Gothenburg and there are still fewer people on the streets and sidewalks. But come May and people will flock to the sidewalks to evidence what Vivian Gornick called “human expressiveness”. I’ll close this off with a blurb from Jane Jacobs who coined the oft used term “sidewalk ballet”.
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers.
Related Reading:
Why Would Anyone Live Like That?
Are Disorder And Freedom Two Sides Of The Same Coin?