Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Ahuvia Kahane, Simon King and Esther Leslie (eds), Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Urban Environments (New York: Routledge, 2024) 352 pp. $180.00 Hb. $52.99 Pb. $39.74 e-book. ISBN: 978-1-032-41260-3
‘Walking in Cities’ is perhaps one of the simplest yet most evocative titles one might give to a book about urban life. As a city planner, the phrase immediately resonates: walking is the most fundamental activity that underpins both how a city functions and how it is perceived. Yet, as several contributors suggest, it is also the most taken-for-granted. The book captures the essence of this relationship through seventeen chapters from artists and writers across varied geographies—each reflecting on how walking, or the inability to walk, shaped their experience of the pandemic city.
As the full title (Navigating post pandemic Urban Environments) suggests, these chapters capture the experience of the city through the act of walking, or not walking thereof, in the restrictions that were thrust on citizens due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Activities that could be, were transferred to the digital world; the physical act of moving around and seeing people, the core idea of urban life, was stalled for a long period. Cities and public spaces, their businesses and activities, the residential quarters and the transportation pathways, that are usually the main elements that a city plans and builds for, were suddenly an impediment or practically meaningless. The experience captured by the authors brings in novel ideas of looking at these very elements and their supposed functions, and appreciating them in a different light.
The volume can be read partly as a continuation of the earlier book Walking Cities: London, co-edited by Jasper Joseph-Lester, which invited readers to see London differently through artistic walking practices. Here, the scope expands globally, but the underlying premise remains: walking is an interpretive method that reveals the political and cultural structures embedded in the urban.
One of the strongest contributions of this book is its attention to the politics of space. The varied global responses to lockdown restrictions show how mobility reflects ideological commitments as much as public-health imperatives. Cape Town’s severe measures, shaped by the spatial legacies of apartheid and pervasive inequality, stand in marked contrast to Stockholm’s reliance on civic trust. These differences underscore a broader argument running through the volume—that navigating a city is never a neutral activity. Walking is regulated, encouraged, choreographed or suppressed depending on the political values embedded in urban governance.
This perspective becomes particularly vivid in essays that examine how lockdown exposed structures otherwise masked by the pace of urban life. In many cities, the absence of crowds revealed the infrastructures and ideologies that govern movement: security features, gates, bollards, CCTV networks and spatial boundaries that protect some bodies while excluding others. In Cape Town, for instance, the sight of a security grille fronting a homeless shelter becomes a potent metaphor for how biosecurity logics intertwine with older spatial injustices.
Equally compelling is the book’s examination of walking as a site of emergent solidarity, as seen in Hong Kong. Long before Covid-19, protest livestreams enabled residents to ‘walk with’ journalists through tense encounters with police. During the pandemic, these virtual walks intensified, becoming a means of witnessing, remembering, and interpreting the rapid transformations of Sha Tin and other districts. F. C. Wilfred describes how watching these streams on social media, a barrage without any editorial due diligence, produced a ‘sensory overload’ that required stillness and reflection to process. These digital walks also shaped behaviour: people avoided the MTR, adopted alternative transport apps, supported businesses aligned with the democratic movement, and re-evaluated urban planning’s influence on their daily lives.
This interplay between digital mediation and embodied mobility is one of the most intriguing themes in the book. It highlights how walking is no longer a simple physical act but a technologically extended one—mediated through livestreams, digital maps, smartphone notifications, and algorithmic suggestions.
The Somers Town essay is particularly interesting as it vividly brings to fore many things that go wrong with our current forms of urbanisation. Drawing on the author’s earlier documentation of the neighbourhood, these chapters examine how pandemic quietness exposed the profound pressures of redevelopment. Somers Town, adjacent to the booming King’s Cross district, finds itself squeezed by a tide of speculative capital: parks replaced by student blocks, new luxury towers rising above modest council flats, biotech, and journal facilities occupying former community spaces. The absurdity of rebranding becomes apparent when a council flat in the Ossulston Estate is advertised as being located in ‘Marylebone.’ As Leslie writes, ‘Without a name, it is easier to eradicate a place’ (18).
The most arresting insight from this section is Leslie’s assertion: ‘Everywhere has layers. Everywhere develops and regresses and develops again’ (19). That simple sentence captures what redevelopment often disregards: the need for continuity, memory and social embeddedness. Cities accumulate meaning through generations; they grow, deteriorate, and grow again. Yet the redevelopment pressures on Somers Town—driven by real estate logics rather than community need—threaten to flatten those layers. The book’s description of green space being ‘replaced’ with planters and vertical greenery for passing commuters illustrates the hollow promises of contemporary urban greening.
The contrast between Somers Town and Venice offers a wider reflection on urban identity. Venice, a city almost entirely oriented toward the visitor, became uncanny during lockdown. Stripped of tourists, it seemed to lose its defining purpose. Its stillness exposed the fragility of models that hinge on constant inflows of outsiders. As the book suggests, Venice without visitors was suddenly not Venice anymore. This insight pushes readers to consider what makes a city itself: is it the built environment, the community that inhabits it, or the relational currents that animate it?
The book extends its scope to Delhi, where the stakes of walking reached an extreme. When India announced a sudden nationwide lockdown, millions of migrant workers were left stranded without work, transport or income. Many walked hundreds of kilometres home. The scenes described, likened to a ‘biblical’ exodus, reveal the raw inequities of urban development. The chapter on Chhatarpur juxtaposes sensory richness (food smells, textures, sounds) with infrastructural hostility to pedestrians. Unlike the contemplative walks found elsewhere in the book, these walks were born of desperation rather than introspection.
Despite the global sweep of the volume, the chapters maintain a grounded attention to sensory detail. They discuss gates locked to deter ‘undesirables,’ bridges that function more as barriers than connectors, deserted plazas monitored by security cameras, and digital infrastructures that guide or limit movement. These descriptions show how walking reveals the social values embedded in built form.
As an urban planner, one has a certain techno deterministic view of the city and its residents. There is a certain degree of authority and power asymmetry that permeates this understanding. Walking in Citiesbrings an entirely different perspective of looking at the city and its residents, through a non-techno lens, and using perspectives primarily of artists. This book dives into how the pandemic has changed the way we walk and experience cities, blending physical and digital realms.
Places grow in layers. In their growth, they retain their parts, in parts, and grow around and in between. The place I saw is not what my grandfather saw, but in parts we have seen the same. What Leslie observes is the total indifference this time around: to the old, to the community and public, to shared. The ask is for a more privatized existence, privatized accumulation, and perhaps, mediated by technology, a hyper individualistic living. And in that march, erasing the stories that a place has to tell, the vivid lives that it stood witness to, memories.
What the book ultimately offers is not prescriptive guidance but perceptual sharpening. It asks how walking—physical or virtual, solitary or collective, liberatory or constrained—helps us read cities differently. The pandemic serves as both catalyst and lens: a moment that stripped away noise and forced attention to what had long been hidden in plain sight.
Walking in Cities is therefore timely, imaginative and illuminating. It will speak differently to different audiences; but speak it will. It reminds us that walking is a profoundly ordinary act with significant power, an act through which cities disclose their structures, tensions, and possibilities. In a period defined by disruption, it argues quietly but powerfully for the value of slowing down, looking closely, and recognising the layered stories beneath our feet, and often by donning a different pair of gasses.
Mahroof Mohammad, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India
