Rebecca Solnit’s purposely and gorgeously meandering wanderlust: a history of walking identifies ‘basic freedoms’ that allow us to walk in the world. Solnit describes three freedoms; I’ll break one into its two component parts, so four freedoms, paralleling FDR’s.
"One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraint." (wanderlust, 168)
Walking therefore has a social history. Your right to walk freely has been fought for. This framework of requisite freedoms – free time, good places, good health, equal access - illuminates a new set of challenges to walking in the modern city.
If you’re not an aristocrat or a capitalist, you owe your leisure time to unions – thanks for the weekend! But do the long-term unemployed have motivated time to walk? Do the overworked or overscheduled have sufficient time?
Planners and environmentalists have ensured that there are places to walk in urban and wild areas. But can people walk to where they want to go, or to discover new places, when streets designed for and overrun by automobiles become a grid of walls and when parks are threatened with closure every with every state budget.
Public health advocates and medicine’s scientific research bolstered our bodily health. But in a region with polluted air, the healthy exertion of a walk can become a risk.
Feminists and civil rights movements struggled to remove barriers so all can move to all corners of society, if not yet with full acceptance. But do low-income neighborhoods lack amenities like parks and cafes while affluent, suburban neighborhoods are badly designed, stretching and cul-de-sac-ing on an unwalkable scale? Is any place safe for all at all hours?
Something to think about the next time you’re strolling. A simple walk can set as much in political motion as a protest march.