War disrupts the symbiotic interplay between bodies and built environments, unraveling familiar routines and destabilizing urban life. Walking becomes a precarious tiptoeing through danger and continual re-routing, a spatial practice of survival and resistance, asserting presence and agency amid violence. Consequently, urbicidal practices and persistent insecurities reconfigure walkability, undermining patterns of normality and a collective sense of safety. Yet, post-conflict reconstruction, particularly in historic cores, rarely considers former or newly formed footpaths, further misaligning future project agendas with context-specific recovery needs. This paper develops the “disruption assemblages” approach, a conceptual framework that captures the dynamic interplay of material, temporal, and human elements in conflict-ridden contexts, to examine war’s impact on walkability. Using Aleppo’s historic core as a case study, it highlights the inseparable connection between the urban fabric’s sensory-spatial characteristics and its social-temporal layering of familiarity and generational presence. Qualitative methods—including historical analysis, sensory ethnography, and walking as a research tool—reveal how Aleppo’s historic core has metamorphosed into a landscape of complex survival practices, danger-evasion tactics, and everyday resistance. These findings illuminate the contested spatio-temporality and lived experiences of reclaiming rights to and within urban space, demonstrating how walkability is deterritorialized and reterritorialized in war-torn landscapes and during sporadic (post-)conflict reconstruction. Ultimately, this paper argues for re-centering walkability in (post-)conflict healing and proposes the “attract the foot” approach, emphasizing the imperative of re-enabling walking as a sociable and human-centered recovery strategy.
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