In Malta, pedestrian infrastructure cannot be assessed solely through technical provision because the willingness to walk depends on barriers that inhabitants recognise and interpret. Scerri and Attard combine interviews with public, private and academic stakeholders with a Virtual Urban Living Lab in which participants evaluate walking conditions and prospective interventions. The workshop follows a twenty-minute walk in Ħal Lija: experience precedes the digital interface. Participants classify twelve potential walking barriers, consider visualised street changes and contribute or endorse proposals on a virtual note board. Eighteen people attended, making the results exploratory rather than representative. The distinctive operation is a passage from situated encounter to deliberative, shareable evidence: a pedestrian's discomfort is translated into an assessable issue, then placed alongside institutional proposals. This translation has political value, yet it also filters experience through preselected categories and interface formats. For comparative walking research, the study illustrates how perceptions can inform co-design without being mistaken for an objective inventory of physical defects or a forecast of future behaviour.
