Home | blog

Footpaths of Bangladesh: Our complicated relationship with walking

I have long wondered why cities in Bangladesh cannot develop a "culture" of walking as a mode of transportation, even though city streets and footpaths are always crowded. It is a paradox. There is no shortage of commuters, vendors, food kiosks, and everyday happenings of urban life on Dhaka's footpaths. But do congested footpaths necessarily indicate a pedestrian culture?

It is hard to pinpoint what culture is. At its most safe and cautious stance, it may mean a people's widely shared ways of thinking about themselves, their way of life, language, food, music, money, art, and their sense of right or wrong, among many other things. Culture presumably shapes a group's identity by fostering certain social patterns unique to that group, even though both identity and social patterns could very well be complicit with the political machinations of the dominant class.

Is walking as an everyday urban practice to go to work, the market, or to school – or, walkability – an element of Bangalee culture? I am talking about walking as a primary means of going around, as an urban lifestyle, not merely as a "health practice" in parks and on lakefronts. Walking, sadly, is not part of our shared value system, and there are many reasons behind this.

First, the most obvious: our cities hardly value walkable footpaths as part of an urban ecosystem. Merely having footpaths does not mean people will start walking on them. Other related factors inspire people to view the footpath as an inviting, pedestrian- and gender-friendly, functional, and safe place. I was reading urban planner Jeff Speck's Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012) and in it, Speck offers a "General Theory of Walkability," which explains how a walk must meet four essential goals: "usefulness," "safety," "comfort," and be "interesting." When a walk satisfies these conditions, a pedestrian can rate a city's walkability score highly.

Usefulness implies a kind of urban organisation in which a walker can reach his or her daily destinations by walking. Safety suggests that a pedestrian can walk without being hit by a car or obstructed by a makeshift chayer dokan or tong (tea stall). Comfort means that the organisation of footpaths and adjacent buildings should be undertaken at a scale and distance that pedestrians find welcoming. And, interesting is when the pedestrian finds the footpath not only walkable, but also full of exciting experiences, including views of unique buildings, sites, trees, water bodies and, in general, humanity.

The second reason for the low score of walkability in Bangladeshi cities is related to the ways in which we conceptualise the idea of social status. Our self-righteous notion of ijjot (honour) frames walking on the street with a tinge of both denigration and indignation. From the bourgeois middle-class perspective, the street is a place for the struggling masses, the downtrodden, khete khawa manush (the working class).