Sidewalks: The Thinking of a Whole Society

Some things are only beautiful when they stand next to each other. A beautiful brick is easy to find, and a beautiful stretch of sidewalk is not that hard to build. But for thousands of sidewalks in front of thousands of different buildings to join one another as if they had always belonged together, that is the work of an entire city

When he was in Singapore, he kept being drawn to the wide walkways, the trees, and the small ramps that connect the sidewalk to the street. He once wrote about this in Singapore Has Many Cool Things. Back then, he thought a sidewalk system like that must sit on the patience and consensus of many people. Looking more closely now, he sees that this consensus is also fed by something far less romantic: rules

A street cannot be designed in isolation

Singapore does not have one brick that every road must copy. What they have instead are shared technical standards and design guides written for each district. The Urban Redevelopment Authority, URA, does not only ask whether a building looks good or bad. They also ask how its ground floor meets the street, whether the walkway stays continuous, and whether a pedestrian can move from one building to the next without running into a wall

In Paya Lebar Central, for instance, URA’s urban design guidelines even specify that covered and open-air walkways should mainly use a warm beige-gold material, with a surface that looks like natural stone. When new buildings appear, the nearby pedestrian paths may also have to be upgraded so they fit the shared face of the district. Each building can keep its own character, but once you step outside, all of them join a larger design

Singapore even has a way to reconcile the interest of a developer with the interest of the public. Covered walkways that meet the conditions of location, width, and public use may be excluded from the gross floor area used to control a project’s scale. In plain words, the city does not only ask businesses to leave room for pedestrians. It also designs a mechanism so that this act becomes less of a loss

The coherence lives in the smallest details

According to LTA’s infrastructure design criteria, a new standalone footpath has its standard width raised from 1.5 m to 1.8 m, enough for two ordinary wheelchairs to pass each other. For covered walkways, URA specifies that the minimum clear width can be 3 m in the city centre or near a train station, 2.4 m a little farther out, and 2 m elsewhere. Depending on the area and the volume of people walking, the actual requirement can be higher

Those numbers sound ordinary, until a person pushing a stroller, an older person, or someone in a wheelchair needs to share the same stretch of path. Then a few dozen centimetres stop being a technical matter. They decide who can move with ease, and who has to look for help

The beauty of a sidewalk, seen this way, does not sit only in the colour of the brick or the line of trees. It also sits in the fact that the designer thought of people they have never met

Building it well is hard, keeping it beautiful is harder

One detail caught him most when he read LTA’s code of practice for works on public streets, April 2026. When a paved sidewalk is dug up for construction and then reinstated, the new bricks must match the colour and surface around them. The relaying must cover the full width of the walkway, with a length of up to 6 m as specified, or to the nearest joint if that is shorter, forming a rectangular patch. If a matching brick cannot be found, the alternative still has to be approved by the competent authority

This means people do not only care how a sidewalk looks on opening day. They also care how it will look after the first water-pipe repair, after the tenth cable pull, or years later when the people who laid the first brick have already left

Behind that sits the Street Works Act, a law that requires work on public streets to be approved in advance, and gives the managing authority the power to set requirements for design, construction, and reinstatement. A stretch of sidewalk is therefore not merely the private affair of a contractor, or of the building sitting right next to it

He suddenly thought that a city can become beautiful not because everyone shares the same taste. It becomes beautiful because private decisions, from new construction to repair, all have to honour a shared promise

Before, he saw Singapore’s sidewalks as the fruit of sacrifice and consensus. Now he wants to add one more thing: goodwill is precious, but goodwill needs laws, standards, and fair mechanisms if it is to last. One cannot expect thousands of developers, contractors, and repair crews to do the same right thing on their own, year after year

So if one day we want better sidewalks, perhaps the first question is not which brick to choose. It is who will keep those bricks beautiful, after the people who laid them have gone far away

❤️ cowriter aethery