Justice
How Walkability Shapes Political Activism
Social movement organizations are strongly correlated to key elements of cities.
"The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely," Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass. The great city, he continued, is found where "the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons ... where the citizen is always the head and ideal ... where women ... enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men."
The uprisings of 1848 mostly exploded in cities: Paris and Vienna, Dresden and Berlin, Budapest and Prague. As unruly as they were, cities epitomized the egalitarian ideal, and Whitman was neither the first nor the last to make the connection.