city

There is no better way to explore a city than by foot, but not all places are as suitable for an adventure as others, as I found out during a recent visit to the world’s most walkable city

There is no better way to explore a city than on foot. Once touched down in a city, bag in the hotel and a fresh pair of socks on, the first thing I do is go for a walk.

It is impossible to get a feel for a place from the back of a taxi or from the elevated vantage point of a coach. You’ve got to start pounding the pavement, ideally without a destination in mind, and see where you end up.

On a recent trip to Rome, I set out from my central station hotel and marveled at the carnage of the Trevi Fountain queues, crossed the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and witnessed a coordinated group of ball-under-cup scammers sweatily fail to take anyone’s money. Last spring, I headed out into Benidorm, finding myself an impossibly cheap roast, a seafront pint of Guinness, and a ‘Good boys go to heaven, bad boys go to Benidorm’ t-shirt.

And so, in April, I applied the same approach to Seoul, a city recently named the most walkable in the world.

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OPINION

Each year, Time Out conducts an annual city survey, this time around quizzing 24,000 people on how easy or not it is to discover given cities on foot. The ranking is based on the highest percentage of locals who rated their city’s walkability ‘good’ or ‘amazing’, and the South Korean capital tops the list.

“A city doesn’t have to be small to be walkable. In fact, Seoul is one of the largest cities on the list by surface area and population, but its impressive 93 percent approval rating from locals has secured the South Korean capital joint-first position. Why? Well, the city has a reputation as an exceedingly safe place to stroll by day and night, and is home to neighbourhoods such as Myeongdong, Insadong, and Hongdae, which are all primed for exploring on foot,” writes Time Out.

“Then there are the innovative pedestrian walkways, like Seoullo 7017, an 1074m-long elevated ‘sky garden’ which has seen an old inner city highway revamped into a stroll-worthy green space, home to 24,000 different plants. In downtown Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream is flanked by a walkway that not only links many of the city’s central metro stations, but also landmarks such as Gwanjang Market, Jongmyo Shrine and Gyeongbokgung Palace.”

I could not disagree more.

Seoul is a fantastic city. It’s alive with a kind of youthful, optimistic energy that feels far removed from most places I’ve visited; it’s fearlessly trendy, and it’s centered on an urban mountain blanketed with cherry blossoms come the spring.

But walkable it is not. Seoul is a car city.

The almost unbelievably cheap cost of an Uber (we’re talking around £5 for a half-hour ride) means that hopping in a cab is far more common than in the UK, while the wide, four and six-lane roads that dominate much of the city encourage motoring. And produce a lot of fumes.

According to NASA, Seoul is one of the world’s cities with the worst air pollution, beating Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, and London. You can certainly feel it. On one crisp morning, I walked up Namsan, the 170-meter-tall hill in Seoul’s center. The view from the top would be spectacular, were it not for the heavy, shimmering cloud that hung over everything.

Walking back down, I started to get the vague feeling I’d done something wrong. I hadn’t accidentally offended a waiter or lost my hotel pass; it was the signs. Seoul is a city of signs. From the expected ‘no smoking’, to the less typical ‘no archery’, to the possibly unique ‘no hiking without a flashlight’, everywhere you look, some kind of rule is being transmitted to you. It doesn’t leave you with a feeling of freedom and exploration, nor do the CCTV cameras placed on tall metal poles in the city’s woodland.

It’s a place that’s big on rules and completely opposed to bins. Having finished a snack, I walked for two hours without finding a trash can. South Koreans are expected to take their rubbish home with them – a system that says a lot about the population’s diligent character, but one I find inherently anti-social.

As I do the lack of pavements that had me regularly sliding down alleyway walls to give way to cars, and the complete, frustrating prohibition of jaywalking. Couple all of this with the fact that the city lacks an obvious centre and is exhaustingly massive, and its status as one of the world’s least walkable cities is clear.

Given my love of treading the tarmac, it says a lot about how fantastic the rest of Seoul is that I left in love with the place. From the fish-filled waters of Cheonggyecheon River, the rusty octopus of Yongma Land, and the impossibly cheap but high-grade cosmetics, it’s a fascinating place that feels like it’s at the centre of the world. Just prepare to order a cab.

A stunning new poll showing Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman gaining a double-digit lead over incumbent Karen Bass in the mayor’s race is increasing pressure on Bass and her allies to go sharply negative against her opponent and to seek support from conservative and undecided voters to narrow the gap.

The poll, conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times, showed Bass trailing Raman by 11 percentage points — with 28% of likely voters saying they supported the mayor while 39% said they would vote for Raman. The remaining 33% were undecided, an unusually high number this close to the Nov. 3 election.

“The bottom line is this is a huge shot in the arm politically for Raman — and it’s not a good day for the mayor,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Dan Schnur, a former Republican political consultant, said the poll could have instant negative effects for the mayor’s fundraising ability as potential supporters might now view Raman as the favorite in the race.

“The most immediate tangible result of a poll like this is that Bass’ greatest advantage was her fundraising and it now becomes much more challenging to raise money,” he said.

Bass, appearing Wednesday at a news conference in Hollywood, said she’s seen multiple polls that show a tight race. She said that Raman is “absolutely not” the front-runner in the race.

Mayor Karen Bass speaks at Vermont/Santa Monica Metro Center on Wednesday, touting progress on construction of affordable housing.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The mayor said she is working to highlight the city’s progress in making rent more affordable, pointing to newly released numbers that show that more than 10,000 units of housing with restricted rents have been built since she took office in December 2022.

“The No. 1 issue to Angelenos continues to be lack of affordability, and our primary way of addressing that from the city is housing,” she said. “So we are absolutely addressing affordability.”

Others in the Bass camp seemed more anxious about the poll results.

“It put a pit in stomachs,” said one supporter close to the Bass campaign who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the poll. “But there is still an outside chance for Bass. It’s not total doomsday.”

The supporter said that the Bass campaign truly doesn’t believe Raman’s lead is that big, but that the poll was still “not good news,” especially for fundraising.

Mike Bonin, a progressive former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, said Bass needs to focus on winning over voters who chose former reality television personality Spencer Pratt in the primary election in June. Many of those voters are now on the fence.

Pratt received 26% of the vote in the primary, and most of the voters who cast ballots for him — 63% — say they still haven’t decided whom to vote for in the runoff, the poll found. Among the Pratt voters who have decided, 22% favored Bass compared with 16% for Raman.

Bonin said he expects Bass and her allies to attack Raman’s progressive views in order to reach Pratt voters. Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and opposed raises for Los Angeles Police Department officers that had been championed by Bass.

“The nature of the attacks will try to reach the Pratt voters particularly since they are the largest bloc of undecideds and they skew conservative,” Bonin said.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, is already airing campaign ads critical of Raman over her opposition to a law barring homeless encampments next to schools. In the coming days, the group will also roll out commercials highlighting Raman’s ties to the DSA, which has endorsed her mayoral bid, said union spokesman Tom Saggau.

“Our own poll told us that the Pratt folks were very much undecided, and that when they heard more about Nithya’s record, and her co-governing with DSA, they moved off of her,” he said, adding that his group still views the race as a dead heat.

Raman, not surprisingly, cheered the poll results.

“This poll reflects the momentum we’re seeing on the ground. Angelenos are ready for change and want to see a City That Works,” Raman said in a post on Instagram.

Raman campaign officials said the poll probably will help their fundraising efforts, which they said had already been gaining momentum over the last few weeks. And Schnur, the former GOP political consultant, said the wide lead allows Raman to spend more time touting her own credentials instead of disparaging Bass.

“For the most part Raman has the front-runner’s luxury of putting out a positive message and reinforcing her own credentials,” Schnur said.

Estevan Montemayor, who is running the pro-Raman Estamos con Nithya independent expenditure group, said his group’s role will be to inform voters about Raman’s positives while the Bass campaign attacks.

“They’re gonna come after Nithya and we’re gonna be here to tell her success story,” he said.

Bass supporter Stuart Waldman, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, said the large number of undecided voters this close to the Nov. 3 election is worrying but also leaves an opening for Bass to gain ground.

“Any swing in any direction could make a big change,” Waldman said. “We have no idea who’s going to vote. … Usually by this point in time, everything has tightened up.”

Councilmember Nithya Raman, lower right, campaigns at a Latinos Con Raman rally at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In courting those undecided voters, however, Bass is burdened by high unfavorability numbers, according to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

The mayor had 63% unfavorable ratings, the poll found, with 28% favorable and 9% having no opinion. By comparison, 40% had a favorable view of Raman, according to the poll, while 39% said they had an unfavorable view of her and 21% had no opinion.

Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant, said that Bass needs to accept responsibility on core issues upsetting Angelenos about her tenure, such as homelessness and the 2025 Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. In a recent interview with The Times, Bass said her biggest mistake as mayor was being in Ghana when the fire began amid high wind warnings.

“You have to say, ‘I hear you,’” he said. “Voters don’t think Karen gets that they are mad about things that happened during her term.”

Then, Murphy said, he believes Bass needs to attack Raman as being more establishment than Bass.

Murphy noted that Bass has frequently attacked Raman for being “at City Hall longer than I have,” which he called a powerful message to voters who are considering Raman because they want change. Raman was elected in 2020 and Bass in 2022.

Other polls taken in the campaign have shown a closer race than the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

In an internal Raman campaign poll from early September, the council member was ahead, 44% to 39%, with 17% undecided. She was also leading, 38% to 32%, in a poll commissioned by the group Streets for All, which is backing Raman.

In an early August poll commissioned by an independent expenditure group supporting Bass, the mayor had the edge, 41% to 35%, with 24% undecided.

Mayor Karen Bass greets community members after speaking at Vermont/Santa Monica Metro Center.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The Bass campaign cited some of those polls when responding to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll Wednesday, calling it an “outlier poll” and accusing the pollsters of getting it wrong.

“In the primary … they got it wrong and undercounted Karen Bass’ support,” campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said in a news release.

Stack added that polls conducted online, like the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, “systematically [undercount] working-class families, seniors, and non-English speaking communities who regularly turn out on Election Day.”

Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll, defended the methodology, saying he has spent 45 years polling in California and eight years running the Berkeley IGS Poll.

“What would you expect from a campaign down by double digits? They attack the poll,” he said.

Mayor Karen Bass called the training that LAPD officers receive for handling mental health calls “woefully inadequate” and ordered an outside review of the department’s policies Thursday, saying recent shootings highlight continued shortcomings in how police deal with people in crisis.

Bass is particularly concerned by the relative lack of specialized intervention training for patrol officers who respond to the vast majority of service calls. While the SWAT team and other units receive such training, it is not standard across the Los Angeles Police Department.

“After the academy, they have spot training that is essentially videos that are played at roll calls,” Bass said in an interview week with The Times.

The mayor’s directive comes as she’s locked in a reelection fight with progressive challenger Nithya Raman, who, like Bass, has criticized the LAPD over shootings of mentally ill people.

“The ability of the city to respond to someone’s pleas for help is incredibly important in ensuring that we maintain the trust of the public,” Raman recently told The Times. “And right now, there is no alternative system besides LAPD to respond to many of the calls that are coming into 911 besides, of course, Fire Department calls.”

Polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, shows Raman is favored by 39% of likely L.A. voters, compared to 28% support for Bass — with 33% still undecided.

LAPD officers have fired their weapons at people 16 times this year — down from 34 shootings in 2025, but recent incidents have highlighted how officers continue to turn to their guns when confronting individuals with mental illnesses. In years past, department statistics showed at least a third of all police shootings involved someone with obvious signs of emotional distress.

Bass was particularly disturbed by a July 29 incident in the Olympic patrol area in which police fatally shot a man who approached them with an aluminum bat.

Body-camera video captured officers approaching 33-year-old Alejandro Garcia as he was walking through traffic on Normandie Avenue underneath the 10 Freeway overpass. Officers ordered him to drop the bat, although it’s unclear whether he heard them. While Garcia could be seen holding the bat with both hands, the footage appeared to contradict an early LAPD account suggesting he swung at them.

The shooting could have been avoided if “the officers were trained differently or better,” Bass said, noting that one of the officers had been on the job for roughly five months.

The LAPD has yet to identify the officer or officers who opened fire.

Bass said it would have been appropriate for the department to deploy a unit that sends a social worker out with officers when responding to calls involving a person in crisis.

“You knew before that he had a bat and he was going around smashing cars,” she said.

About a week later, two officers shot and killed Canas Zimran, 44, in Boyle Heights after, department officials say, he approached officers with what was later determined to be a tree trimmer.

The shootings occurred despite policies that prioritize deescalation techniques and the use of “less-lethal” alternatives, such as bean bag rounds meant to subdue people without resorting to firearms.

Bass said the killings reflect, in part, a broader failure of the mental health system to get people the care they need. Also of concern, the mayor said, was the lack of training for officers on how to distinguish between symptoms caused by mental illness, physical and cognitive disabilities and drugs such as phencyclidine, or PCP, which seems to be having a resurgence on city streets.

Bass said her review would be a top-down evaluation that also scrutinizes the roles of dispatchers, supervisors and others involved in responding to reports of people behaving erratically.

She said the audit will examine calls from the last five years involving people with “with known histories of mental or behavioral health conditions” in which police officers avoided using force. The goal, Bass said, is to “identify common themes or best practices that successfully de-escalated the incident or allowed officers to gain compliance.”

Bass added that it’s also important to consider the needs of LAPD officers and ensure they “receive appropriate assistance” to cope with stress. She was struck by the willingness of younger officers to openly talk about the mental toll of the job, recalling a recent visit to a roll call in which an officer described feeling a lack of support after being involved in an on-duty shooting.

LAPD officials have said the department has made numerous changes in recent years to curb police shootings, including adopting deescalation training focused on slowing down volatile situations, particularly those involving people who may be mentally ill. Still, the agency’s critics pack police commission meetings each week to argue for removing police from such calls, saying that officers are too quick to fire on people — particularly those wielding knives.

Although the city has experimented with programs that send specialists to help deescalate such encounters, LAPD policy still requires armed patrol officers to clear a scene of any potential threats beforehand.

Bass said she always has been a proponent of approaches that don’t involve police, some of which are employed by her Office of Community Safety. But she said stabbings and other incidents that pose an immediate danger to the public still require a police response.

Beyond looking at how to avoid police shootings, Bass’ directive calls for further assessment of the department’s training for handling people who’ve been booked into jails and detention facilities, including how they are restrained and transferred to medical facilities.

Bass wanted to ensure the review was done by an outside body, hinting at her frustration with the inaction of department leaders and the police commission on addressing the issue.

“Much more needs to be done,” Bass said.

The moon is an impostor. Swimming backstroke beneath its surface, I look up at craggy hollows in close relief. White rock undulates in all directions, a forest of peaks rising next to a desert of craters. Every time I trick myself into thinking I’m somewhere celestial, the sound of children splashing brings me back to earth.

This is no lunar landscape but Helsinki’s underground swimming hall, excavated from granite bedrock and officially opened in 1993. These days, Itäkeskus uimahalli is one of the Finnish capital’s most visited leisure facilities, welcoming 400,000 people a year. Local people mingle with tourists, I will discover, during a week exploring Helsinki’s subterranean metropolis.

My visit was one of 12 research trips I made over three years to better understand how cities are being reimagined. It turned into a book, How to Build a City, for which I travelled to locations that are testing the frontiers of urban living in response to an increasingly uncertain world.

Many global cities feature a version below ground, but Helsinki’s is thought to be the only one transformed for peace. As urbanisation increased the population, a more efficient solution was needed for heating plants and telecoms cables. You could scatter them around in expensive pockets of land, digging up the streets and sacrificing parks. Or you could tuck them away beneath ground level, by adding to bomb shelters first carved out during the second world war.

And that’s what Helsinki did. By 2010, its city council approved the world’s first officially masterplanned underground city, home to hundreds of vast human-made caves and tunnels up to 90 metres deep. Itäkeskus pool was opened 17 years before this space allocation plan was approved.

In peacetime, the caves function as shopping malls, playgrounds, a go-karting track and subway stations, all connected by almost 200 miles (293km) of tunnels. In the event of war, however, each can be transformed into a bomb shelter, part of a network capable of accommodating 900,000 Finns.

Itäkeskus swimming hall alone could house almost 4,000 people. In less than 48 hours it can be drained and fitted with decontamination showers. For the rest of the time, there are no clues as to its defence nature. Only the comforting hallmarks of the public pool: the tang of chlorine in my nose and the warmth that cloaked my skin.

I arrived in Helsinki on the morning of the spring solstice, although the ground was still dusted with greying snow and I was grateful for the heated carriages on my 25-minute Metro ride from the city centre. At Itäkeskus station, past a school surrounded by Soviet-style tower blocks, silver birches trailed bare branches over cars. From the outside, a municipal glass building gave an uninspiring welcome, but inside, I found a different world entirely.

A broad staircase swept me down steeply, framed by rocky, whitewashed walls. After paying (entry to all four of Helsinki’s public swimming halls is €6 for adults and €3.30 for children, making it popular with families as well as budget-conscious travellers), I disrobed in changing rooms spun off from a cathedral-tall granite core. Signs were in Finnish, but the space was easy for non-natives to navigate. Staff spoke excellent English.

At one side of the colossal hangar, men grimaced as they lowered themselves into a triangle of freezing water. On the other, a postmodern dreamscape was revealed, a large pool lined in lavender, canary yellow and burgundy tiles, with huge plastic triangles in cerulean and lilac suspended overhead. The only windows were set into a lifeguard’s tower next to a waterfall that filled the air with the roar of water in motion.

Swimming under the ersatz moon was an otherworldly experience. After 50 lengths, I’d earned my reward. Included in the entry fee is access to a gym, which I did not visit, plus a hot tub, steam room and two saunas, which I did. A graphic on the door showed a swimming costume crossed out in red and I gingerly removed mine, sliding into place on the bench and reminding myself that prudishness is a uniquely British affliction. Inside, it was so dark I could barely make out other bodies. The low light created the effect of a confession booth.

Around me, conversations bubbled in Finnish, American English and German. The quotidian details of living emerged. I joined in, asking a stranger for dinner recommendations and whether I should brave the plunge pool. If you don’t dwell on it, you could forget the true purpose of this place.

It was something I kept returning to over the following days as I wandered through experimental installations at Helsinki’s underground art museum Amos Rex (from €20; children go free), whose antennae-like skylights popped up on concrete stalks from the pavement near the chichi shopping district of Kluuvi. And in the Töölö neighbourhood’s exquisite Temppeliaukio church (€8; children go free), half-buried in a giant mound of rock.

All were examples of a supremely responsive city. All were bomb shelters, too. Evidence that you can design for the future with verve and beauty. Helsinki shows it is possible to do it all.

How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future by Gabriella Bennett is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.