The Priviledge of a Walkable City

There is an ongoing joke circulating online that people yearn for walkable communities.

You might have come across this digital discourse on your feed – a persistent romanticisation of what life could be like if everything your heart desires was within walking reach from your home.

Beyond convenience, community plays a key role in this romanticisation: a barista who remembers your daily order, a supermarket cashier who knows you by name, or a group of friends who can meet regularly at their favourite café (think Friends, circa 1994) without the added nuisance of driving around looking for parking.

Yet, despite 74% of the population in Europe living in urban areas, relatively few of these environments are designed with walkability and the pedestrian in mind. Cars often play the protagonist in our cities, becoming the centre around which everything else is designed.

Of course, multiple examples can be used to counter this argument. Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam are just a few European cities that spring to mind when thinking of examples where walkability is a reality, rather than a pipe dream. But these remain exceptions among hundreds of cities that are largely car-dependent and unwalkable. This is where living in a walkable city turns into a privilege for a few rather than a widespread reality for most.

For many in Cyprus, this reality is familiar: even a short journey to a shop, café or workplace can feel impractical without a car – not necessarily because the distance is too great, but because the journey itself was never designed with the pedestrian in mind.

Where you live and how easily you can move through it is not just a planning question – it is a public health and equity question. As such, walkability is not a default but a privilege.

What makes a city walkable?

In the simplest terms, a walkable city is one designed in a way that allows you access to daily necessities – shops, workplaces, parks, and other public areas – on foot.

The concept of the 15-minute city, coined by urban planner Carlos Moreno, is often referenced in discussions centred around walkability as it presents a new model for the modern city in which multiple nodes contain all the amenities necessary for modern life rather than a single city centre.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this notion gained significant traction as the global lockdown, which restricted our car usage, revealed the benefits of having amenities close to home and exposed how few neighbourhoods actually meet this standard.

However, beyond proximity to amenities, we must also consider connectivity and experience. A walkable city must also be pedestrian-friendly.

On paper, a city might seem perfectly walkable, but once you take to the streets, other factors can greatly impact the journey – lack of shading, broken or obstructed pavements, poor drainage, and sparse resting spots such as benches can make that walk less than pleasant. So, while there might be a direct path from your house to the pharmacy, grocery store or your office, the experience of walking to these destinations might be less than ideal. This is why pedestrian experience is an essential element of walkability.

In much simpler terms, and at the risk of sounding cliché, walkability is not about the destination, but about the journey.

To determine whether a city is truly walkable, we must take into account several factors that, together, make up a person’s experience walking from Point A to Point B, including green coverage, heat exposure, stormwater management, accessible public spaces and spatial equity. Only by considering these factors together can we determine whether a city is genuinely walkable for everyone.

The walkability gap

The gap between a city that looks walkable on a map and one that works for its residents can be enormous, and it often affects those who can least afford it.

Let’s take heat exposure for example. With cities growing denser and green spaces giving way to concrete and asphalt, temperatures rise unevenly across neighbourhoods. Research consistently shows that low-income areas tend to have less tree coverage, fewer parks, and more heat-absorbing surfaces. The numbers don’t lie – studieshave found that the poorest 10% of urban neighbourhoods can be 2°C hotter than the wealthiest on an average summer day, a gap that widens further during heatwaves. This reality underlines a public health risk which can determine whether a person can safely walk to school, work, or simply step outside.

And this is where the idea of a “walkable city” gets complicated. While a route might exist in theory, without shade to shelter from the heat, a bench to rest on, or a pavement wide enough for a wheelchair or a stroller, it might not be a walkable one in practice. A city that scores well on walkability metrics but offers no trees, no cooling spaces, and no accessible infrastructure is not actually walkable. Not for everyone, at least, as vulnerable groups usually bear the brunt of this spatial inequity.

Older adults, who are more vulnerable to heat and may require more opportunities to rest. Parents navigating broken kerbs and narrow pavements with prams. People with physical impairments who rely on ramps, dropped kerbs, and accessible public transport. Children, who depend on safe street environments to be able to play outside. These groups are a significant portion of every city’s population and yet, they are routinely the last to be considered when urban space is designed. This creates a domino effect within cities: if you cannot walk safely and comfortably in your neighbourhood, you are more likely to become car-dependent or restrict your movement outside your house. This leads to less physical activity, whilst also eroding your sense of connection and community, which in turn impacts your mental health.

As such, the inability to move easily around your city is not merely an inconvenience but a slow erosion of well-being, often impacting those who are already vulnerable. Walkable cities, then, are not simply easy to get around. They are socially equitable by design. And cities that fail on walkability do not fail everyone equally.

The links between walkability and urban health

There is a direct link between your health and the direct environment in which you live.

In fact, the connection is measurable and increasingly well documented. Urban health, the field of research that examines how the built environment shapes the physical and mental wellbeing of city dwellers, has been building this case for decades. And the evidence is hard to ignore.

Walkable neighbourhoods are consistently linked to better health outcomes across the board: higher levels of physical activity, lower BMI, better mental health, and lower blood pressure. This suggests that the problem is less about individual motivation and more about the environments we are asked to move through. When the environment enables walking, people walk. When it does not, they don’t, and their health reflects that.

And beyond the physical benefits, walkable neighbourhoods play a key role in mental health, encouraging spontaneous social interaction, which, in turn, can reduce loneliness and build community. To add to that, access to green space has also been linked to lower rates of depression and anxiety, better cognitive health in older adults, and improved mental wellbeing during periods of stress.

Designing cities which take these considerations into account is key if we are to build healthier urban environments where all citizens can thrive. Understanding these connections is also the focus of U-CARE, a European initiative which examines how urban environments influence health across different climate zones. This Erasmus+ collaboration operates across four European cities (Berlin, Florence, Gothenburg, and Nicosia). Rather than assessing cities at the level of district or policy, the project zooms in to the everyday: bus stops, road crossings, rest areas, the specific obstacles that determine whether citizens, and especially vulnerable groups, can actually complete a journey.

For Cyprus, this raises particularly urgent questions. What does a healthy, walkable neighbourhood look like in a city where extreme summer heat can make even short journeys difficult? How do shade, greenery, crossings and public transport shape whether people can move around safely?

Creating cities for everyone

Moving around your city should not require mental (nor physical) gymnastics – it should be a safe, comfortable experience for everyone.

However, the reality is that the part of town you live in, the amount of green cover lining your streets, and whether your public spaces were designed with different users in mind all play a significant role in your health and well-being.

That is what makes walkability a privilege. Not because walking itself is exclusive, but because the conditions that make walking possible, pleasant, and safe are not available to everyone in equal measure.

The good news – and yes, there is genuine good news – is that this is not a fixed or unchanging reality. Barcelona did not always have superblocks. Utrecht did not always prioritise its cyclists and pedestrians over its traffic. These transformations happened because cities made a deliberate choice to reimagine public spaces and who they belong to.

These were by no means easy decisions – they came with resistance, disruption, and political courage to hold a long-term vision in the face of immediate complaint. But the outcomes made the effort worthwhile: cleaner air, quieter streets, healthier residents, and stronger communities.

Research like U-CARE is part of what makes that case. By centring the experience of the most vulnerable residents, and by building tools that planners can actually use, projects like this move the conversation from aspiration to evidence. They show not just that healthier cities are possible, but how to get there – neighbourhood by neighbourhood, crossing by crossing.

The aspiration, then, is not radical. It is simply this: that the ability to step outside, move through your city, reach the places you need to reach, and arrive somewhere that welcomes you should not depend on your postcode, your income, or your physical ability. It should be the baseline. It should be what a city, by definition, provides.

About U-CARE

U-CARE is an Erasmus+ initiative, involving TU Berlin, University of Florence, Chalmers in Gothenburg, University of Cyprus, Building Health Lab, and the RESET research centre.

The project is dedicated to studying and transforming urban ecosystems to enhance health across European cities.

Find out more at ucareproject.eu