"These very sidewalks which made my walks magical"

A tribute to the video : « The city stops without me », by Wilfrid Duval, that can be read in this sensitive text by Anandi Mishra and Addison Del Mastro : www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/on-sidewalks

 

« Sometimes I wonder if I’d be a different person if I had grown up in a city with better walking infrastructure.

“It’s never been more fashionable to write about walking in cities. Books on psychogeography have become a cottage industry, their authors held up as philosophers of modernity,” writes Lauren Elkin in her 2016 book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Since then much ado has been made about walking cities, and I’ve myself contributed a fair share of essays on the subject. Yet, I feel one specific aspect of walking gets ignored: essential walking infrastructure, without which these ruminative, necessary, literary walks would be impossible. The sidewalk. (…)

But after living in cities in the UK, Germany and now, Sweden, I find my walks animated, charged. While out on my two feet, I’m achingly alive to the din and hum of the city, the crowd that passes by, as I walk. While on these aimless solitary walks, I’ve been pursuing the pleasure that was denied to me in my home country. It wasn’t until recently when I saw this Urban Mobility Explained rhapsodic video, beautifully titled The city stops without me, that I realised that it was these very sidewalks which made my walks magical. In their absence, I did not know this pleasure, and now in their presence, there’s no other way to walk but by enjoying each step after another.

The video quotes fromTrottoirs! by Isabelle Baraud-Serfaty (French).

“I’ve become an interface between the physical and digital worlds.
I make the city function.
Without me, no markets, no shop windows, no terraces.
Beneath my surface, water, fibre optics and electricity flow.
I connect the visible to the invisible. I am the discreet artery of a vibrant city.
And the more crowded I become, the more contested I am.
Everyone wants their place. I am becoming a space for all innovations, a testing ground.”

(…)

The sidewalk has always been there, like a friend you take for granted, a meaningful sustaining, nurturing relationship. (…)

Whether decked with tiles, or littered with toffee wrappers, these sidewalks transport us even before we board our choice of mode of commute. Sometimes after a bad, tiring, long day, an undecided walk on the sidewalk often comforts me. They are not just symbols of connectedness, they literally make connections. And while they might look like an everyday feature in our lives, it’s only in their absence or misuse that we realise their importance. »

 

Book « Trottoirs ! » : here (new edition, 2026, 15 euros)