The promenade as the town's living room

The wall was not built for this. It was built because the town stands on a straight stretch of the Bay of Bengal with no harbour to shelter it, and a straight coast takes the full force of a cyclone without anything to break it. The wall is an engineering answer to that: stone, sloping, wide at the base, high enough to stop the spray from reaching the first row of houses.

What it produced, as a side effect, is a paved platform twelve metres wide, elevated above the beach, with nothing on it, facing open water, on the west side of which sits an entire town. That is a description of a public square. Nobody drew it as one, and for a long time nobody used it as one — the benches are a later addition, and so are the lamps, the railings and the idea that the road behind it should be closed to cars in the evening.

What makes a place usable in the evening

Indian cities are not short of public space in the legal sense. They are short of public space that a family can use at seven in the evening without a plan. The promenade works because it satisfies five conditions at once, and it is worth naming them, because most Indian public spaces satisfy two or three.

It is flat and continuous, so children and the elderly can move along it. It is closed to fast traffic, so the risk is low. It is on the water, so there is a breeze in a month when the town is otherwise unbearable. It has edges to sit on — the wall itself, the benches, the steps — so sitting requires no purchase. And it is overlooked, by the road on one side and by the sea on the other, which is the condition that makes it usable by women in particular.

The audit, five to eight

What happens on that strip in the evening is not quite leisure. It is a review. Everybody who is anybody in the old town walks it, in the same hours, in both directions, and is seen doing so. Courtships are conducted there in public, which is the only way they can be conducted at all. Newly married couples present themselves. Children are displayed. The elderly are installed on a particular bench at a particular hour, and their presence is a report on their health.

The road has a social gradient along its length that no sign announces. The northern stretch, near the cafés and the war memorial, belongs to visitors, students and the French quarter. The middle belongs to families and to older residents who have been walking the same two hundred metres for thirty years. Further south, where the fishing quarter begins, the promenade stops being a promenade and becomes a working edge — nets, boats pulled up, a different set of people who are not there to be seen.

A person who lives here can read a family's week from where they walk and at what hour. That is the function. It is the same function a village square serves, and it survives in a town of six hundred thousand people because the strip is narrow enough that the whole town has to use the same twelve metres.

What the rules are doing

The evening closure of the road is enforced by police and, more effectively, by everyone who is already walking. A car that enters the strip at six in the evening is not stopped by a barrier; it is surrounded by a slow-moving crowd that simply does not part. The rule holds because the space is occupied, and the space is occupied because the rule holds — a loop that takes about a season to establish and can be broken in a fortnight by allowing traffic back in for a festival.

The vendors are part of the same arrangement and are tolerated at specific points rather than everywhere: the balloon seller at the junction, the corn cart near the steps, the man with the toy helicopters who works the strip between the two fountains. They are allowed because they add to the reason to stay. A vendor who sets up in the middle of the walking line is moved on within minutes, by the police if they are present and by the crowd if they are not.

A colonial edge, used against its design

The promenade was laid out under a colonial administration that had a clear idea of what a sea front was for: a carriage drive, a view, an ornamental boundary between the European town and the water. The railings, the lamps and the alignment of the buildings behind it all carry that intention. What the town did with it afterwards is not what the intention specified.

It filled the drive with pedestrians and took the carriages away. It put benches where the view was best rather than where the plan was tidiest. It turned an ornamental boundary into the one place in the town where every part of the town meets. This is the ordinary fate of good infrastructure: the drawing specifies a function, and the people who use it specify a better one, and the second specification is never written down.

Which is why removing a promenade is harder than building one. A town can build a waterfront in three years. What it cannot build to a schedule is the habit of walking it at six, and that habit is the actual asset — the reason the benches are occupied, the vendors are viable and the road stays closed. The wall is stone. The rest is attendance.