One of the few books that has genuinely changed how I walk around my own city. It takes apart the assumption that the streets we inherited were designed for everyone, and it does so without ever losing patience with the reader.

Read it in three sittings. The chapter on who gets counted in a traffic survey made me angry in a way a book has not managed in years, and then it handed me the tools to do something with that.

The central argument — that the everyday infrastructure of a city is quietly built around a narrow idea of who is using it, and that this makes life harder and more dangerous for everyone else — is laid out with unusual care. Each claim arrives with evidence stacked behind it, drawn from a dozen countries and as many decades, and the author never asks you to take a leap you have not been walked to. It is also, in stretches, genuinely dispiriting to read. It took me most of a year to finish because the sheer accumulation of examples kept draining my appetite for another chapter, and I would set it down for weeks at a time. I am glad I kept coming back to it.