A city's streets, it turns out, are more than pathways — they are a form of public health architecture. Researchers publishing in Nature have found that New York City neighborhoods designed for walking, with well-connected streets and accessible parks, healthcare, and services, experienced COVID-19 infection rates 50 to 81 percent lower than their less walkable counterparts. The study, which weighed 24 spatial indicators against pandemic outcomes, suggests that the physical grammar of a city — how its blocks connect, where its services sit, how its residents move — quietly determines how disea