When Tbilisi’s municipal authorities installed above-ground pedestrian crossings and adaptive traffic lights at one of the city’s most chaotic junctions — Heroes’ Square — the city didn’t just get a new urban feature- it got a symbolic battlefield for the negotiation between power, bodies, movement, and visibility in the public space.
To some, it might look like a routine infrastructure upgrade. Yet, in reality, this development marks a philosophical and cultural shift: from a car-centric, technocratic urban ideology inherited from Soviet modernism to an embryonic gesture toward what anthropologist Michel de Certeau would call a “space of practiced place” — where human bodies reassert their agency in a city built to exclude them.
Why Crosswalks Are Not Just Crosswalks
Pedestrian crossings are never neutral: they are choreographies of power — silent contracts between institutions and citizens about who has the right to occupy the street, when, and how. In this sense, the newly introduced traffic lights and ground-level crosswalks on Heroes’ Square are not only infrastructure, they are instruments of cultural meaning.
For decades, Heroes’ Square embodied the post-Soviet auto-normative logic: speed over safety, cars over people, infrastructure over intimacy. It was a spatial metaphor of control — unwalkable, unapproachable, unsafe. It embodied what French sociologist Henri Lefebvre called the “abstract space” of modernity — geometrically rationalized, politically depersonalized, and hostile to organic urban life.
By contrast, the reintroduction of pedestrian logic, however minimal and partial (so far, only on the zoo side), is a rehumanization of that space. It signals an implicit recognition that cities are not machines: they are living, breathing, conflicted organisms.
The Ethics of Slowness: Against the Tyranny of Flow
Modernity has always been obsessed with flow: of capital, traffic, data, bodies. Urban theorist Paul Virilio warned of “dromology” — the logic of speed as a fundamental mode of organizing power. Cities that prioritize uninterrupted vehicular movement, like Tbilisi historically has, internalize this doctrine.
Yet in recent decades, counter-movements have emerged — from Barcelona’s “superblocks” to Paris’ “15-minute city” and Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River restoration — reclaiming urban space for slow life, ecological balance, and pedestrian dignity. These interventions are not only about mobility. They are political. They ask: What kind of city do we want? Who is it for?
Tbilisi’s attempt, however embryonic, to slow down Heroes’ Square reflects a deeper cultural conflict: between velocity and presence, opacity and legibility, private comfort and public commons. The pedestrian crossing is thus not a piece of asphalt, it’s an ethical position.
Geopolitics of the Crosswalk: Whose City?
Across the world, the humble pedestrian crosswalk has been weaponized as a political symbol. In 1965, civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama, chose a crosswalk, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as the site of their protest, precisely because it was a public space where rights could be demanded. In Warsaw, anti-authoritarian protestors in 2020 used rainbow-painted crossings to defy conservative power.
Even in post-Soviet cities, crosswalks have carried semiotic weight. In Yerevan, the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” had scenes of thousands marching across blocked intersections. In Moscow, the 2012 anti-Putin protests often centered around the metaphor of “crossing over” from fear to action, even using car convoys and pedestrian movements in sync as a form of coordinated dissent.
Heroes’ Square has historically been one of the main protest sites in Tbilisi. New state crossings are not political symbols, but they might become such. Already, the backlash on social media suggests a cultural unease: “Too many traffic jams,” “Why are we privileging pedestrians?” These complaints are not just about traffic. They express a resistance to changing spatial hierarchies — a discomfort with the idea that pedestrians might have an equal claim to the city.
Smart Lights, Dumb Politics?
According to the municipality, the new adaptive traffic lights on Heroes’ Square can regulate traffic in real time. But algorithmic regulation introduces new forms of invisibility. As scholars like Shoshana Zuboff warn in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” smart infrastructure often disguises control behind the facade of optimization.
Who programs the lights? Whose convenience is prioritized? Do the algorithms “see” differently-abled bodies, the elderly, or non-standard behavior? Urban AI often replicates the biases of its designers — privileging efficiency over equity. In this sense, the smart light can become a new form of technocratic gatekeeping, where the machine’s logic overrides the human’s right.
From Dead Space to Democratic Space
Heroes’ Square has long been a non-place — what anthropologist Marc Augé calls “spaces of transit without identity.” Introducing pedestrian logic into such a site is an invitation for reanimation. It is a small step toward a democratic city, one where space is not merely passed through, but dwelled in, observed, questioned, and reshaped.
But this requires more than a crosswalk. It demands an urban ethic that sees mobility not as a function of cars, but as a civic right. It requires maintenance, education, care, trust — all things that take longer to build than asphalt.
Tbilisi stands at a crossroads: it can become a city that treats pedestrians as nuisances to be managed, or as citizens with bodies, rights, and stories. The crosswalk at Heroes’ Square, then, is not a finish line. It is the beginning of a much longer walk.
Walk, Don’t Run
As complaints about traffic grow, we must ask: What kind of crisis are we witnessing? A logistical one, or a cultural one? Is the real issue the traffic jam, or the psychological disruption of a worldview where cars no longer rule unchallenged?
By Ivan Nechaev
