By Deborah Talbot
This present abundance of private cars is nothing but the result of the constant propaganda by which capitalist production persuades the masses—and this case is one of its most astonishing successes—that the possession of a car is one of the privileges our society reserves for its privileged members (Guy Debord, Situationist International, 1955).
One of the key ideas emerging from the Situationist International, a radical anarchist urban movement, was that our interaction with city spaces was imbued with emotion and psychology. Places could instill us with joy or fear, and this was something to do with their design, their history, or their intent. Suffice to say, they did not meet the spectacle of mass car ownership with joy, and the abundance and dominance of traffic in urban centres, displacing human engagement with their localities, along with shocking levels of pollution, remains one of the biggest challenges facing urban planners.
In recent years there have been a number of projects aiming to reclaim urban spaces from cars and for people or communities. One of these is the Playing Out scheme, in which streets are blocked off from traffic for a day to enable children to play, much as they used to before overwhelming traffic and dangerous driving made this too risky. We have also had a rash of street parties in the UK, and in my hometown of Walthamstow, in areas of the Village cars are being permanently excluded by road layout changes.
A new project, operating on a shoestring budget and a bundle of enthusiasm, is Open Streets. Open Streets is a global phenomenon, the origin of which has been traced to Colombia from 1976, and has spread to major cities of South America, Australasia, the United States and Canada, the latter two forming the Open Streets Project in 2010. It is based on a very simple idea: that ‘streets are for people’. Reclaiming the public space of the street from the car allows people to interact, engage and appreciate space and their community in a very different way. Activities can range from cycling to dancing, from street music to children’s games.
Now London is going to host its first Open Street in Great Suffolk Street on 30th May, from 11am to 4pm. If you’ve never been to a street party, or to a march that has closed down streets to traffic, or to a playing out day—or even if you have—it’s worth going along to appreciate the different sense of the city you get just from being permitted to occupy the entire street, without fear of being mown down by speeding traffic. It is quiet, sociable, and, as one commentator said on the Open Street’s website of New York’s version of the experiment, you get to look at the architecture around you in a very different way. So go along, and also look at the Open Streets Trust’s resources, because it promises a very different vision of our urban future.
