What makes a city walkable

Planners have a word for how easy it is to get around on foot: walkability. It sounds vague, but it can be measured, and the measurements explain a great deal about daily life in a district.

Four things matter most. The first is distance: how many useful destinations — a school, a market, a clinic, a park — lie within about fifteen minutes on foot. The second is the network: whether streets connect directly or force long detours around walls and highways. A grid of small blocks produces many short routes; a landscape of large gated blocks produces few.

The third is the quality of the path itself. A pavement wide enough for two people to pass, continuous rather than interrupted by parked vehicles, with shade in hot climates and a safe crossing where it meets traffic. The fourth is what planners call eyes on the street: shops, windows and doorways facing the pavement, which make a route feel watched and therefore safe, especially for children and older people.

Walkability has measurable consequences. Residents of walkable districts take more steps, own fewer cars and report knowing more of their neighbours. The effects are not large for any one person, and they are easy to overstate, since people who like walking may choose to live in such places. But the direction is consistent across many cities.

For a school, the lesson is small and practical. The distance a student walks each day is set mostly by decisions made before they were born. What a school can change is the last two hundred metres: where the gate is, whether the yard is open at break, and whether the stairs are more pleasant than the lift.