‘Talk the Walk’: The co-design of socially sustainable mobility solutions in informal settlements

Walking is globally acknowledged as a primary form of active mobility for health promotion and social wellbeing, and for climate change mitigation. This paper offers alternative perspectives on walking within informal settlements based on collaborative participatory research with the residents of two low-income urban settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Nairobi, Kenya. The methodology was designed to capture participants’ everyday mobility experiences and to explore how these affect their livelihoods and daily activities. It identifies that walking facilities within settlements and connections with the formal city are unanimously described as inadequate and unsafe by residents, with unpaved roads and footpaths, and temporarily built bridges. Footpaths obstructed by waste and inadequate drainage ditches intensify these poor walking environments during rainy seasons when flooding makes walking almost impossible. As such, walking is seen as the option of least choice by these walking-dependent communities, to be replaced by motorised travel wherever it can be afforded, which is a direct challenge to sustainable urban mobility objectives.