Sidewalks are the most popular spaces for pedestrian circulation. They are places of social interaction where the complexities of urban life flourish in an amalgamation of crashes and encounters. But sidewalks are not neutral scenarios where things happen. The way the sidewalks are made, the elements used, and the logic behind their (re)designs, play a crucial role in the development of those social interactions. Precisely, this number of Tarde is about the material and structural dimensions of sidewalks.

Particularly, it will pay attention to a bunch of sidewalks in western Medellín, Colombia, focusing on their enactments and compositions. Those sidewalks have the structural peculiarity of being broken, damaged, turned into something else, and even usurped, but somehow still functioning as sidewalks. Together, they form an overall functional patchwork quilt of individual failures that once it is aligned and observed from above, behaves as a functional infrastructural element designed to safely and efficiently mobilize bodies across the city.

Perception survey

Are pedestrians aware of glitches? Do they care for glitchy infrastructures? 25 people were interviewed regarding their perception and daily experiences walking over malfunctioning sidewalks in the three routes above presented. After being classified by age, and their main way of moving around their neighborhood (Figure 1), their opinion about Medellín’s sidewalks was collected through a ranking exercise on a scale of one (bad) to ten (excellent). In general terms, the pedestrian perception of their neighborhood’s sidewalks was positive.

However, regardless of their opinion on the quality of their neighborhood’s sidewalks, people were able to identify glitches as a continuous presence in their trajectories (Figure 2). This situation reinforces the idea proposed in this issue that rather than trying to repair or eliminate infrastructural glitches, people have learned how to live with them.

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