Designing Safer Pedestrian Walkways

India’s Supreme Court (SC) declared the ‘right to walk’ on safe demarcated footpaths as a fundamental right as it highlighted the absence of footpaths or pedestrian crossings.(1) 
The background context was the death of a five-year-old who left home around 9 a.m. with his father and was run over by a tanker. A pertinent question for a pedestrian on Indian roads would be: ‘What if the timing of the event was 9 pm?’ Would there be added safety concerns? Can we imagine a pedestrian walkway that remains safer across time and space?

The answer is much more complicated. It sits at the cross-section of urban planning that determines the State’s intended land use and contradictions within; spatial logics that determine how citizens make sense of those rules and how they access a city’s private and public spaces; and locating the significance of pedestrian walkways in Indian cities. In this article, I probe policy attributes that could be useful for a national design on pedestrian walkways from a property and urban citizenship perspective. I argue that counter spatial logics of movement employed by commuters and pedestrians, who negotiate city’s urban planning to access public spaces in Indian cities, are key to realising the fundamental right to walk.

Spatial demarcations, propertied spaces and class-gendered walkability

In an earlier case, the petitioner had estimated that “90% of the problem of deaths due to road accidents is the result of a lack of strict enforcement of safety rules on roads and strict punishment for those who do not obey rules.”(2)  While emphasising the need to prioritise walkways, the apex court remarked:

“It is not at all difficult to imagine how a wide, well-demarcated and uninterrupted footpath can change the beauty of and equitable access to our cities and towns – this could truly be transformative of our urban and rural living. In reality, how much does it take to create a well-demarcated footpath wherever a road exists? All that the fundamental right to walk demands is a comfortable space for an easy and carefree walk. Should this not be the minimum of the minimum duty that a municipal authority owes to the citizens?” (3)

The judgement is a welcome decision to guarantee constitutional protection towards realising the right to walk freely on Indian walkways. However, it is far-fetched to be realised in practice in cities of the Global South. The question here is: which pedestrian? Who counts as one? And where do they reside? The invocation of obedience around rule-following and “well-demarcated and uninterrupted footpath” in the two cases above is a maxim of safety for any city and citizen, but I argue that it caters mostly to property owners of a city. A prime example of well demarcated spaces are self-regulating gated communities. Property owners not only govern their internal residence affairs but also what happens in their vicinity. A society’s association could get its members to sign a petition against street vendors outside or non-humans (stray dogs) to be removed and present it to the respective municipality. The growing influence of propertied class, particularly Resident Welfare Associations in how a city-space comes to be governed is discussed in an earlier co-authored piece.(4)

As Indian cities are expanding, safer walkways cater mostly to propertied citizens whose places of residence provide well-defined mono-rational (singular) land use.(5)  These gated spaces and neighbourhoods provide a tight security perception with CCTV surveillance. There is a class distinction to it as well. For the non-propertied urban citizens, walkability is not only gendered but comes with a day and night element of safety attached to it. It applies to who gets a right to walk in solidarity against a common cause. 
 
In 2024, when a solidarity march was held on women’s safety after the rape-murder of a doctor in Kolkata, women from Hiranandani – a posh neighborhood in Powai, Mumbai – had gathered for a ‘Reclaim the Night’ protest. Women from Jai Bhim Nagar, who had been engaged in an anti-eviction struggle from Hiranandani as their homes were demolished, were denied participation in the solidarity march. Women’s safety was a common factor for the Jai Bhim Nagar women as they too were surviving the ‘pitch dark night’ with no street lights.(6).  In light of the recent gangrape in Delhi, the question on public space as well as walkability has shifted. In particular, it is to locate dark spots along walkable spaces to ensure safety and dignity for women.(7)   Thus, the framing of road/pedestrian safety as an outcome through clear demarcations and equitable access to cities requires rethinking a national policy on pedestrian safety that reconciles the class divide.

State’s planning logic and counter spatial logics of movement

The city is a continuous project in the making with extension of a legal ownership logic. Spatial contestations and counter logics to State planning constitute its ground realities. Though well-planned city walkways promise a walkable city in design, the spatial realities of global South cities depict a different scenario where planned spaces contradict their own logic. Thus, upgradation of material infrastructure or stringent laws, without attending to spatial logics pedestrians employ to navigate city spaces are one of the key reasons for lack of safer pathways.

Walkability has to get past the accessibility criteria. There is a substantial body of urban literature on Southern urbanisms that highlights the manifestations of urban informality in cities of the Global South. It demonstrates the simultaneous tensions between planning, property regimes and law. In urban practice, the literature underscores the disconnect between that State’s theoretical designation of planning, the contradictions within it, and how citizens negotiate it. An often-cited expression in thinking through the question of urban citizenship implying equitable access to quality public services and infrastructure for non-propertied citizens is Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city concept. In cities of the Global South, the expression needs much more deliberation through the idea of land uses and urban informality as the State may contradict its own planning logic creating unintended exclusion.

One such example is that of Bhan’s (2019) work on Southern practice.(8).  Bhan highlights the construction of mohalla clinics that ensure free health services to citizens in Delhi by the then ruling AAP government. Bhan invokes the State’s self-contradictory logic of urban planning as the clinics were built on designated pedestrian walkways. This is not the only instance in which the State contradicts its own designated logic of urban planning. Take for example Biswas’ invocation of a commonly invoked expression by researchers: ‘captive pedestrians’. It denotes those are solely dependent on walking due to unaffordability. Women particularly are dependent on walking.(9)

The use of captive pedestrians could also be extended to ongoing construction in the city that dislodges the walking pathway (Image 1); and to long-forgotten dysfunctional walkways in a city to make a case for their restoration. For instance, a walkway connecting Domlur and Indiranagar in Bengaluru was abandoned for two decades. As a Canadian vlogger walked from Domlur towards Indiranagar, he joked on X (formerly Twitter) that to make his way he had to resort to use “parkour and gymnastics”. As the post on the walkway went viral, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike along with citizens repaired it and opened it up for pedestrians.(10)  The urgency therefore, is to reduce the burden on non-propertied public spaces that are used on an everyday basis by both walkers, bikers etc. including restoration of dysfunctional ones. But, walkability in Indian cities is not an accessibility question alone. It is that of locating poly-rational (many uses) land.

The city walkways could baffle a pedestrian who is used to mono-rational land use such as a pedestrian walkway meant for walking alone. A footpath or designated walkway in Indian cities is used through multiple rationalities. In a fast-paced city such as Mumbai, it is used by street vendors for a temporal or day long period. This could mean setting up a small stall for livelihood purposes on a walkway for say three hours in the morning. The same space is then used by another vendor for setting up a food truck in evening. The walkway could be storage space for vendors or the State municipality to keep materials for metro construction. The same metro construction could also disrupt the continuity of the walkway as a metro staircase is simultaneously being built on the same walkway. Or the walkway could be temporarily closed due to a personal or public event.

A commons approach towards a safer walkway should recognise the social realities of counter spatial logics

The walkway is also a temporary parking space, besides providing space for joggers, smokers, men urinating in open, disposal of garbage, those waiting in long queues for buses, repair work by municipality workers, open drainage that requires one to jump across. Also, the haste of reaching due to ‘ten-minutes delivery’ promised by the booming gig economy, and bikers using the walkways to cut through long traffic jams in rush hours are simultaneous realities in which everydayness of walkability unfolds in a city.

In approaching informal or poly-rational uses of footpaths, Image 2 depicts a day and night element to spatial logic of movement that undermines the State’s designated use of walking. The bikers, along with those on foot, have to take great caution in avoiding an open drainage on the footpath. Recognising poly-rational uses of walkways is neither to legitimise or delegitimise it. It is to locate the ground where the limits between uses of walkways, State’s rationality and spatial demarcations, and urban citizenship are negotiated every day. The next section attempts to reconcile these and suggest a commons framework.

Pointers for designing safer pedestrian walkways

A key question the walker is contemplating in light of instances of violence against women in parks, or deaths and accidents on walkways is that of dignity. If the safest route to one’s destination cannot be assured by the State through the passage of a walkway, then infrastructural upgrades create a city for property (movable and immovable) owners not for commons. A commons approach towards a safer walkway should recognise the social realities of counter spatial logics beyond the question of who owns the space. It is important to recognise the temporal dimension of space appropriation that caters to achieving a certain purpose. It is not a permanent squatting activity. For instance, a vendor’s livelihood or State using the walkway to keep repair/construction material and whether it creates hindrance to modes of movement for the pedestrian. This temporal dimension should remain valid for day and night by creating a sense of security for the citizens regardless of who owns such a space.

The idea of a national policy should not be to introduce formal spatial order as observed in the SC judgement.(11).   Doing so visualises the street or pedestrian walkway as a neat space where the user accepts the State’s designated use as the lasting order. Contrary to this, as the article has shown, it is counter spatial logics that govern the walkways. Thus, a policy should aim to recognise shared uses by delineating the risks involved in such uses. For instance, by recognising that bikers tend to appropriate certain pedestrian spaces at certain routes on particular times creates the space for creating rules to safeguard the interests of those walking, particularly those with disabilities. That could potentially create a pedestrian commons framework.

All photos : Devansh Shrivastava

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