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Why “walkability” was always the wrong word
After a season of cold, ice, and ICE, the city needs us outside
Julien Suaudeau
I didn’t know what a privilege walking is until my father’s final weeks, in December 2024. His lung cancer had spread, and he would leave his bed only to go sit on the sofa. There were two rooms in his Parisian apartment: the bedroom and the living room. Every day, it took us longer to cover the short distance from one to the other. In the days before he couldn’t do it anymore, he became more restless, as if constant motion would make the inevitability of death disappear. It was a powerful illusion: if you kept moving, even if you weren’t moving by yourself, the rooms in the apartment were still rooms. The city out there was still the city. You could fool yourself into denying that there was just one place left in our world: the dying room.
About a year later, the Philadelphia metro area got buried under 10 inches of snow. Over the next few weeks, because of a combination of sub-freezing temperatures, poor public decision-making, lack of resources, and civic carelessness, the snow didn’t go away. It turned into concrete-hard ice—the infamous snowcap. By mid-February, cars were still boxed in the spots where their owners had left them before the snowfall. Parking territorialism set in (the infamous savesies). Fights broke out. People with a roof over their head became hesitant to go outside, while unhoused people moved to shelters as the Code Blue alert lingered.
ICE and immobility
When I came out to shovel in front of my house that Sunday, I was first struck by the beauty of the winterscape. No more dog shit, rotting gingko, or discarded Wawa cups. Philly looked immaculate. But when I was done shoveling and tried to go somewhere, I realized ice had taken the city away from me. My wife and I used to make fun of the local obsession with “black ice”. To the outsider, it sounded like an ancient curse. But now the word has a new contemporary meaning: everywhere in the US, including in Philly, some people are stuck inside because of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE is darker than the disease that took my father away, because it forces people of all ages into the immobility of death.
The snowcap eventually melted. March brought a couple of unseasonably warm days. As I walked to 5th and Fairmount, where on the morning of February 16, a Gopuff delivery driver had been kidnapped by ICE agents, I wondered what my freedom to move around means in a city where thousands of families have to play dead behind locked doors.
Everything’s erasable?
When I got to the Northern Liberties intersection, everything looked normal. The only trace of the life-shattering event that had taken place a few weeks earlier was the fake historic sign designed by artists Huston West and Emeyewhisky.
I stood there for a few minutes, taking the scene in; the absence of a scene, the shadow of a scene. As I tried to visualize the month-old violence, the streets and the buildings around me began to look less like parts of the neighborhood and more like a sound stage. The only real thing left was the “fake” marker.
One week later, the marker itself had disappeared. This is 2026: everything, everyone, erasable.
When another place flickers
When I think about the defining traits of my life in Philly, moving around the city always comes on top. Philadelphia is first and foremost a walking experience to me.
My intentional walks account for only a fraction of my walking. For me, the real walking happens beyond the transitionality of commuting or the convenience of running errands. Most of the time, when I walk, I don’t have a direction. I could be out just listening to music or sound hunting on the fly, stealing bits of conversations and soundscapes that will find their way into a layer of my podcast, Song of Philadelphia. Sometimes, I don’t even know what I’m walking for: I leave it up to the city’s energy to tell me where I’m going.
When I walk in Philly, I think of Paris a lot. And I often find myself thinking of Philly when I walk in Paris. Walking opens up thin places: invisible portals scattered around the city where another place is leaking into the space that one experiences physically, but also where the past is leaking into the present.
The other place flickers where and when Philly happens as more than just Philly. It could be something about a building, a child’s voice, a beat pulsating on a passing car’s sound system, piano notes trickling down from a window. It’s a strangeness that pulls you out of the quotidian and makes you drift off the straight lines, beyond what you think is real and familiar. Recognizing it requires a blankness of the mind, an availability to receive. The door to the other place opens only when I am walking for the sake of walking.
“Walkability” is not what we lose
Losing that, when when we can no longer move about the city, cannot be measured in terms of “walkability”. The word implies a commodification of public spaces and personal impulses that I find repulsive. The US is the place where land gets recycled into real estate, but not everything has to be turned into an amenity.
What I’m really talking about is the mental-health impact of having the city taken away from us as an infinite supply of journeys that are also personal futures. I don’t want to be just a resident or a user of the city. I want to be a traveller, a listener, a flâneur. I want to steal back time from the power structures that regulate the flow of our lives, and this is what’s at stake whenever I go outside. Turning the capitalist imperative into self-care is one of the few cards still in our hands. (No one puts it better than Noah Davis, whose work you can see at the PMA through April 26; here’s the BSR review.)
“How are we going to know you?”
Being outside is also part of a community-building process: as West Philly artist and writer Andrew Simonet muses in the first episode of Song of Philadelphia, why would you frantically minimize your time on the street? “If you’re not going to spend time on the stoop,” Andrew asks, “how are we going to know you?”
When I first arrived in Philly, back in 2006, I rented a rowhome at 22nd and Catharine. My wife and I moved in one muggy morning in early August. Our neighbor Didj’ sold water ice at the bus stop. When the sun came down and the streets got quiet, she found our Parisian disbelief hilarious: “You guys didn’t know we pull the sidewalks after dark in Philly?”
Sidewalks are the places where the city is supposed to happen. But for that to be possible, they need to be sidewalks, and we need to remember how lucky we are that we can exist outside the walls of our homes.
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