Cripping desire lines: Disabled people,creative walking and the right to walk the city

Abstract

This article discusses the impact of Covid-19 on disabled people’s experiences of walking in the UK, using survey and interview data from the project Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community During Covid-19. Built environments are often encountered by disabled people as hostile and exclusionary. Our research identifies ways that this inequality was significantly magnified during the pandemic, including through overcrowded public spaces, increased street furniture and lack of facilities. Alongside attending to everyday walking experiences, we draw upon creative walking tactics and the work of walking artists, which enable imaginative encounters at multiple scales. These demonstrate how creativity can iterate alternative trajectories which embed accessible infrastructures and facilitate different ways of encountering, moving through and being in the city.

Introduction

This article discusses the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on walking in the UK. It centres the experiences of disabled people for whom built environments are often encountered as hostile, with exclusion reified by design and policy. The ‘pedestrian’ may be dismissed as insignificant but urban walking can be a profound creative, political and cultural act. We advocate for walking as a vital part of enacting an individual and collective right to the city for all. We also explore the potential of creative walking, and walking art, to model, enable and manifest more equitable walking practices. We share Middleton’s (2022: 1) interest in exploring people’s appropriation of space ‘and the richness of what unfolds through the “simple act of walking”’. A complex embodied practice, walking sets the scene for multiple encounters at various scales, from regulatory to interpersonal, architectural to atmospheric. Solnit (2001), Springgay and Truman (2018) and Mueller (2023) provide insightful historical, cultural and aesthetic overviews of the evolving and heterogenous meanings of ‘a walk’.

As our title alludes, we utilise crip theory (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Crip ‘is not a slur but is conceptualized as a fluid and inclusive category, encompassing a wide spectrum of disabilities … a way to build solidarity among disabled people, as well as function as a countersignifier’ (Gahman, 2017: 705). The authors include self-identified crips and by drawing attention to crip mobilities we disrupt default assumptions of who, what, why and how people walk. We all have extensive experience as walking artists, as creative walkers and/or of using walking in research. Throughout, we adopt an expanded definition of ‘walking’ as inclusive of all bodies, welcoming assistive technologies including chairs, sticks, prosthetics etc. and respecting the different speeds, scales and ways that diverse bodies walk. We opt to retain the word ‘walking’, but appreciate that many people prefer the term ‘walking and wheeling’ to explicitly foreground different ways of moving. What the word ‘walking’ conjures is key to disability politics. Clare (2023: 290) notes that in the disability community there is an appreciation of ‘gimpy ways of walking’, but people ‘rarely talk about sliding, scooting, crawling, crab-walking’, those ‘modes of mobility that bring us close to the ground’. Walking exists in relation to not-walking, typically including pauses. When considering infrastructures supporting or enabling walking, we must also attend to the provision of spaces of resting. Alongside this, we respect that walking as a fundamental right includes the right to choose not to walk.

Original data provides evidence supporting an urgent need for inclusive walking. This includes survey responses and interviews with disabled people, artists and campaigners who shared their experiences of walking during the pandemic (Heddon et al., 2023; Rose et al., 2022). We acknowledge that Covid-19 and its differential impacts are ongoing, so walking ‘during the pandemic’ is something of a misnomer. The pandemic continues. Our use of ‘during’ refers to the period of March 2020 to May 2021, aligning with our research timescales. Covid-19 profoundly changed lives and exacerbated many inequalities in the UK (Blundell et al., 2022; Suleman et al., 2021), with particular impacts on disabled people (Shakespeare et al., 2021). We demonstrate that it also transformed experiences of walking, entrenching inequality for some pedestrians. For example, disabled people faced issues including struggles to avoid crowds, fear of harassment and difficulties navigating reconfigured streetscapes (Rose et al., 2022). However, we also identify many pleasures and consolations that walking brought and explore engagement with creative walking. We introduce work created by artists imagining new, more inclusive walking practices, facilitating different ways of encountering, moving through and being in space. Evidencing the multiple benefits generated by urban walking, we assert that creative walking can and should be available for all, but that it demands more equitable use of public space.

Creative walking and walking art

The starting point for our work is recognition that walking can be positive and joyful, with potentials to connect people to place, communities, nature and neighbourhoods, alongside improving health, wellbeing and environments (Kritz et al., 2021; Olafsdottir et al., 2020; WHO, 2022). We signal potentials because walking is unevenly distributed. Reasons for walking are multiple and diverse, ranging from leisure to employment or enforced activity. As advocates for walking, we also acknowledge walking’s vulnerability to neo-liberal appropriation, with benefits often rationalised through economic framing and indicators of increased productivity. In this scenario, ‘better’ translates to a healthier, more productive workforce; better health reduces demand, pressure and cost of healthcare provision; and footfall increases spend (Arup, 2016 demonstrates this accounting system). We strive to resist recuperation and do not propose walking as a panacea to systemic inequality. We do, however, recognise walking, and specifically creative walking, as a tactical tool of resistance against capitalist extraction and accumulation. These can become practices where, following Lefebvre, use value is asserted ‘over exchange value, encounter over consumption, interaction over segregation, free activity and play over work’ (Purcell, 2014: 15). In creative walking, an orientating, ludic or directional frame is typically applied at the outset of the walk, providing structure and motivation (e.g. walk your familiar route looking out for the colour yellow; walk with a coin in your pocket, at every junction toss it to decide your direction). Creative walking activates imaginative, playful, rule- or task-based wanders, including following trails (e.g. rainbow trails, illuminated windows), finding ‘treasures’, leaving messages, drawing shapes on maps and walking them, taking photographs, etc. (Rose et al., forthcoming a).

We distinguish creative walking from walking art, though they are closely related. Walking art is a form of arts practice which centres the primary material and mode of the art as walking. It pays attention to or foregrounds the aesthetics of the process and work created, often motivated by conceptual enquiry and reflection (Rose et al., forthcoming b). Given the significant number of people who now identify as walking artists or who describe their work as walking art, and the range of exhibitions, publications and events now dedicated to its documentation and analyses, we are confident in claiming ‘walking art’ as a genre of arts practice (Mueller, 2023; Ulrich and Hesse, 2022). Creative walking is broader in conception and participation than walking art, less concerned with walking as aesthetic practice and more concerned with what a creative approach offers to the experience of walking. We focus here mainly on creative walking but also share some walking art practices which demonstrate approaches resisting and critiquing compulsory able-bodiedness.

We distinguish creative walking/walking art from everyday walking, although there is frequent overlap and fluidity between categories. For example, they may take place concurrently in time and place, such as during the school ‘run’ which parents and carers undertake as routine (Short, 2021). Creative walking/walking art frequently attends to, and makes visible, often overlooked materialities and details of the everyday (Brydon, 2022). Middleton (2022: 1) identifies the prevalence of romanticism in analysis of everyday walking in the city which positions it ‘as an accessible, democratic, inclusive, and emancipatory urban practice’. Our discussion of disabled people’s experiences of walking during Covid-19 demonstrates that such romanticism is misplaced. While creative walking/walking art may be distinct from everyday walking, it still resonates with many of the same politics in relation to exclusions, even if much contemporary walking art challenges those at macro (systemic, anti-capitalist) and micro (individual, personal) levels. We partially agree with Middleton’s (2022: 6) view that many walking artworks ‘emerge from a position of class, race, and/or gendered privilege’, particularly in relation to disabled artists and intersectional identities more broadly. However, many women artists use walking, often with a feminist orientation, challenging sexist and heteronormative spatial practices, and have done so for decades (Sharrocks and Qualmann, 2017). We posit that walking art is becoming more diverse, in terms of both who is walking and the walking that is practised (Heddon and Turner, 2024; Mueller, 2023). Furthermore, it is important that in acknowledging the privilege of the ‘many’, we do not further marginalise the ‘few’ by neglecting their committed walking practices, inadvertently re-inscribing a totalising homogeneity through continued reference – even if critical – to the most visible (Heddon and Turner, 2012).

Our definition of creative walking extends De Certeau’s everyday walking rhetoric, where the walker variously tries out, transgresses, actualises, invents, increases and transforms the trajectories available, selected or created (De Certeau, 1984: 98). We attest that creative walking and walking art offer desire lines to other ways – an ‘elsewhere’ and ‘elsewhen’ (Kafer, 2013:3) – of being and relating that insist on the right of everyone to be able to walk/creatively. Sheller (2018: 28) reminds us in relation to mobility justice and a wider context where ‘many people do not have access to easy mobility’ that such rights are inflected by ‘racial and classed processes, gendered practices, and the social shaping of disabilities and sexualities’ (Sheller, 2018: 21). Mobility regimes may differentially govern our movements and their meanings, but they are not inviolable.

Disability and walking

Our use of the term disability locates physical and mental impairments in political and relational dynamics, rather than as objective facts or essentialised attributes of individualised bodies and/or minds. As Kafer (2013: 6) summarises:

Under a political/relational model of disability, […], the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

Like Kafer (2013: 14), in defining disability ‘as a political category rather than as an individual pathology or personal tragedy’, we do not seek to ignore or erase lived experiences of those whose bodies cause them chronic pain, illness and fatigue (Kafer, 2013: 7). In the realm of walking work and scholarship, we must heed the heterogeneity of ‘disability’ when advocating for the benefits of walking, insisting on contextual rather than universal claims. We also need to consider time alongside space in making walking accessible. Samuels (2017: 1) illustrates how crip time necessitates a ‘flexible approach to normative time frames like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping’. Movement may be slower, fragmented or painful in ways that need to be appreciated.

Acknowledging that environmental changes cannot resolve all experiences of pain, fatigue and exclusion, the current inequity of mobility is nevertheless largely predicated on infrastructures designed around and for a mobile body (Imrie, 2000; Larrington-Spencer, 2025). This idealised body is typically coded as adult, male, non-disabled, healthy and unchanging. Bodies fitting this ideal benefit from infrastructures modelled around it, while others are challenged and curtailed. A key response to this inequity is demanding changes to infrastructures (transport provision, pavements, architecture, public toilets and street design, amongst others), enabling greater mobility for all. Infrastructural reconfiguration at a grand scale would acknowledge bodies as fluid rather than fixed entities. Following Garland-Thomson’s (2012: 339) proposition that ‘disability is inherent in the human condition’ and is ‘the body’s response over time to its environment’ (Garland-Thomson, 2012: 342), infrastructures built around an idealised normative body must necessarily, in time, fail everybody.

Alongside demanding changes to exclusionary infrastructures comes rethinking the terms and practices of mobility, including walking (Hamraie, 2020). Infrastructures can also be conceived of as relational; walking practices shape infrastructures as much as they are shaped by them (Middleton, 2018, 2022: 23). To avoid romanticism attached to the relational, infrastructures are best viewed as both relational and political. Sheller (2018: 36) describes a choreography ‘in which power is always corporeally in play’, a dance at times highly constrained and sometimes coerced. Implicit in reframing infrastructures as co-produced is the potential for alternative productions engineered through different walking practices, both everyday and creative. A political move is enabled through recognising and valuing the knowledge and expertise – the embodied pedestrian manoeuvres – of disabled people. Thinking with and through bodies which do not fit normative infrastructures, we again take inspiration from Garland-Thomson (2012: 592), who offers disability as:

a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship [which] confers agency and value on disabled subjects at risk of social devaluation by highlighting adaptability, resourcefulness, and subjugated knowledge as potential effects of misfitting.

Bringing Sheller’s choreographics into an encounter with performance artist Petra Kuppers opens different trajectories. Kuppers (2023: 101) experiences walking as ‘strange’, ‘something akin to being on a ship: unstable, rocking, faintly surprising’. Walking, for Kuppers, always needs constant mindfulness, is never simply a form of transit. In 2020, early in the pandemic’s trajectory, Kuppers launched an online class, ‘Starship Somatics’, described as a ‘movement dream journey […] a dance, a walk, of encounters, […] of rehearsing alterity, the world as it might be otherwise, encounters as they might be otherwise’ (Kuppers, 2023: 104–107). Kuppers’ work dreams into being a new way of moving in, between and through bodies. To manifest possible visions of future mobility is a familiar theme for walking artists and disabled activists (Morris and Rose, 2019) and the title of this article alludes to the power of speculative art to create desire lines. A desire line forms when many bodies (human or not) traverse a route not officially marked as a path: over time, repetition of movement creates a new way, walked into being from the ground up rather than imposed by powers above.

Walking artists, and creative walking, can call into being – even momentarily – a more equitable use of space. This frequently emphasises co-operation, mutual dependence and collectivism above neoliberal individualism. For example, visually impaired artist Carmen Papalia’s (2016) ‘Mobility Device’ replaced his white cane with a marching band. Artists can be allies in overcoming barriers, such as in Green’s (2022) ‘Finding a Way’, where she worked in and with a community centring people with dementia. Together they utilised technologies to produce an assemblage enabling them to walk together at a distance. Green’s ‘proxy walk’ (Finlay, 2023) was directed via Zoom by people whose physical movements were restricted.

The desire lines mapped herein challenge the meanings and practices of ‘walking’ and ‘going for a walk’, extending beyond presumption of physical activity or walking as enactments of individual desires. A cultural context which disables through uneven distribution of mobilities is met with a politics and aesthetic practice of resistance and redistribution. Together we walk otherways in elsewheres and elsewhens where ‘disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral’ (Kafer, 2013: 3). The need for this understanding became even more urgent during Covid-19 when policy decisions enacted the lives of disabled people as less worthy than others (Pring, 2021).

Disability, walking and Covid-19

Original data presented here was generated by our research project, Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community During Covid-19 (Research Ethics approval granted by both the University of Glasgow and the University of Liverpool). This work explored lived experiences of walking and the potential of creative practices to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and in recovering from a pandemic. The pandemic magnified and entrenched many existing inequalities (Blundell et al., 2022; Suleman et al., 2021), whilst profoundly changing many people’s encounters with walking (Rose et al., 2022). Restrictions across the UK variously limited the place and duration of walks and the number of people who could walk together. The Institute for Government (2022) provides a useful timeline of lockdowns and other key measures implemented during our data collection period. For some people, working from home, and the closure of schools, also changed walking habits. Those who were shielding, or living with people at high risk, found their movements even more severely limited. Essential workers, and others who walked for work, experienced a changed environment and different risk levels. Our research findings foregrounded that there was no singular or shared ‘pandemic walking’ to be recounted. For example, some felt safer walking during restrictions, others more anxious. Some found pleasure in staying local, others felt frustrated or bored. The needs of disabled people were not considered when encouraging people to walk rather than take public transport or when mitigating economic impacts. Most people’s practices and feelings about walking changed over the course of the pandemic.

During April–May 2021 we conducted an online survey, inviting reflections on people’s experiences of walking since March 2020. A total of 1221 UK residents aged 18 or over participated. We utilised a range of question types, eliciting single-choice/closed, multiple-choice, Likert-scale and free-text/open responses. We conducted a thematic analysis of qualitative data alongside appropriate statistical techniques for quantitative data (Rose et al., 2022 provides full methodological details). Here, we explore survey responses from those who identified as disabled and/or having mobility issues. We asked whether respondents considered themselves disabled or living with a chronic illness. Most, 989 people (82.4%), said no, whilst 153 people (12.8%) said yes. A further 55 people (4.6%) responded with ‘Maybe’. We didn’t ask for details, so this answer potentially covers a wide range of impairments, some with no impact on walking. We also asked, ‘Do you have any mobility issues?’, recognising that people may have a mobility impairment without considering themselves disabled. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a voluntary survey about walking, the majority of respondents, 1083 people (90.2%), said no. However, 75 respondents (6.2%) answered ‘Yes’ and a further 39 (3.2%) answered ‘Maybe’. A total of 77 people (6.31%) said yes or maybe to both questions. The quotes herein are from people who self-identified as having a disability or mobility impairment and who live in an urban or suburban area. Whilst not a representative sample, it gives a richly textured qualitative snapshot. All responses were anonymous, with some edited here for clarity.

Alongside the public survey, we undertook an online survey specifically aimed at artists who used walking in their work during Covid-19 (see Heddon et al., 2023 for more information). We also conducted 14 walking interviews, with 28 people, to supplement and expand the survey data. Interviewees were chosen because of their specific expertise or interest in walking (see Rose et al., 2022 for details, and Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2017 on walking methods in research). Insights from all data strands are shared here.

Everyday walking

The key reasons why disabled or mobility-impaired people walked during the pandemic broadly echoed the findings of the wider survey: for health and wellbeing (both physical and mental), for fun or relaxation, to create routine, to get out of the house, to access green spaces, to engage with their children and other family members and to meet safely with others when permitted or for tasks such as visiting shops or services (Rose et al., 2022). Some respondents directly referenced how walking was beneficial to their physical health, for example telling us that it helped in ‘maintaining declining mobility’ or building ‘strength in my hip to ease trochanteric pain’. Significant here is the recognised importance of walking for resilience and recovery, and the potentially amplified impact of restrictions on walking or reluctance to walk for particular groups of people. This was foregrounded in our interview with Helen, who works for Paths for All, a Scotland-based walking organisation co-ordinating Health Walks. Though open to all, the organisation seeks to address health inequalities, targeting resources at people who are inactive and have long-term health conditions. Helen confirmed that during the pandemic, a huge percentage of people who had been participating in the weekly Health Walks were shielding. As restrictions eased, Helen observed that many of those shielding had not returned, partly due to self-consciousness about being ‘de-conditioned, not as fit as they used to be, then worried that they’re going to come and slow the group down’. Many were also still anxious about catching Covid-19 and uncomfortable in group settings, even outdoors.

Survey responses also demonstrated that lockdown restrictions helped people discover more about, and appreciate, their immediate neighbourhood, as one respondent told us: ‘(we) discovered lots of unknown places within walking distance of our home which we would never have been aware of otherwise!’ Implicit in this observation, one repeated in many responses, is not just a valuing of the local but a valuing of local walks and what they can deliver. Another respondent told us:

Walking […] has buoyed my mental health during the pandemic, especially after three months of shielding in 2020. I have taken great pleasure in getting to know my own neighbourhood more, even after 11 years of living here! I have spent a lot of time just exploring with no real plan or route of where I want to go; that has been really enjoyable.

For many, during the pandemic everyday walking became walking every day. Walking local might go some way towards rescaling what ‘counts’ as a walk, and where one needs to go to have or enjoy ‘a walk’, as implied in this response:

I’ve spent a lot more time exploring my local area as I’ve been unable to travel beyond it so I’ve been enjoying the feeling that slowing down has enabled me to (re)discover more things that may have been under my nose.

The opportunities that the pace of walking affords for closer attention to place were also commented on repeatedly:

I have switched from cycling to walking for journeys that take less than one hour’s walk as I now have more time and do not feel time pressure so can enjoy the walk and the slower pace.

Setting myself the challenge of taking a selfie of the most beautiful or most unusual or striking thing I saw on each walk helped me be more conscious of my surroundings; rather than walking to get somewhere I was walking to explore and seek beauty and that made me feel good, much more appreciative of my surroundings.

Artist Laura Fisher engaged with themes of slowing down and attending whilst creating two interconnected and complementary audio works. ‘GOING OUT | GOING IN’ is designed to be experienced through headphones whilst walking in an urban environment. Gentle instructions ask the listener ‘to slow down, observe the streets and buildings around them and be guided by their curiosity on a journey through their city or town’ (Fisher, 2021). In the companion piece, ‘GOING IN | GOING OUT’, the work is listened to through speakers, indoors in a personal space, experienced lying down or sitting.

Responding to our project’s survey of artists (Heddon et al., 2023), Fisher shared valuable insights which we quote here to centre their expertise:

As a disabled person, I have experienced long periods of being unable to leave my home as well as reduced geographical area that I can travel around, due to my condition and capacity. So, the restrictions of lockdown were not particularly new to me, even if the global situation was. From being in conversation with other people online, I recognised […] a common struggle among many people in adapting to and coping with the confines of this reduced world.

Through my previous experiences of isolation, I had developed techniques for finding new ways to notice and experience the environments around me; to draw upon embodied memory and visualisation to enable me to journey in my body/mind to landscapes beyond my home; and to use the rhythmic practice of walking to bring meditative calm and process thoughts and emotions. I wanted to draw upon these different experiences to create a participatory performance […] As a disabled person who was also recovering from long Covid, I knew that many people were not, and are not, able to experience walking as a practice for a wide variety of reasons and so there needed to be a different access point to the works and practice. I devised the concept for a pair of sister walking performances, which offered similar practices and techniques for re-experiencing the familiar and connecting internal and external landscapes.

Combining their lived expertise as a disabled artist, whilst tapping into ideas of ‘crip time’, Fisher’s work challenges ‘normative and normalizing expectations of pace and scheduling’ (Kafer, 2013: 27). They explore the potentialities of different temporalities, and different encounters between self, environment and infrastructures that they facilitate.

Encountering and appreciating the local through walking may build stronger affective connections with place, as self becomes locally emplaced and local place registers the ephemeral traces of the self which moves through it. People used creative walking techniques for inspiration, for example ‘taking photos and improving my photography, exploring different parts of London, seeing unseen things, personal challenges (walking tube lines)’. Restrictions were adapted into creative prompts:

I set myself a challenge to walk as far as I could along the Clyde, River Kelvin and canal without driving more than the five miles permitted. Each walk I had to take a selfie with the favourite thing I saw. I plotted each walk […] on a map. I managed 41 miles in May 2020 […] a huge achievement for me. Having that wee project helped me so much.

The setting of challenges did not just provide motivation but often enabled a closer connection with nature. As one respondent reported, ‘I have discovered my neighbourhood, the minutiae of bird song and plant growth’. Another wrote: ‘I decided to learn the names of trees […] to make the endlessly repeated walks a bit more varied’. While we resist simplistically offering access to nature as a cure-all (Walton, 2022), for many, encountering nature is pivotal to their wellbeing (Selanon and Chuangchai, 2023). One respondent commented: ‘[I] focus on nature rather than my Eeyore thoughts while I’m out and about’. Experiencing the mental health benefits of walking was powerfully articulated by this respondent:

I found it increasingly important to my mental health, as the lockdowns went on, to walk, despite some mobility issues & despite having a garden. So, it wasn’t just about being outside, it was more about feeling that I was escaping & doing something that made me feel better.

Notable was frequent attentiveness to nature as a temporal signifier, as suggested by another reflection: ‘It was also important to see in the trees on the streets the signs of spring, of things changing, and of beauty in nature, which was uplifting during such a hard time’. Given that access to green spaces is inequitably distributed (Boyd et al., 2018), we hope that these positive experiences lead to collective action supporting green infrastructures. More attention must also be paid to what ‘nature’ means in this context and to what it is that is valued, acknowledging that both human and more-than-human refuge can be found in sites not typically recognised as ‘pristine’, ‘green’ or ‘natural’.

Walking, encountering

Significantly, walking afforded opportunities for repeated encounters with others, ostensibly creating comfort zones and enabling individuals to feel part of a community even during physical distancing. Sometimes, this was a conscious choice leading to new habits, walking oneself through daily routines into place and connections (Peterson, 2017). This respondent told us:

I visited parks that I didn’t normally use and that were closer to me. I now go at a regular time with the dog every morning and slowly feeling part of the local community through walking in the park. Since moving house, I’ve also more consciously walked around the area to get to know it a bit, taking different routes, taking notice of how its history is on the townscape, in street names, in changes, new developments.

Fleeting encounters were often experienced as uplifting:

During the first lockdown, people said hello to each other as we passed by. There was a real sense of community – wartime spirit? A chance to walk and interact – if only momentarily. I loved this. It reminded me of walking in the mountains where people almost automatically say hello as they pass by. The shared experience. This has reduced with each lockdown … I practise saying hello and feel connected to others.

Comments such as this gesture to contextual drivers of what we might call ‘encountering’. While the enactment of such exchanges perhaps carries more valence in a time of shared anxiety, it is interesting to note the above respondent’s commitment to keep practising encountering, affirming the value that such interaction brings and the required performativity. Conscious encountering produces an emergent, peripatetic sense of social infrastructure. As Glover et al. (2023) similarly noticed, neighbourhood walking during the pandemic enabled ‘urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociality and acts of “neighbouring”’, potentially strengthening social connectedness. Understood as a ‘tactic of everyday life’, it ‘enabled participants to subtly subvert physical distancing restrictions and stay-at-home orders’ (Glover et al., 2023: 52, 59). In the pandemic context, where more intimate social contact held higher physical risk, such micro encounters need to be acknowledged as important contributors to collective life, small gestures of affective citizenship and civil attention enacting solidarity and empathic recognition (El-Khoury et al., 2023; Glover, 2021; Horgan and Liinamaa, 2023; Tamura, 2020). The fleeting need not automatically equate with the superficial and, in its repetition, might well render a thickening of neighbourhood ties and support networks.

Many individuals and communities turned to creativity as a means of expression, for comfort, amusement or to foster new connections and developing solidarities. One respondent articulated powerfully the impact of material encounters with vernacular creativity in their neighbourhood:

Walking for me was a way to connect to my community, which felt so important during this time. Just […] seeing pictures people had painted on the pavement outside their house or boxes of books for people to help themselves to, or pebbles people had painted for people to take, was really reassuring and inspiring.

This feeling of connectedness recurred in many survey responses, encountering creativity seeming to mitigate some impacts of lockdowns, specifically isolation and anxiety: ‘I always like to see the art people put up to spread hope and positivity. It makes me feel like I am not alone’. Others spoke of delightful surprises: ‘Discovering art on a walk – fairy trails, things hanging in trees etc. – was an unexpected pleasure but not one I went looking for. Its uninvited interruption to my walk was a joy’, and ‘finding guerrilla artworks […] I enjoyed these, added curiosity and moments of wonder to my walks’. Some respondents actively sought out interventions:

Looking for street art by a local artist, Louise McVey, who makes ceramic objects and attaches them to walls around various parts of the city. I love discovering new pieces, there’s a sense of surprise, wonder and joy. The first one I found was a very memorable moment and spurred me on.

Some social relations sustained by walking may have existed pre-pandemic, however it is clear from responses that walking during the pandemic also afforded the opportunity to forge new connections. Significantly, these newly created relationships mostly took place locally. For some people, prior to the pandemic, the social lay beyond this. While no respondent used the term alienated, the new affection for neighbourhoods gestures towards that.

In encounters with artworks or found objects, it is possible that the person behind the communicative act remains an anony-mous stranger. The social relationship and the community inferred are imaginary but nevertheless affecting. In this scenario, both giver and receiver of the act traverse an imaginary exchange. We should not dismiss imaginary encounters as ‘fictional’ or ‘false’. It is in our imagination that we rehearse and practise other ways of being and encountering. Without further research, it is impossible to say whether these are instances of ‘meaningful contact’ in terms iterated by Valentine (2008: 325), changing values by engendering ‘a more general positive respect for […] others’ and others’ differences. Perhaps those leaving messages were imagining an identical recipient and vice versa? The impetus to leave something intended to bring pleasure, to virtually reach out to others, known and unknown, suggests, at the very least, a civic orientation (leaving aside debates about the altruism of gifting). Our survey responses certainly indicate that such gestures were positively interpreted and valued by many, with contact considered meaningful. We acknowledge the risk of romanticising these encounters as performances of neighbourly inclusivity. For those who experience public space as typically hostile, with that hostility magnified during the pandemic, these micro-civilities may ring hollow, not least because they were disconnected from a politics of equity (Low and Iveson, 2016). Issues of safety were a major barrier to people’s participation in both everyday and creative walking.

Unequal walking

Fundamental and foundational access needs must be met to enable space for creativity to emerge. It is important to recognise that the benefits of walking (creative or otherwise) were not universally accessible. Many respondents to our survey were explicit that the central barrier to walking was deeply connected to Covid-19. Respondents who were shielding were clear that going out for a walk felt too risky, and indeed until April 2021 those deemed clinically vulnerable were required to stay at home. While the social potential of going for a walk was valued by many, for others it provoked anxiety, with people’s behaviours identified as anti-social in the pandemic context (a flip side to the conviviality noted above). To cite survey respondents:

Walking in the park became frustrating due to the number of people standing chatting on the path […] at quieter times groups of youths hanging about made me feel unsafe, enough to make me change my route or cut my walk short.

I would love to have been able to get out, but there has been nowhere safe to do so […] I tried once very early morning, but it was very difficult still to find somewhere safe (some people distanced, many didn’t, few wore masks).

Given that walking was one of the few activities permitted and encouraged during the pandemic restrictions, it is unsurprising that many places were busier. That the needs of those who were most vulnerable were not considered in the use and management of these spaces is acknowledged in this response: ‘I was in the clinically extremely vulnerable group so was shielding – I walked a lot less than I would have liked to because green spaces were very busy and there were no protected times or routes for those at higher risk’.

The inability to walk during the pandemic had multiple impacts for respondents. As with some regular participants in Paths for All walks, de-conditioning was an issue for survey respondents, with longer-term consequences: ‘I deconditioned so walked less often and at slower pace unfortunately’, and ‘I used to walk everywhere, now I hardly move. I’ve lost my confidence and my routines’. While many found pleasure in staying local, others reported boredom and frustration: ‘At first I walked to get out the house. Then as I can’t go far, it got a bit boring. Then I just got used to staying indoors for weeks’. Another said: ‘being so restricted in the choice of route made it very tedious, so I stopped doing it as often as I used to’. One person summed this up, linking the loss to infrastructure failures:

I was almost immobilised/struck with inertia by Covid and shielding and fear. Plus my job became more intense working from home and on Zoom. I was more fatigued and my pain worse. And a lack of green space and benches in some areas made walking both less interesting and also harder.

Infrastructure, or a lack of it, represented a significant barrier to free movement for many disabled people. During the first lockdown, benches were taped off, despite being vital for those who need to rest as part of walking activity and an essential part of mobilities infrastructure (Bynon and Rishbeth, 2015). The press carried reports of zealous policing of who, when, where and how people walked, with slowness or loitering deemed suspicious. Crip time was constructed as problematic. Alongside the removal of formal and informal resting places, several survey respondents reported the significant negative impacts of closing public toilets:

Closure of public buildings and commercial facilities meant that I stayed at home more […] I’ve wet myself when out and about due to the lack of loos in lockdown […] Lockdown has restricted my ability to go out and walk, because I’m afraid of ‘being caught short’.

This is one of many responses to our survey underlining toilets as a fundamental part of accessible infrastructure (Slater and Jones, 2021). Changes in road usage also had a negative impact, magnifying already existing barriers identified by this survey respondent:

Fewer but faster vehicles made crossing even minor roads unpleasant. Parking on pavements & the damage caused to them made walking very painful (arthritis) & the lack of design for people became much more noticeable, e.g. the random placing of posts, dropped kerbs, level surfaces & sight-line obstructions.

The emergence or reconfiguration of street furniture also caused issues. Councils across the UK took measures to support local businesses adapting to lockdown restrictions, including allowing pubs, cafes and restaurants to develop outdoor seating areas. Sandy Taylor, executive officer for the National Federation of the Blind UK (Scotland), demonstrated in our walking interview with him the consequences for blind and visually impaired people: ‘My cane gets tangled up with the chairs and with customers’ baggage underneath the chairs [and] we can’t self-distance […] It’s inaccessible to many, many people now’.

Other infrastructural obstacles included poor signage and lack of access to public land, which survey respondents felt increased during the conditions of the pandemic:

[I] am often stopped getting to places by roads with no footpaths […] I wanted to walk to my vaccine appointment but was stopped by a private sign which said ‘keep out, guard dogs loose’. This was stopping access to a large tract of (public) land […] the only walkable route.

Walking (safely) during the pandemic was strongly encouraged. Lots of publicity was given to initiatives to improve walking, including streets turned into pedestrian-only routes, but several respondents reflected on marginalisation: ‘The city was given money by central government to improve walking and cycling. As a wheelchair user, I wanted to test any improvement. There were none. The pavements remained dangerous and uncomfortable’. The importance of safer pavements was highlighted by active travel researcher Harrie Larrington-Spencer, who told us that with infrastructural improvements, ‘the focus needs to be on pavements and improving pavement condition’. Campaigns by organisations such as Living Streets amplify this message. Hamraie (2020) highlights how too often active travel initiatives, with an emphasis on individual health and fitness, conflict with notions of ‘crip mobility justice’. This echoes the vital call for mobility justice articulated by Sheller (2018), Waitt and Harada (2023), Morrison et al. (2024) and many artists, activists and disabled people’s organisations. We assert that a fundamental shift is needed to ensure that all bodies, and mobilities, are valued and their rights to the city enabled.

Throughout the pandemic, the impact of lockdown was unequal and experienced differently for many reasons; there was no singular Covid-19 experience. Other intersectional factors made walking challenging, for example one survey respondent said: ‘[It’s] practically impossible to walk with a toddler because of their pace, distractibility and stamina […] Because of caring responsibilities, [I] was actually more housebound’. Several respondents spoke of street harassment limiting their movements, with one person aware that ‘there was a very definite increase’. This included racialised and gendered harassment: ‘After several incidents where I was approached, threatened or followed by men when I was alone, I changed my route and walking times’. The impact of all forms of harassment, including ableism, needs further discussion. For some, quiet streets conversely felt safer; for example, one respondent said they ‘walked more during lockdown [because] there was less chance of people seeing me and mocking my disability’.

Legal limits placed on individuals had psychological impacts alongside physical ones. Interviewing Stacey, who is neurodivergent, we learnt of the deep conflict they felt negotiating desires to protect others versus a fundamental need to get out. For Stacey, walking has always been central to their sense of self:

restricted movement was excruciatingly hard […] staying indoors all day is just not something I can ever tolerate […] I’ve always felt a kind of compulsion to some degree to get out and walk a certain amount every day […] I need to move […] I felt very, very alone […] My horizons had narrowed so terrifyingly.

Stacey’s experience is important to recognise, not just because of the pain they endured but also as another reminder to avoid homogenising disability.

We close this review of disabled people’s experiences of walking during Covid-19 by foregrounding the importance of recognising and respecting bodily autonomy and difference. Such differences exist not just between people but within individuals’ experiences, often shifting across time, as this survey respondent tells us: ‘My attitude to walking has varied wildly over the pandemic, sometimes on an hourly basis – from frustration and boredom with it, to joy and discovery. Previously it wasn’t really something that would bring up strong emotions’. There is a risk that the promotion of walking essentialises and universalises its benefits, ignoring individual needs and contexts. As advocates of walking, and especially creative walking, we are mindful of this respondent’s warning:

Doctors and others are always telling me to go for daily walks and I find it frustrating and upsetting, because all that trying to walk every day did was cause me more chronic pain and make me bored and stressed.

Another respondent cautions about the negative impacts of ‘gamifying’ walking:

There is a lack of social awareness around the fact that for people with chronic illness some days a simple walk to the shop [is] too painful. The cultural and societal push for ‘counting steps’, ‘logging miles walked’ etc. all in the name of health and wellbeing can be detrimental to the mental health of people with chronic illnesses […] Everything feels like a competition and like you are being silently judged.

In asserting walking as a right, we recognise the right to choose not to walk, an idea explored by artists Nathan and Stratford (2022) in ‘Incline/Recline/Decline: Ways to Not Necessarily Walk’. This work gently subverts expectations of movement and productivity implicit in ‘walking’. Walking and resting must be recognised as mutually constitutive, not oppositional, so they provide a set of instructions for ‘anyone who for whatever reason finds themselves resting, unable or unwilling to walk’ (Nathan and Stratford, 2022: 71). These begin with ‘Find spots to recline and make yourself as comfortable as possible’ and include ‘On a train spanning between seats’, ‘On a bench in a park’ and on an office floor (Nathan and Stratford, 2022: 72). Nathan and Stratford’s work demonstrates the immense value of expanding an understanding of mobilities, movement and walking art, whilst reminding us that basic material needs must be met to enable creativity to flourish.

Conclusion

Drawing on original data, this article shares disabled people’s testimonies about their experiences of walking in cities during the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing them together with a focus on creative walking. Material, social and cultural conditions presented obstacles to free movement for disabled people, with existing barriers magnified by policies and practices which devalued disabled people’s needs and further restricted their engagement with walking. However, walking, and specifically creative walking, also brought solace, joy and new connections to local place and people. Vernacular creative activities bridged physical distance and fostered new solidarities and networks. That some interactions were virtual, imagined or fleeting does not render them without value. Practices of everyday and creative walking, and the work of walking artists, often overlap and enrich pedestrian experiences. Bringing these different but interrelated modes into conversation provides new insights into the potentialities of walking, especially when the expertise, needs and creativity of disabled people are centred. Creative approaches can model alternatives. Speculative futures conjured by emancipatory imaginations provide glimpses of transformative paths to a more equitable and inclusive future walking. However, lasting change requires more than performative freedoms if crip bodies are truly embraced as integral to ‘just’ walking. Mobility justice demands structural changes, improving supportive infrastructures, adopting an expanded view of what ‘walking’ means and avoiding essentialising walking’s benefits. This shift would view equality of opportunities for walking as a fundamental right and a foundational aspect of a more sustainable and heterogeneous urban environment. Disabled people’s multivalent experiences of walking during the pandemic offer a salutary reminder of the importance of acknowledging both individual needs and wider contexts in any encounter with walking, scholarly ones included.