This study shifts walkability from a formal property of street networks to a lived contradiction. Residents of low-income Accra neighbourhoods walk extensively, yet the very environments in which walking is indispensable can be dangerous, stressful and poorly supported. Through focus groups, sixty resident interviews and ten institutional interviews, Okyere and colleagues distinguish high walking prevalence from genuinely walkable urbanism. The iconic concept is the “captive walker”: a person for whom walking is not necessarily an elective healthy behaviour but an economic and infrastructural necessity. Methodologically, the paper privileges lived accounts of mobility, revealing how social relations, health, spatial awareness, traffic danger and design failure coexist within the same practice. Its bridge to comparative urbanism is powerful because it destabilises a policy category often imported from contexts where walking is framed as lifestyle choice. Accra shows that identical indicators can signify radically different urban realities.
URBANISM MEETS ART