Emergent Conversation 23

This essay is part of the series Sustainable Urban Mobility in India, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 23.

By Shivani

This emergent conversation explores the politics and possibilities of walking and cycling in Indian cities. The series considers everyday mobilities intersecting with infrastructure, access, and urban imagination. From Delhi’s contested walking infrastructure to the cycling cultures of Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, and Mumbai, these essays engage with non-motorised transport as technical modes, socially embedded practices, and much more. Through ethnographic accounts and personal narratives, the contributors examine how the city is experienced, negotiated, and resisted on foot and by pedal. These insights invite readers to rethink sustainable mobility in Indian cities and reflect upon walking and cycling as central to how cities live, breathe, and survive.

The Politics of Urban Mobility

Urban mobility in India is a deeply political question. It is not just about how people move, but who gets to move, how, where, and with what rights and risks. In cities marked by sharp social hierarchies, fragmented infrastructures, and competing visions of modernity, walking and cycling have been consistently undervalued, even as they remain the most used forms of everyday mobility. This emergent series brings together interdisciplinary and grounded contributions that examine walking and cycling not only as modes of transport but as social practices, political acts, and urban imaginaries that shape and are shaped by the city.

This intervention is necessary because in most Indian cities, walking and cycling are systematically rendered invisible, even impeded, despite being essential to mobility for the urban poor, women, children, and the elderly. The push for “smart” and “world-class” urban development has prioritized automobility and flyovers while erasing the messy, vibrant realities of footpaths and cycle lanes. Yet, it is precisely in these spaces, on the footpaths, through informal shortcuts, across congested chowks, that the social life of the city unfolds.

This series is developed from long, deep conversations I had with the Bicycling Research Team at the University of Chicago and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Our conversations grappled with questions of access, positionality, and, at the heart of it all: who is a cyclist in the city, and what are their rights?

Building upon these conversations, the pieces here push us to critically think how categories like cyclist or pedestrian are not neutral descriptions, but unique identities shaped by class, gender, visibility, and policy. Such reflections echo throughout the essays. Samprati Pani’s “Making the City on Foot” explores how walking in Delhi intersects with class and gender, revealing pedestrian infrastructures as technical artefacts and deeply embedded in political terrains.  Namrata Narendra, in “Urban Rhythms,” captures the contestation between feet, pedals, and wheels in everyday movement patterns, where temporal rhythms and spatial claims come into constant conflict.

The question of cycling access is further explored by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth, and Rahul Goel in “Bicycling to School in Urban India,” which uses empirical data to show the gendered and spatial inequalities that shape children’s access to school via bicycles. Complementing this is the podcast, “Cycling in the City” by Madhushree Kulkarni that offers a comparative look at Metro Manila and Bengaluru, drawing from the public storytelling format of Chala Pune, a podcast by Busकरा. The guests’ narratives highlight how global South cities negotiate aspirations of urban cycling amid infrastructural precarity and symbolic marginalization.

Smruthi B. Kannan’s “A Case for Lazy Bicycling” gently dissolves the utilitarian discourse around cycling and offers an effective case for slowness, pleasure, and care in everyday mobility. Similarly, “Morphologies of Walking” by Shivani follows the journey of congestion, uncertainty, and evolving spatial literacy through which walking becomes a form of embodied ethnography, and lessons on how cities are lived through movement, not simply planned on maps. Finally, a discussion with Jonathan Anjaria about his book, Mumbai on Two Wheels, weaves the series together with a consideration of urban cycling, uncovering how cycles have moved from necessity to marginality in Mumbai’s changing transport ecosystem.

Together, the essays invite readers to rethink sustainable mobility in cities and ponder upon walking and cycling as central to how cities live, breathe, and survive—in India and beyond. While the footpath is a corridor of movement, it is also a site of commerce, care, protest and presence in informal settings. While the cycle offers low-cost mobility, it is also a political and ecological alternative and a means of reclaiming the right to move differently in the city.  As Indian cities modernize in pursuit of global urban ideals, this emergent conversation insists on the value of friction, pause, improvisation, and co-presence. The everyday mobility of walking and cycling, though often neglected in formal plans, offer the most grounded, equitable, and imaginative visions of urban sustainability.

Shivani is an anthropologist focused on sustainable urban mobility and critical minerals supply chain. As part of India ZEV Research team at Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis, her work involves research and analysis on critical minerals trade and governance. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Shivani curated an Emergent Conversation on “Sustainable Urban Mobility in India”.