Walking is political. I do not refer here to demonstrations in which a political message is conveyed through collective movement from one place to another, but rather to two other aspects: the planning of cities and the ecological implications of walking—or not walking—in urban environments.

At first glance, we might assume that walking depends solely on our two legs and our willingness to move. However, it is a far more complex phenomenon that depends on several factors. As Rebecca Solnit puts it in her famous essay on walking, ‘[o]ne must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints’ (Solnit, 2001: 181). At the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that the first condition concerns class, the second infrastructure, and the third discrimination (gender, race, disability, etc.). While all of these issues are important, this article focuses on the second condition, namely space: where do we walk, and how do infrastructures shape the way we walk? The aim of this article is thus to analyse Paris as a walking city from the 19th century, through Baudelaire’s perspective, to the 21st century, through the lens of the poet and philosopher Jean-Christophe Bailly. In doing so, it examines the role of infrastructure in shaping walking practices and considers their implications from a contemporary ecological perspective.

As several studies have pointed out (Carse, 2017; Guajardo Soto, 2023; Esposito et al., 2023), the term infrastructure originally had a literal meaning in 19th-century France, referring to the works ‘conducted beneath unlaid tracks (roadbeds)’ or the construction that was ‘otherwise organizationally prior to them (surveys, plans, bridges, tunnels, embankments)’ (Carse, 2017: 29). This article does not aim to recount the history of the term, which has already been thoroughly studied. Rather, I would like to emphasise that infrastructure has obviously come to mean much more than the structure beneath railways. Today, the term encompasses both the material and immaterial arrangements that enable societies to function, including systems for the circulation of people, goods, and information, as well as sites of political debate and collective meaning-making (Esposito et al., 2023: 12). Accordingly, infrastructure should not be understood as a fixed physical object but as a dynamic assemblage of material elements, institutions, legal frameworks, policies, and forms of knowledge that evolve across space and time (Anand, Gupta & Appel, 2018: 12). As Larkin puts it, infrastructures are the ‘built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space’ (Larkin, 2013: 328).

Streets are the primary infrastructure for walking in the city. Their geography, layout, architectural features, and other physical characteristics shape the presence or absence of pedestrians. However, walking is not confined to a single street. Beyond sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and traffic signals that make movement safer and easier at the street level, the city as a whole functions as an interconnected network of infrastructures that can either encourage or discourage walking. Factors such as traffic intensity, the presence of parks and green spaces, pollution levels, social practices (including the presence of other pedestrians), public transport, and even the overall image of the city all play a role in shaping walking practices. In this sense, this article understands infrastructure as a confluence of material and immaterial elements that together produce a walkable city, from the scale of individual streets to the broader urban imagination.

Our 21st-century cities are profoundly shaped by the development and establishment of 19th-century infrastructures (Kirkby, 2023: 2). Paris was also shaped to its contemporary form mostly in the 19th century, during the Haussmannian transformations. If this brutal remodulation of Paris was critiqued by some of Haussmann’s contemporaries, such as the poet Charles Baudelaire, because of the demolition of the old city, it also undoubtedly modernised the city and adapted it to the industrial era.

However, is it still operational in the 21st century and its exigences? When Haussmann directed the works in Paris, people walked and travelled in horse-drawn vehicles. Since then, the automobile has come to conquer the streets of modern cities, profoundly reshaping everyday life and urban planning. In addition, ecological concerns have become central to contemporary debates on infrastructure in the 21st century. As Jaillet (2016) argues, renewed interest in walking is linked to a broader critique of the automobile-centred model that shaped cities in the second half of the 20th century. Growing awareness of climate change and the finite nature of fossil fuels has encouraged policymakers to rethink mobility systems and to promote more sustainable forms of urban development.

Today, walking has become a marginal activity in urban life. As major works on walking and urban mobility—such as Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (2001) and Matthew Beaumont’s The Walker (2020)—have shown, the figure of the urban walker—born in the modern city of the 19th century, and experiencing both his zenith and his decline during that period—is now disappearing, largely as a consequence of the utilitarian logic of capitalism. As Solnit argues, the pursuit of efficiency is ‘actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between’ (Solnit, 2001: 11). Even when people do walk today, they are often no longer fully present but distracted by digital devices, ‘impoverishing their everyday experience of its physical and social life by funnelling their attention through the screen’ (Beaumont, 2020: 10).

Recent efforts to promote walkable cities—such as Anne Hidalgo’s 15-minute city in Paris—seek to reintegrate walking into contemporary metropolitan life. Paradoxically, however, they often do so again in the name of efficiency rather than as an end in itself. As Pascal Amphoux (2004; translation my own) argues, contemporary political discourse on walking tends to emphasise its ecological and functional benefits above all, promoting developments such as ‘the removal of cars in most European urban policies (Paris being a current example)’, and contributing to phenomena such as ‘the gradual rise of critical discourse on the shortcomings and unintended effects of pedestrian streets, and the growing promotion of intermodality’ (138).1

Rather than adopting a ‘utilitarian’ perspective on walking and its infrastructures, I propose to approach walking from a philosophical standpoint—specifically, that of emotion, which Amphoux identifies as the third type of mobility, after ‘motricité’ (spatial or technical dimension of walking) and ‘mouvance’ (social dimension): ‘walking as a physical pleasure or a form of enjoyment of the landscape’ (139)—and which, as will be shown, is no less ‘useful’. I will analyse 19th-century Paris’ transformation through the lens of the poet and urban walker Charles Baudelaire. This Paris, and its critique by Baudelaire—later analysed by figures such as Walter Benjamin and Antoine Compagnon—will serve as the starting point for this study, which seeks to understand the legacy of Second Empire infrastructures in the contemporary world.

In a second part, I turn to the conception of the city of Paris in the essays of the philosopher and writer Jean-Christophe Bailly. As a teacher in the École nationale supérieure de la nature et du paysage in Blois, he is specially interested in landscapes and architecture, often treated in his texts, the most known being Dépaysement. Voyages en France [Disorientation: Travels in France] (2011). Here, I examine how he conceptualises the infrastructures inherited from Haussmann’s and Baudelaire’s Paris, and how these relate to current ecological concerns in three of his publications that focus on the city: La phrase urbaine [The Urban Sentence] (2013), Paris quand même [Paris Nevertheless] (2022) and La ville en éclats [The City in Fragments] (2025).

Although Bailly does not explicitly adopt an ecological perspective, his work has a particular concern for living beings and space and develops a particular ‘ecopoethics’—the latter being a concept coined by Anne Gourio (2021). According to Gourio, ‘ecopoeths’ ‘revive the Hölderlinian imperative of a ‘poetic dwelling in the world’ in a context of ‘ecological urgency’. In doing so, they return to a poetics rooted in the land and in territory, guided by an ethical concern: ‘In a context of growing ecological precarity, all these approaches indeed converge on a rejection of the poem’s exclusively aesthetic purpose, in favour of the participation of ethos in the construction of a liveable dwelling and a shared world’ (Gourio, 2021; translation my own).

The growing body of scholarship on walking—its history, philosophy, and artistic representations (Le Breton, 2000; Solnit, 2001; Amato, 2004; Coverley, 2006; Gros, 2019; Beaumont, 2020)—shows that this practice is far more than a simple technique of putting one foot in front of the other. Rather, it is a culturally constructed phenomenon whose emergence can be historically situated. The figure of the walker, initially conceived as the archetype of the wealthy white male, emerged in the late 18th century and was consolidated during the 19th century through the Romantic idealisation of Rousseauian nature and the rise of the modern city. This does not imply, however, that forms of walking did not exist earlier or in other cultural contexts; rather, it is this particular cultural construction of the walker that belongs to modernity.

According to Laurent Turcot (2010; translation my own), walking in Paris emerged as early as the 17th century and was closely linked to the creation of spaces where pedestrians could move without being struck by carriages or splashed by waste thrown from windows:

This new or renewed infrastructure avant la lettre enabled the emergence of the figure of the promeneur in the 18th century and that of the flâneur in the 19th century. However, the latter was already shaped by the most significant urban transformation project in Paris, commonly referred to as Haussmannisation, named after Baron Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, who oversaw the city’s large-scale renovation during the Second Empire under Napoleon III.

Beginning in 1852, Haussmann’s plans included the sanitation, beautification, and securitisation of the city. This entailed the demolition of old Paris—its buildings and narrow streets—in favour of wide boulevards that allowed air to circulate, through the famous percées (urban ‘pierces’). It also involved the construction of a modern sewer system, new buildings, parks, and green spaces. Finally, it exiled the poor to the periphery in order to create a rich and pleasant, bourgeois centre. As Walter Benjamin observes, these transformations were not solely intended to make the city more beautiful or healthy, but also to control the population, which had a strong tradition of building barricades and engaging in revolutionary activity: ‘The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time’ (Benjamin, 2006: 43).

Both criticised and praised, Haussmann’s work responded—albeit in his own way—to a growing population and a changing world, shaping what we now call the ‘modern city.’ The large avenues and boulevards facilitated the circulation of people, who increasingly occupied and walked through streets and parks, frequently depicted by artists.2 This mass—the foule—created the ideal environment for the flâneur, for whom walking became an opportunity for immersion in personal reflection and observation (Turcot, 2010). For Benjamin, who analyses Baudelaire’s flânerie, the flâneur is one ‘who goes botanizing on the asphalt’—a phrase that alludes to the Romantic passion for nature while highlighting its transformation in the modern city. Rather than exploring forests and mountains, the urban walker studies his surroundings, treating the artificial landscape of the city as a new form of nature.

Baudelaire himself connects in ‘Les foules’ [‘The Crowd’] of Petits poèmes en prose the act of walking to poetic creation, linking the solitary walker to the figure of the poet who is alone in the crowd:

Baudelaire thus practices a form of urban walking that enables errant movement and a simultaneous immersion in the self and the crowd. The flâneur is an outsider, ‘both immersed in the crowd but isolated by it’ (Coverley, 2006: 60).

Yet, while the modern city’s multitude offers certain benefits to the poet, modernity is far from wholly positive in his view. As Antoine Compagnon (2014; translation my own) argues, Baudelaire’s relationship to modernity and its manifestations is deeply ambivalent. Compagnon even suggests that Baudelaire’s conception of modernity is paradoxically grounded in a form of anti-modernity: although inseparable from the modern world, he simultaneously resists its values. Thus, while Baudelaire celebrates modernity as an aesthetic category,4 he repeatedly criticises its concrete expressions, including ‘bourgeois materialism, Haussmannian urbanism, democratic fraternity—in a word, progress, or more precisely, the dogma of progress, the faith in progress, symbolized by the press, photography, the city’ (Compagnon, 2014).

Baudelaire was, in fact, critical of Haussmann’s transformations, as expressed in the famous poem ‘Le Cygne’ [‘The Swan’], where he laments the destruction of old Paris:

This ambivalence toward modernity, and Baudelaire’s critique of progress, may in fact be considered more ‘modern’ than the attitude of many of his contemporaries, who generally embraced modern innovations with enthusiasm. Only a minority of thinkers critically addressed the transformation of cities and the destruction of natural environments. Rapid population growth and the development of industrial urban centres raised increasing concerns about public health. More broadly, critiques of the modern city were often inseparable from critiques of capitalism itself:

Thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Considerant, and Flora Tristan simultaneously criticised capitalism, industrialisation, pollution, and the miserable living conditions of the working classes. Although Baudelaire’s perspective is not ecological,6 his denunciation of urban demolition and his attention to the fate of the poor and the ironic description of the violence they suffer in several of his poems7 resonate, to some extent, with these broader critiques.

From a contemporary standpoint, the ambivalence surrounding Haussmannisation invites renewed attention. On the one hand, Haussmann’s interventions entailed the large-scale destruction of the urban fabric of old Paris, erasing a significant architectural and social patrimony and displacing working-class populations toward the city’s peripheries. This process not only transformed the physical city but also reshaped its social geography, reinforcing divisions between classes. On the other hand, these same transformations created the spatial and infrastructural conditions necessary for new forms of urban experience. The wide boulevards, open vistas, and interconnected street network established a new unity within the city, while also making walking more practicable and pleasurable. As Benjamin observes, ‘[b]efore Haussmann, wide pavements were rare; the narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Flânerie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades’ (Benjamin, 2006: 68). In this sense, Haussmannisation provided an ideal setting for flânerie. Yet the same process of modernisation gradually destroyed the passages, or ‘rue-galéries’ so characteristic of Paris, where the flâneur was born (Benjamin, 2013).

This paradox is particularly evident in relation to the evolution of mobility in the city. Although Haussmann’s transformations initially improved pedestrian circulation, they also laid the foundations for a street network increasingly adapted to vehicular traffic. As Lesieur (2023, translation my own) notes, the Haussmannian boulevards were designed not only ‘to ventilate the city, but also to accommodate horse-drawn traffic during the era of rapid automobile expansion’. This transformation profoundly altered the experience of walking. As Coverley (2006: 62) argues, the flâneur gradually lost the privileged knowledge that had allowed him to navigate the city’s labyrinthine streets. As traffic increased and public space became increasingly regulated and commercialised, walking ceased to be an exploratory practice and was reduced to a more passive form of promenade.

Haussmann did not—or perhaps could not—anticipate the transformation of transportation brought about by motorisation. However, as Jordan notes, ‘The transportation problems Haussmann had been unable or unwilling to solve remained (and still exist) to plague the city’ (2004: 95–96). Criticism of Haussmann’s legacy also emerged long before contemporary debates on sustainable mobility. Writing in 1962, Bernard Champigneulle argued that Haussmann’s urban model had become outdated and condemned its lasting consequences, including the destruction of historic heritage and the reinforcement of the city’s socio-spatial divisions between the wealthy West and the poorer East (Champigneulle, 1962).

As Jordan (2004) further argues, Haussmann’s ideas about urban mobility were, even by mid-19th-century standards, limited, being largely confined to walking and private carriages. He had little understanding of the importance of public transportation within the city, even though he demonstrated some imagination regarding railway systems connecting Paris. In turn, according to Jordan, the growing presence of automobiles has placed increasing pressure on Parisian streets, perhaps more than in many American cities, although the extent of this congestion is difficult to quantify (96).

In summary, by adapting the city to circulation without fully anticipating motorised traffic, it laid the groundwork for the later dominance of the automobile, without providing an adequate infrastructure to accommodate it. The rise of the automobile thus generated new tensions, and today, from an ecological perspective, we are confronted with a challenge that echoes that of Haussmann’s era: how can walking be restored in cities whose streets have been overtaken by cars?

This article has shown, through the perspectives of poets and essayists, that 19th-century infrastructure played a decisive role in shaping the image of Paris. Haussmann’s transformations left their mark on the city like scars on a body. Yet, as this study has also argued, those scars have, at least in part, healed and have become integral to the city’s identity, contributing to what Rebecca Solnit describes, talking about Paris, as ‘a single construction of inconceivable complexity’ (2001: 212).

Therefore, from Bailly’s perspective, the legacy of Haussmannian infrastructure is double-edged. On the one hand, it reflects a 19th-century tendency toward destruction and a notion of progress that often disregarded the past. On the other hand, it did not erase the city entirely; much of Paris could—and did—reabsorb these transformations. Today, the city that captivates us is still largely this 19th-century creation. Its golden era of flânerie—the reflective, observational walking Baudelaire and Bailly both celebrated—thrived in this context.

The problem, Bailly argues, is not the inherited infrastructure itself but the mentality it carries. Modernity, framed as progress in the 19th century, often prioritised monumental interventions over human life, health, and everyday practices. Over time, this mentality has persisted and adapted to new contexts: mass tourism, elite boutiques, and the segregation or ghettoisation of neighbourhoods. These tendencies, rooted in Haussmann’s era, are now flourishing openly.

The analysis of Baudelaire’s and Bailly’s texts has also demonstrated that, despite the different historical contexts in which they wrote, their attitudes towards modernity closely mirror one another: a nostalgic awareness of the old city lost, a commitment to flânerie, and an ambiguous stance toward change—neither rejecting adaptation nor ignoring the past.

This perspective has clear consequences for walking and urban experience. Walking is not simply utilitarian, moving efficiently from one point to another; it is existential. Bailly advocates for errancy, for moving through the city in a way that inhabits it socially and personally. For the philosopher, walking is not about the mere presence of side streets or shortcuts, though they may help—rather, it reflects a city that calls to you, inhabited by people who actively use and appropriate its spaces, including for purposes beyond commercial consumption, and whose interactions are part of what makes the city a living place. Spatial segregation and fragmentation, by contrast, hinder this circulation and appropriation, producing a city that is difficult to inhabit. Walking is thus a social practice, what Amphoux calls ‘mouvance’:

Crucially, this is a reciprocal relationship: a liveable city invites walkers, but walkers themselves help create the city. Planning can encourage this process, but it must be bottom-up rather than top-down, emerging from the interactions and movements of inhabitants.

Both Baudelaire and Bailly write from the perspective of white male intellectuals. Their reflections on the city are not concerned with questions of gender, race, or disability, nor do they address the ways in which different bodies experience and navigate Parisian urban space. As this article has shown, Bailly’s reflections on walking—although they do not constitute a systematic theory but rather a series of fragmented essayistic observations—remain indebted to a modernist and 19th-century conception of urban experience. In this respect, he also perpetuates the tradition of the flâneur, who, as Rebecca Solnit observes, ‘was male, of some means, of a refined sensibility, with little or no domestic life’ (2001: 215).

Where Bailly departs most clearly from this tradition is in his ecological concern. This article has shown that Bailly conceives ecology primarily in ideological rather than environmental terms. His critique is directed less at issues such as pollution or waste than at the effects of capitalism and neoliberal urbanism, including mass tourism, patrimonialisation, and the subordination of the city’s liveability to economic interests. Rather than focusing on conventional environmental concerns, Bailly is interested in the conditions that enable an ethical and meaningful relationship between inhabitants and urban space.

Nevertheless, Bailly’s conception of urban infrastructure is inherently ecological. He does not advocate the outright exclusion of cars; instead, he imagines a city in which people are both able and willing to walk, thereby gradually reducing dependence on motorised transport and other environmentally harmful practices. In this vision, infrastructure is light, adaptive, and respectful of both the city’s historical layers and the people who inhabit it, fostering a dynamic, lived environment rather than a static monument. It is also genuinely ecopoethical, insofar as it links everyday practices in urban space with civic responsibility and artistic creation. This connection is embodied in Bailly’s generative ‘grammar of legs’, through which walking becomes both a mode of inhabiting the city and a creative act that continually rewrites its urban fabric.