Mapping Walkability: Visualising Pavement Governance for Community Participation

Indian cities are dense, walkable, and pedestrian-heavy. According to census data, over 31% of urban commuters walk. Yet pedestrian infrastructure, especially pavements remain fragmented, poorly maintained, and institutionally invisible. While roads and flyovers are mapped, budgeted, and tracked, footpaths rarely exist as visible, measurable civic data.

This talk explores how visualisation can shift pedestrian infrastructure from being an overlooked physical space to a shared, participatory civic dataset.

Drawing from my ongoing design research in Bengaluru, the talk examines pavement maintenance not merely as an urban design problem, but as a visualisation and governance challenge. Broken pavements are visible to citizens, but the systems responsible for maintaining them are not. Grievances are reported through fragmented channels like social media, helpline numbers and civic apps, yet there is no shared visual memory of issues, progress, or accountability.

The core idea of this talk is that community-centred visualisation can transform passive frustration into structured civic participation. By visualising pavement health as a spatial layer through participatory mapping, route-based alerts, and public lifecycle tracking - infrastructure becomes legible, measurable, and collectively owned.

The talk connects to contemporary conversations in data visualisation around civic tech, participatory mapping, and public-interest data design. It asks: What happens when we visualise not just data, but governance gaps? How can maps function as instruments of civic agency rather than static navigation tools?

The main sections and flow of the presentation:

1. The invisibility of pedestrian infrastructure in urban data systems
2. Field research insights from Bengaluru’s pavement conditions
3. Mapping fragmentation: how current grievance systems fail visually
4. Designing a participatory pavement layer - prototype walkthrough
5. Implications for community-led visualisation and urban accountability

Intended for designers, data visualisers, urban researchers, and civic technologists, this talk offers a framework for thinking beyond dashboards and toward participatory spatial systems.

Key takeaways include:

1. How visualisation can expose governance blind spots
2. Designing maps as community interfaces, not just geographic tools
3. The role of designers in shaping civic transparency