By Samprati Pani

Emergent Conversation 23

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

Walking Is Not Just Walking

Sara and Tabassum,^[1] two teenage girls from a low-income neighborhood in Delhi where I did my fieldwork in 2016–2018, walked to and back from school, a couple of kilometers each way. They would make their way through the neighborhood’s narrow, winding, uneven alleys, flanked by houses and shops set cheek-by-jowl on both sides. After crossing a bridge over the nullah that marks the border of the neighborhood on one side, they would walk alongside the nullah, and then cross over into the neighborhood where their government school was located. Spending on an autorickshaw or cycle rickshaw was not an option for them, and while the two neighborhoods are connected by a bus route, they would still have to walk quite some distance from their homes to the bus stop and then from the bus stop to their school, making the bus unviable. Walking was thus the cheapest and fastest way for them to get from home to school and back. This walk, undertaken six days a week, involved exertion given the distance covered and Delhi’s relentless cycle of harsh weathers. It involved prior management and expending of time and labor in order to be able to set out for school: finishing household chores and running errands for male siblings and elders in the family, as well as walking to the community toilets in the neighborhood to get ready. It involved the trepidation and anxiety of having to encounter or avoid boys and men on their route who would pass comments, drawing courage from each other’s presence.

Notwithstanding these challenges, while narrating their walks to me and retracing parts of their route with me, the two girls drew my attention to how central these walks were to their friendship and their everyday life. Walking to and from school meant time together, a time indulged in talking and fooling around, away from the eyes of adult supervision. Their walks were peppered with rituals carried out with varying degrees of regularity—treating each other to ice lollies on alternate days, the occasional detour through a graveyard to pluck mulberries from the trees there, fixing a quick rendezvous with a friend or lover somewhere along the way. The duo would sometimes extend their time together by slowing down their pace or deliberately taking a longer route, observing new places and people, and once in a while, they would bunk school to go traipsing in the city. On one occasion, they ventured to a large, well-known public park in Delhi, only to be turned away by the guards at the park’s gate. Sara and Tabassum believed it was their government school uniforms that prevented this entry, marking them not as bodies that needed to be in school at that time in the day but rather as “poor” children whose bodies did not belong there. They are well-aware of the disparities and discriminations the streets of their city are steeped in. They recounted to me various other instances of being asked to get out of parks in posh neighborhoods adjoining theirs by guards and residents of these localities on the grounds that they are “outsiders.” That there are places in the city out of bounds for them makes them angry, yet it does not prevent them from testing the limits of the segregated city from time to time.

No single way of walking, walking itinerary, or walking route can encapsulate the diversity of bodies navigating the city on foot. This diversity, however, cannot be recognized without engaging with the particularities of specific enunciations of walking in the city. I begin this piece with Sara and Tabassum’s school commute to underline not only how walking is intertwined with everyday life in the city but also how walking is a relational process constituted by and constitutive of the interaction between bodies—their socio-economic positions as much as physical ability, their needs and desires, their practices and activities—and the socio-material characteristics of places, including how these are regulated and used. As I have argued elsewhere (Pani 2022, 2023), this relationality tends to be glossed over in the dominant Western discourse that sets walking apart from ordinary life, its routines, and inequalities, particularly through the overrepresented figure of the male, white flaneur, who is unshackled by any constraints. The flaneur, who engages in unproductive aimless loitering to subvert the oppression of capitalist time, has captured the imagination of writings in non-Western contexts too and is even viewed as a model for walkers to emulate. Foregrounding the everyday is, for me, a critical analytical move that not only draws attention to the diversity and situatedness of walking but also challenges the construction of walking as an act of freedom or subversion that can be carried out by anyone anywhere. Sara and Tabassum’s walking routine reveals that the city is not a homogeneous, neutral terrain, which is accessed and experienced by all city dwellers uniformly. The lens of the everyday can thus open up certain critical questions about walking: who walks, what makes their walking possible, and what does their walking make possible. These questions are at their core political and infrastructural questions bound with the making of cities, the negotiation of power and inequalities, processes of inclusion and exclusion, and the possibilities and limitations of mobility.

This piece draws on my experiences of walking as part of my everyday life in Delhi for over two decades and my research on how socialities performed in/through the street are co-constituted by the movements of embodied practices. It is an attempt to bring into conversation anthropology’s renewed interest in walking as a social activity that interweaves everyday life with places (Ingold 2004; Ingold and Vergunst  2008) and the emergent literature on urban infrastructure that looks beyond physical structures and systems to conceptualize infrastructure as constituted, maintained, animated, and reconfigured by bodies, labor, and the social (Annavarapu and Truelove 2023; De Coss-Corzo et al. 2019; Simone 2004; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022).

Walking as provisioning infrastructure

Sara and Tabassum’s neighborhood only has a primary school, and the secondary school they walked to in a different neighborhood is the closest option. Walking in their case is not just a means to get from home to school but tied to accessing education as well as experiencing student life and the tiny freedoms this affords.

As much as 77 per cent of the urban poor in Delhi commute primarily on foot (Delhi Development Authority 2019). This reveals not only the inaccessibility of public transport to the city’s poor but also widening urban inequalities and the shrinking consumption capacity of the urban poor who are increasingly engaged in informal, low-paid jobs. These jobs service the middle-class and the elite, as well as build, repair, and maintain the city, making certain mobilities possible for others, while reproducing the informal workers’ own stagnancy and precarity. The middle class in Delhi can choose from a range of transport, such as buses, metro, auto rickshaws, cabs, and private vehicles, which they use in varying combinations in different situations. But for many of my low-income interlocutors, affordable choices are fewer (e.g., buses and shared electric rickshaws) and not always feasible for different destinations. They engage in much planning and calculation before choosing an auto rickshaw or metro ride, resorting to it as a treat for special family outings or emergencies. It is their bodies that they primarily rely upon to get somewhere, walking to reach their place of work, access commodities and services, and engage in forms of leisure and sociality.

The reliance on walking to self-provision for activities critical to everyday life is also deeply gendered. According to an UN-Habitat report, in developing countries across the world, “due to both economic and social reasons, a significantly higher share of women than men have no access to either individual or public means of transport and are hence dependent on walking” (Peters 2013, 4). A survey on gender and transport in Pune points out that in households with one vehicle, men use the vehicle, while women are expected to use public transport or walk (Parisar 2016). My research in Delhi suggests that women, both middle-class and low-income, employed or home-makers, also spend more time walking than men due to the gendered character of everyday household chores. Women walk their children to/from schools or school bus stops, while accompanying children and the elderly to access health services, to shop for daily provisions, and, in the case of low-income women, to access essential services (e.g., fetching water from tankers and kiosks). If infrastructure is by definition that which lies in the background for carrying out other work (Ruszczyk 2019), then walking constitutes critical urban infrastructure in itself.

Walking as Laboring Infrastructure

Walking is an intrinsic part of certain modes of urban work. Waste pickers, municipal sweepers, and garbage collectors do their work on foot. These low paid, arduous forms of work, predominantly engaged in by scheduled castes, clean up the city’s debris, maintaining footpaths and streets for continued use. These workers are most exposed to the elements, face apathy from the municipality and residents of the city alike, and are the most susceptible to diseases owing to Delhi’s poor air quality. Urban planning and policy discourse on promoting walkability for the sustainable development of cities typically focuses on the need to expand the network of footpaths or design them better, viewing maintenance of pedestrian infrastructure as a matter of removing barriers to walking such as wrongly parked vehicles and unauthorized street vending. This discourse glosses over not only the socio-political barriers that restrict access to existing pedestrian infrastructure but also the laboring bodies that sustain this infrastructure.

Even as innumerable studies by scholars and associations of street vendors across the world have drawn attention to how street vendors maintain the usability and vitality of streets, street vendors in Delhi continue to be systematically and arbitrarily harassed by state agencies and middle-class citizen groups. Despite the protections under the National Street Vendors Act and the lip service paid to incorporating street vendors in urban design in master plans and walkability plans, beautification projects and footpath improvements more often than not involve the removal of street vendors.

It is important to note that most street vendors walk, either by carrying wares to a spot from where they sell, or by pushing wares in carts and cycles or carrying them on their body. These walking bodies generate self-employment as well as make commodities and services available at affordable prices, within customers’ walking distance, sustaining everyday household provisioning and neighborhoods. More significantly, their laboring bodies undergird the well-being of streets as public places, constituting the infrastructure that gives people a reason to walk as well making walking sustainable by providing food and drink, and places to rest and socialize. Across neighborhoods that have been part of my research, the greater the density and diversity of street vendors, the greater the density and diversity of walkers, especially women. A large number of Delhi’s women, low-income and middle-class, walk in their neighborhood’s weekly bazaar, makeshift street markets that pop up once a week, not just for the convenience of shopping close to their homes but due to the ease and safety of walking and engaging in leisure in the midst of other walking bodies, especially those of other women. The presence of bodies, stationary or moving, working or relaxing, on the street make it possible for others to inhabit and walk the street.

Walking as Infra-making

The existence/improvement of what is conventionally understood as pedestrian infrastructure, paved streets and footpaths, with vehicles and pedestrians conforming to their designated zones, as a sufficient condition for sustainable cities is a modernist fantasy based on the premise that straight lines improve the efficiency of cities by automatically making mobility frictionless (Davies 2023). This fantasy is exemplified by Corbusier’s claim that “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade” ([1929] 2013, 6). This fantasy obliterates the diversity of bodies that walk,  including women, ignoring that life is not lived along straight lines, that meandering paths sometimes might be shorter or the only possible routes, that walking bodies need to rest, that stretches of straight lines might not be accessible to all. It also invisibilizes the social production or infra-making of walking infrastructure—the interstitial activities, labor, social collaborations—that set into flow and interweave myriad movements on foot with the movements of the city.

It is difficult to romanticize walking as unbridled freedom and spontaneity, when it is understood through such a conceptualization of infrastructure. Walking makes mobility possible, to access work, services, and social life, but this mobility is hardly frictionless, being exposed to barriers, physical and social, and is often intertwined with limited or no access to other forms of mobility. Walking bodies and mobilities are made of multiplicities: constraint and choice, drudgery and pleasure, difference and repetition, fears and freedom, hope and despair, vitality and exhaustion. The ease and struggles of urban life are lived, reproduced, and modulated through the negotiation of tensions between these multiplicities. Walking mobilities sustain the everyday life of the city but also tend to reify inequalities of who gets to or has to walk, how, how much, and where.

Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist interested in social, material, and affective lives of street and street markets in Delhi. She is an affiliated fellow at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi. Her areas of interest span marketplace socialities, urban spatial formations, and walking as a research technique. She is the editor of the blog, Chiragh Dilli, which explores forms of writing the ordinary city.

Notes

^[1] Names changed.

Works Cited

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