How Do We Reclaim American Cities for People Who Walk?

I’ve walked for days, even months and years, in Boston, New York City, London, Paris, Moscow, Vienna, Rome, Sydney—all beautiful, unique cities with varying grades of walkability. I went to Denver partly because all the books I’d read about walking tended to orbit around either these world-renowned cities or hiking and mountain climbing. “What about New York?” people invariably asked me when I talked about the lack of walkability in the United States. Sometimes they’d bring up Chicago, every now and then Boston. It’s so easy to turn to New York City and its fellow high-profile cities and ignore the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Yet all over the United States, towns and cities are quietly regaining their right to walk. From health initiatives like the Walk with a Doc program to the surprising removals of Futurama-inspired freeways in cities like Dallas, Texas, and Rochester, New York, to Atlanta’s one-billion-dollar commitment to walking and biking infrastructure over 25 years, walking is making a comeback. A slow, step-by-step comeback, as might be expected of such an endeavor, but with the strength one would also expect of a movement seeking to reclaim our free-striding bodies’ rights to our public spaces. I went to Denver to find how at least one lesser-discussed city was reshaping itself around the pedestrian.

On a Tuesday morning, after walking about an hour from my hotel in search of hot coffee and something to eat, I set out to tramp six miles from Aurora to downtown Denver, where I was meeting with Paul Kashmann, the city councilman who chaired the mayor’s sidewalks working group aimed at identifying the problems and roadblocks that prevented Denver from being a completely walking-friendly city.

Depending on your pace, it takes nearly three hours to walk from where I was in Aurora to the City and County Building in downtown Denver. The route that Google Maps gave me was a mostly straight shot down East 13th Avenue through the full spectrum of Denver’s sidewalks, pseudo-sidewalks, and utter lack of sidewalks. There were long stretches where even desire lines (natural paths created by erosion from foot traffic) were absent and I was shoved onto the busy road, wondering how a person with even moderately impaired mobility, or vision or hearing, could safely get from here to there on foot. Forget a wheelchair or walker; that was impossible.

Sidewalk maintenance and repair are only two of the challenges faced by a community interested in promoting walkability. Problems plaguing either very old or very new neighborhoods, like heaving side- walks and signs placed right in the middle of a wheelchair or stroller route, are easier to x than some of the odder infrastructure embedded in Denver’s midcentury neighborhoods. Built up during the 1950s and 1960s, these areas are characterized by a feature I’d never seen before: those “Hollywood sidewalks.” The Hollywood sidewalk, or Hollywood curb as it’s also called, combines the gutter, sidewalk, and curb into one unit, but because the sidewalk portion is only about 32 inches wide (less than three feet), its uselessness as a functional sidewalk is obvious to anyone who wants to walk safely from one place to another.

I’d first run into these sidewalks near my hotel, which was plopped out in a cobbled-together area of the city where swathes of big-box stores sat plumply next to a fast, dangerous four-lane boulevard. Walking along this road toward the train station, I came across slim sidewalks rolling straight up from the street. They presented no barrier between pedestrians and traffic, and not even close to enough room for two people to walk side by side, much less for anyone who needed a mobility aid. The thought of walking a small child down those sidewalks made my skin crawl, but if a parent were getting around the city by bus, there were no other options, as the bus stops were right on the edges of these strips of pavement.
Why, I wondered, would anyone build such a thing? But the answer is obvious: To save money, especially during the decades when it was assumed that most people would be getting around by driving.

Most of these weird constructions were, in Denver, wrapped around neighborhoods that seemed to be on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Smaller houses in greater disrepair, set close together, and very few trees. Unshaded, exposed, unsafe walking. What it shows is not that those neighborhoods are bad places to live, but that, as is too often the case, people with less political and financial power get fewer amenities and greater barriers to health and mobility.

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This access includes the presence of trees, with their attendant shade and pollution-filtering, stress-lowering benefits. Trees get barely a nod in conversations about walking, but, as shown by detailed studies about the value of walking in nature, they are integral both to understanding walking’s complex benefits for our minds and bodies, and to realizing cities that are once again truly walkable.

Throughout the eons since we first slipped out of their branches and onto the ground, trees have been silent witnesses to the evolution of our walking, its loss, and now, perhaps, its reclamation. Trees have nurtured our steps, our imaginations, and our health. We’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of years ignoring the ways trees—like many aspects of our ecosystems—shelter and shape our lives.

Their impact is, in tandem with the gifts of walking itself, finally filtering up to active consciousness; in Japan, the practice of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” has become so popular that researchers began studying it to find if, indeed, hanging out among trees had any actual health advantages, or if the decreases in stress, among other reported benefits, are imaginary. The Japanese government spent eight years and over four million dollars to find that the practice—which in essence consists of spending quiet time among trees—does in fact significantly boost the human immune system, lower blood pressure and cortisol levels (which are linked to stress), and even lower tendencies toward depression and aggression. The effects are attributed to phytoncide, a compound produced by trees to protect themselves from insects and infection. Inhaling it appears to be beneficial to human beings. One weekend in the woods can lift physical health for up to a month, and even 30 minutes hanging out or strolling among trees can measurably reduce stress and blood pressure for a whole day. Forest bathing isn’t just an eco-idealist’s cloud-nine fantasy of what’s good for humans’ minds and bodies; it’s so effective at improving health that governments from Japan to Scotland are making active use of walkable forests to supplement a variety of treatments for mental and physical wellness.

It’s no wonder that when June arrives and nights finally hover above freezing, I start mentally packing for our family camping trips into the abundance of national and state forest lands I’m lucky enough to live among. If there’s one thing Montana can lay claim to besides its fabled big sky, it’s trees dripping with phytoncide.

Journalist Florence Williams, a contributing editor to Outside magazine, spent a lot of time detailing the Japanese research on shinrin-yoku in her 2017 book The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. She also covered the importance of extensive vigorous outdoor playtime for everyone from kids with ADHD to Iraq War vets with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), from adults suffering from depression, anxiety, obesity, or myopia to children with rickets—a childhood disease caused by vitamin D deficiency, or lack of sunlight, that was all but a footnote of history until we started spending so much time indoors and in cars.

Williams went into the woods and wilderness with researchers in Japan and scientists in the American West, studying the effects that being in nature—usually but not always unplugged from smartphones, iPads, and the like—has on our mental and physical health. Trees are a constant theme in her book, trees in city parks, trees in Japan’s shinrin-yoku destinations, trees in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, the home she has to leave to move to Washington, D.C., for her husband’s job. The trails near her Colorado home, she wrote, are “ribbons of delight” and it tears her apart to leave them.

Lack of trees, and green space in general, affects our health in seemingly unrelated and often unconscious ways.

A study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development using participants in the long-term Berlin Aging Study (involving 2,200 residents) and published in 2017, found that city-dwellers who live near forests are healthier and happier than those who don’t, including those who live near non-forest green spaces. A different study found that people who live in urban rather than rural areas are at higher risk for mood and anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, but access to nature, particularly trees, seems to alleviate some of that risk. Pointing to studies on shinrin-yoku, the Max Planck researchers said in their conclusion: “Walking in a forest as well as sitting in a forest and watching lead to a reduction of prefrontal hemoglobin concentration, an observation that has been interpreted as a sign of relaxation.”

I’d never heard of phytoncide until I attended a one-hour forest-bathing class in Canada in 2016, but the scent of pine trees has always been, for me, the scent of home. Growing up in Montana, I’d been raised to view the forests and rivers of the Rocky Mountains as my family’s escape, vacation destination, solace, playground, backyard, and food source. Attending a forest-bathing class felt a bit silly only because it imitated the woods-walking I’ve done regularly most of my life without thinking much about it. I tried, while I was learning about shinrin-yoku, to remember what it was like during the 20 years I lived mostly in cities, when culture was everywhere but so were pavement and traffic and noise, and trees were few and far between.

When suburbs were first built, trees were considered normal accessories to an idyllic white middle-class life. Later, as commuting became the defining experience of that same middle-class life, trees posed a crash hazard for the inevitable times when a driver, drunk or distracted or going too fast, allowed his car to leave the roadway and jump the curb. Those trees promised shade and pleasure for walkers, as well as a protective barrier from the road, but their existence was considered only in light of the danger to drivers.

As cities across the United States and elsewhere restructure themselves around walking as a way of regaining health and reconnecting communities, it is the trees that I look for. My experience has been that how far and how often most of us are willing to walk is directly proportional to how exposed our route is to unfiltered sunlight, especially in the summer. And I’m not alone. In Dallas, a team at the University of Texas at Arlington’s Institute of Urban Studies began painstakingly tracking the famously unwalkable city’s shade and tree cover. They’re doing it because residents and business owners want walkability, a concept that includes the trees that provide cool shade and psychological solace to pedestrians.

Whether the trees that lend companionship to our strolling are towering, leafy reminders of a different generational legacy, or are newly planted, spindly along lonely concrete, they are a promise of a different kind of future.

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Denver, on this journey, was scorching hot; at least it felt that way to my pale, easily burned self. I kept careful track of where reliable shade would make walking a pleasure, where the uttering of leaves and the smell of green growing things would make me smile and lighten my steps, and where the glare of concrete and sky and traffic would make my body feel burdened and wearisome. Walking ten to fifteen miles a day over the course of five days, my internal mapping system started to orient itself to the layout of the city, to its districts and neighborhoods, highways and side streets, gentrification and decline, the existence or lack of trees, and to its sidewalks.

Denver’s sidewalk system, comprising around 2,700 miles of pavement, feels like a code to the city’s history of development. Very old (by American standards) neighborhoods have the standard-width sidewalk, about five feet, buffered by a grassy verge between pedestrians and the roadway. The city’s pedestrian master plan, with straightforward practicality, calls these verges “street lawns” and the trees, when present, “street trees.” Together the lawns and trees make up a network of “tree lawns,” which add to the feeling that Denver—or at least parts of it—is a set of widespread and walkable urban developments that connect a network of open, rolling, mostly shaded parks.

The city is fortunate. In 1878 its civic leaders envisioned a city of parks connected by wide boulevards lined with trees. This vision was enacted in the early 1900s, and, although Denver suffered from the same car-centric infrastructure craze that hit the rest of the country in midcentury, its efforts to chip its way back to a pedestrian-friendly design are made easier by the patterns and groundwork laid out by its earlier residents and leaders.

No matter how determined Denverites are to make their city walkable, though, doing so won’t be easy. Although older neighborhoods are accessible for children, many elderly walkers, and cyclists, disrepair is an enormous problem for anyone who might be less sure-footed or using a wheelchair or walker. And sidewalk repair is a fraught, complex issue. As in most towns and cities across the United States, Denver’s landowners (homes or businesses) are responsible for the sidewalks directly in front of their buildings. While sidewalks are technically public spaces, users must rely on private homeowners to shovel, de-ice, repair broken concrete, and deal with bulges caused by frost heaves or those beautiful shade trees’ roots. Sidewalk maintenance is expensive, and many homeowners aren’t even aware that they are legally required to clear snow and repair broken concrete.

Does Denver take over responsibility for the thousands of miles of sidewalk maintenance itself? Should it subsidize homeowners’ obligations? If a disabled person can’t use a sidewalk, who bears the responsibility to make the walkway accessible? Because Denver is taking walking seriously, it’s already begun to address some of these issues, passing a bond of 47 million dollars in 2017 for sidewalks, and allocating over four million dollars of a revolving fund to help low-income homeowners make sidewalk repairs.

Reclaiming our walkable world is a process we can’t afford to abandon, but it’s full of these exhausting, detailed questions, the realm of policy wonks and budget hawks. Where do we place our priorities? What does the law say in the first place? What about the potentially sticky issue of legal liability, which eviscerated Los Angeles’s budget after it took control of its sidewalks?

This level of detail is where many passionate walkers lose focus, get bored, wander off to talk about Thoreau, Beethoven, Wordsworth, and Solnit. Attention to these details, though, is the only concrete action that will bring everyday, accessible walking back into our lives. Denver is a wonderfully walkable city, but disparities are stark: consistently, Denver’s lower-income areas tend to have the worst sidewalks; the areas with the highest rates of childhood obesity also lack walking accessibility. Only 5 percent of Denver’s nearly 3,000 miles of sidewalk meet its own design standards—where, that is, the sidewalks exist.

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This article has been adapted from Antonia Malchik’s new book, A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time. Copyright © 2019 by Antonia Malchik.