Walking, running and living barefoot.
Honest question: Aren't you worried about broken glass, needles, hot asphalt etc. when barefooting in a city? Or about getting a small cut and a nasty infection via that? Personally I love going barefoot when hiking or backpacking or just on local walking trails, but I'd never consider doing it in the city.
Not criticizing you by any means, just curious.
Not really. I've lived in 7 countries and went barefoot for 20 years, and I never really had a problem. I'm not saying something bad can't happen, but in my experience, glass and needles just aren't really a thing. And if you develop enough leather under your feet, the odd nasty bits you may have missed have a surprisingly hard time to pierce the skin.
The golden rule when going barefoot is to look ahead and scan the ground. If I can't see what I'm walking on or it's to sketchy, I don't go there or I put shoes on - or my trusty chainmail "barefoot" shoes. That includes streams, rivers or lakes I can't see the bottom of, or grassy parks with junkies.
I think in 20 years I might have stepped 5 times on something that I had to spend 5 minutes digging out of my skin, and I got caught only once without shoes on a properly hot black tarmac surface that was only minutes away from burning me for real (in Belgium of all places ๐).