Chris Arnade on Walking Cities
Former physicist and bond trader turned writer-photographer Chris Arnade — who walks the world’s cities on foot and files dispatches to his Walking the World Substack — talks with Tyler Cowen about why Beijing and Shanghai resist the walker, how to score a city’s walkability, McDonald’s as public infrastructure, why he skips the wilderness, and what a decade of walking has done to his views on religion, relativism, and who builds a culture.
Key ideas
- Walking is a method of learning, and it has a domain. Arnade walks fifteen miles to understand a place at the granular level; he concedes that some cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Phoenix — defeat the method, because they were never built to be walked, and the walker learns least where the built environment is uniform by design.
- Top-down design shows up in the street. Reading James C. Scott, Arnade reads Chinese cities as legibility engineered for control: winding neighbourhoods replaced by fifty-storey towers and malls, and organic street life so unwanted that one Shanghai district painted murals of shopfronts where the shops had been removed.
- Walkability is measurable and multi-dimensional. Arnade built an eight-category metric — climate, crime, pollution, density, local distribution (a shop always within reach) and more — on which Los Angeles scores surprisingly high and Phoenix, Dakar, and Kampala score low; topography and heat, not just infrastructure, decide the outcome.
- Cities beat wilderness because Arnade is after people. He cut the ‘boring parts’ — wheat fields, the Gobi, pine forest — from an original plan to walk around the world, because there is little to learn on the fourth day in a forest; culture, not landscape, is the object.
- The walking revised his big priors. He became religious, abandoned cultural relativism, and reversed himself on elites — now holding that a small ‘guardian class’ builds the culture most people passively inherit, since roughly 98 per cent of people are not political and never discuss it.
Content
Chinese cities and the architecture of control
Asked to choose ten years in Beijing or Shanghai, Arnade picks Beijing for its greater depth, but the sharper observation is how alike the two felt — ‘inscrutable’, he says, at the level he works, which is to walk fifteen miles and read a place off its streets. Neither city rewards that. He likens both to a cheap cartoon whose background keeps repeating, and suspects the uniformity is intentional: a design meant to remove difference. Drawing on James C. Scott’s account of top-down regulation as control, he reads the replacement of small winding neighbourhoods with fifty-storey towers and adjacent malls as legibility built for surveillance and easy governance. His coinage for the result is totalitarian anarchy: a regime that intends to be controlling but is too incompetent to pull it off — six security checks he cleared without the required QR code, a VPN that everyone has and that therefore is not really a firewall so much as a filter on the incompetent, and a monitoring channel besides. Cowen counters that the looseness is partly deliberate — a sense of partial freedom makes people easier to control along the dimensions that matter. The starkest image is a Shanghai neighbourhood bought up for redevelopment where the authorities had replaced real shops with painted murals of shop life: organic street life removed and substituted with a cartoon of itself.
McDonald’s as community infrastructure
Arnade is, by his own account, ‘the McDonald’s guy’ online, having written extensively about the chain’s role in the United States. Abroad he usually avoids it, because other cultures supply their own organic food spaces — Japan’s 7-Elevens and izakaya, Taipei’s street food. China was the exception: there, McDonald’s served the American function for the opposite reason. In the US people go because it is functional relative to a poor neighbourhood; in Beijing they go because it is dysfunctional relative to the regulatory tightness around it — a place you can simply sit and relax. The deeper point is autobiographical. Much of Dignity was written in an East LA McDonald’s, and Arnade’s stories about addiction and poverty came not from hunting for them but from sitting in McDonald’s at night typing up notes. The realisation that he kept meeting everyone there — and then walking them outside to photograph them because the restaurant ‘didn’t seem photographic’ — was itself the story: McDonald’s as one of the few genuine community centres left for many people, and a site of remarkable social mixing.
The dimensions of walkability
Arnade has formalised his instinct into a roughly eight-category metric. Climate, crime, and pollution are three heavy factors; density, topography, and what he calls local distribution — the guarantee that a shop is always somewhere nearby — matter as much. He defends ranking Los Angeles highly despite online objections: great weather, good skies, a ubiquitous bus system that lets you stop walking when you choose, and the best food scene in the US. Against that, Phoenix is nearly unwalkable and, he jokes, defeated his deliberate attempt to prove otherwise; Dakar and Kampala rank low on a mix of heat, absent infrastructure, and the risk not of robbery but of a language-barrier miscommunication spiralling out of control. Topography can settle the question by itself — Rio’s mountains, tunnels, and no-go zones make it, for Cowen, the least walkable of all. On the other side, Arnade names Istanbul (especially the Asian side, where history is lived-in rather than embalmed — a thirteenth-century wall used as a car park) and Tokyo as the walkability champion, and singles out Amman and the Faroe Islands as under-rated. India, Jakarta, and Hanoi he rates merely ‘okay’, dogged by pavement potholes that force you to watch your feet.
Cities over wilderness, and travelling light
The project began as a literal walk around the world and became a walk through cities once Arnade cut what he calls the boring parts. He doubts he would learn much on the third day in a wheat field, or the fifteenth in the Gobi, or the fourth in a pine forest — quoting Woody Allen, he is ‘at two with nature’. His object is people, culture, how people operate. He packs remarkably light, on the principle that on returning home you find a third of what you brought went unused and anything can be bought on the road; his one regret is a shortage of clean going-out shirts and a second pair of shoes for the Sunday mass he attends wherever he is. He carries Tide Pods as a ‘secret weapon’, spare cords, batteries and glasses he never needs, and always one physical book alongside a Kindle. Long flights he welcomes as reading time, and he heads to the back of the plane to talk to crew and passengers for their life stories — using the information, he notes, in ways they would not expect, avoiding wherever they say is good because it will be crowded.
What the walking changed: religion, relativism, elites, and El Paso
Pressed on which macro views the walking revised, Arnade names three. He became religious — partly utilitarian, seeing how well it works for people, partly a deeper sense that human life is more complicated than science allows and that common-sense folk wisdom is more than something to be explained away. He abandoned the cultural relativism he flirted with thirty years ago: some cultures, he now says plainly, are simply better than others. And he reversed himself on elites. Where he once held that elite chatter did not matter, he now thinks a small ‘guardian class’ — the CCP being an extreme, explicit case of a near-universal pattern — effectively builds the culture that most people, being non-political, passively inherit; academics, politicians, and elites therefore matter immensely. Roughly 98 per cent of people, he insists from experience, are not political and do not talk about politics — a claim he tested against the panic that ‘the world hates us’ over Trump while sitting in a Kampala bar with a woman telling him how much she loved Trump. El Paso is his case study in optimism: a low-crime, high-optimism, working-class Mexican-American city where the American dream is alive, and where he credits the slope of the curve over its height — people can look across to Juárez and see how far their lives have improved.
Wall Street, pigeons, the Substack life, and the case against museums
Looking back, Arnade rates smart people the best thing about twenty years in finance, and the ‘view from the Ramada’ — fly-in, wealthy-neighbourhood, interchangeable — the worst; the entire investor base of Turkey’s bond market, he jokes, fit into one restaurant every night. His path into documenting addiction ran through pigeons: on long financial-crisis walks around New York he became fascinated with the Black and Puerto Rican pigeon keepers of the Bronx and Brooklyn, and following them brought him to Hunts Point and the addiction project. The Substack, Chris Arnade Walks the World, pays him — not lavishly — to walk the world, which he calls the perfect job, and he invokes the ‘1,000 (or 2,000) true fans’ idea (attributed variously to Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand) as a liberating model: in a world of billions you need only a niche and a few thousand people. He has no plan to turn it into a book, preferring the biweekly essay. The episode closes on a genuine disagreement about museums: Cowen, the self-described romantic, values the aura of the terracotta warriors or the Hagia Sophia — the visual splendour no reproduction captures; Arnade, posing ‘the Walter Benjamin question’, shrugs at museums and visits only military-history ones, for their propaganda. Cowen makes the practical case for AI in travel — photograph any painting, bird, or building and interrogate it beyond any guidebook — which Arnade, so far only using AI as a copy-editor, is beginning to consider.
See also
- Chris Arnade — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art — another CWT-adjacent conversation turning on cities and how to read them