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From Copenhagen's car-free zones to a city where elevated walkways replaced an entire highway, the world's most walkable cities
Alain ROUILLER / Unsplash
No such thing as a perfect city exists, though hubs that pack brilliant food, art, dance and shopping all within walking distance of one another rank among the closest anyone gets. Time Out’s tenth-anniversary city survey, which quizzed 24,000 urbanites on everything from nightlife to street food, dating to transport, asked one particularly practical question: just how easy does a city make it to explore entirely on foot?
The ranking below reflects the highest percentage of locals who rated their city’s walkability as good or amazing in that survey, with only the highest-scoring city from each country included to keep the list globally representative instead of clustering around any single region. Low-traffic streets and the chance to rack up extra steps rank as a genuine win-win for both people and the environment, and the cities below have built entire urban identities around making that kind of movement easy.
