Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Car-Free Cities Need to be a Goal of Climate Justice

The prospect of car-free cities, or at the very least car-free streets in dense downtowns has been a goal of livable street advocates for decades. Their reasons revolve around safety and social connectivity, citing the envelope of harm and loss of humanity created in places overrun with automobile traffic. Rarely do such advocates talk about getting rid of cars for their most dangerous side effect: carbon emissions.

Cars kill about 40,000 Americans a year, about a million globally. As grim as those numbers are, within a few short decades they’re going to pale to the numbers of people killed by the effects of changing climate on our warming globe.

Climate justice advocates are heavily focused on the fossil fuel industry, occasionally pointing out the role of animal agriculture in creating climate change, but almost never criticize the automobile industry itself, or personal fossil fuel use by those driving cars.

That needs to change. We cannot expect to hobble the fossil fuel industry while continuing to provide them with an endless demand for their product.

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The Debut of Open Streets Detroit: PHOTO ESSAY

This Sunday saw the much anticipated Detroit debut of the popular city event series known as Open Streets. Taking a page from similar events like Portland’s Sunday Parkways or LA’s CicLAvia, Open Streets has pushed more metropolises return street use from automobiles back to human beings.

The idea is hardly radical considering the ways in which urban streets have been used for thousands of years prior to the take-over of cars and trucks. While the focus of Open Streets is on fun and recreation, it’s not hard to see how commerce and political speech also flourish in spaces not monopolized by metal machines.

From the event page: “Currently over 200 cities worldwide have established on-going and highly popular Open Streets events. The recent surge in cities creating temporary street parks is widely credited to Ciclovía, a weekly event in Bogotá, Colombia that opens over 70 of miles of city streets to citizens for outdoor physical activity. This event beginning in the mid-1970s and continues to this day with tremendous success attracting up to 2 million participants weekly.”

Detroit’s route stitched together two of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods: Corktown and Mexicantown, running in a single strip down Michigan ave with a slight jog onto Vernor. Along the route were your typical event staples like bouncy castles, foursquare, art making, and children exploring their newfound streetscape.

Businesses enjoyed a splurge of foot traffic, and utilized the additional space on many blocks by extending their merchandise beyond the confines of the narrow sidewalk. No longer constrained by cars, sidewalk chalk could be seen everywhere, containing everything from kids’ drawings to anti-gentrificaion slogans to quickly washed-off vulgarities.

Click any image for full resolution.

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Yes, We’re Still Going Broke Subsidizing Sprawl

Over the last couple years I’ve critiqued the ways urbanists have promoted unaffordable hi-rise condos as being somehow sustainable, how they’ve perverted notions of density and equity for PR purposes with the ultimate goal of making money in real estate. It’s true, making cities so unaffordable that workers can no longer live there is a mistake. Because the place they’ll be forced to move to is far, far worse.

There’s a perception that the housing crash of 2008 halted suburban sprawl. In some places, it did just that. But we’re almost ten years past that epoch, and the home builders associations have been lobbying like they always do for more construction in placeless environs where silly things like public transit or public squares remain unthinkable.

Still too are marketing shills paid to intertwine the idea of upward mobility with urban flight as somehow still being a positive thing. Take this cringe-worthy quote from Ford Motor Company chief sales analyst Erich Merkle on CNN: “[Millennials] might be able to hold off for a period of time, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs, and they are going to purchase many, many new cars.”

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In Defense of Detroit’s Slow Roll

Imagine the absurdity of somebody saying, “Detroit can’t handle 6,000 Tigers fans flooding downtown with their cars anymore, this has to be put to a stop!”

You’d be laughed out of town. But say the same thing about people on bicycles and somehow many nod approval.

That’s essentially the hack job Model D shat upon the internet this week in an unresearched rant titled ‘Slow Roll Has Lost Its Way‘. Right out of the gate the author even admits he’s never ridden the wildly popular and now world famous weekly Slow Roll bicycle ride, now a staple of Detroit’s come-back experience.

The best way to pick this eye-roller apart is to go through it line by line, condensed for brevity of course. Author’s original post appears in italics, my rebuttals in plain text.

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Model D: If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d be forgiven for mixing up two major Detroit bike rides: Slow Roll and Critical Mass. The former is ostensibly a leisurely pedal for all age groups through a different neighborhood every Monday. The latter is a monthly ride designed to snarl traffic and raise awareness of the need for better cycling infrastructure by deliberately clogging city streets and tying up intersections.

Rebel Metropolis: I doubt the author has ridden either in Detroit. Critical Mass had its roots in snarling traffic for political reasons (as though bikes weren’t also traffic), but in the D, Mass is also a leisurely ride, albeit at a crisper pace than Slow Roll. CM’s size here is vastly smaller than Slow Roll, too. So nobody is going to mistake a swift group of 300 with a snail crawling 6,000, especially in a city that’s 138 square miles of flat, open, over-capacity surface streets.

 

MD: The events of the Monday, June 6th Slow Roll began and ended in Hamtramck [a separately incorporated city within the boundaries of Detroit] and have left me, and many others with a bitter taste in my mouth. Slow Roll didn’t inform anyone with the city at any time before the event. The only warning for residents and officials came from a Facebook post a few hours before the ride, written by a Hamtramck resident who happened to find out about it. Continue reading →

Tokyo’s Olympic War On the Homeless

Last week the perpetually capital-minded CityLab jumped on the corporate sponsored greenwashing train to gush over the forthcoming Olympics in Tokyo. Such a damaged brand are the Olympics – with it’s massive wastes of subsidized funding, razing poor neighborhoods for athletic mega-infrastructure, and general disruption to normal street life – that it’s now necessary to hire numerous firms for their Herculean public relations battles.

Urbanist rags like CityLab are all too eager to root for the monied establishment, and come up with the best way to absolve liberal guilt via some paper-thin progressive Trojan Horse.

Here it was puff piece for embattled Tokyo metro governor Yoichi Masuzoe. $350 million is ready to subsidize hydrogen cell cars for the Olympics, as well as the 6,000 unit Olympic village planned to run solely on fuel cells. Despite hydrogen’s abyssimal record as an extremely expensive alt fuel, Masuzoe chimed, “Fortunately, we are rich.”

Certainly a compelling proposition when you’re playing with somebody else’s money.

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The New Gentrifier Tactic: Copy Climate Change Deniers

It seems for every critique of today’s monied urban revival there’s another paid life-style columnist arguing why gentrification should be cherished, if they even admit gentrification exists at all.

“Gentrification isn’t happening, but if it was happening, it would be a good thing.“

That was the crux of a Slate article last year that prompted many well-written rebuttals. This kind of double-think has served climate change deniers well: pretend the crisis doesn’t exist, but if it did exist, it would be fine and good and certainly nobody’s fault (it’s just the will of the free market, after all).

Deniers of global warming counter scientific data showing Earth is getting hotter with anecdotes involving snowballs on the floor of Congress. They claim since there’s no crisis and mankind will be just fine, therefore the ‘alarmists’ as they call us are simply forcing Freedom lovers out of their Freedom-Mobiles to eat Commie vegetables served by gay Mexican lunch ladies.

Don’t worry about class struggle, go back to tweeting about your French press.

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Public Space Is Fundamental to Democracy, No Wonder It’s Under Attack

A true public space is overtly political in that it is a democratized space. That is, there is no regular programming which dictates the goings on within such a space. Instead, the day to day happenings are largely decided by those who use the place. City government or other municipalities can manage or maintain public space, but cannot impose additional restrictive rules or regulations if the park or plaza is to remain truly democratic.

To enjoy such a space involves trusting strangers, and in all relationships of trust, there is risk. In the midst of food carts and outdoor chess there is also crime, and even the rare act of terrorism.

As the Project for Public Space has written in the past: “With mounting public anxiety, and the fact that the distinction between public and private space is becoming increasingly blurred, there is greater likelihood that places will be more intensely monitored, surveyed, even militarized, in order to evoke a sense of safety.”

This is certainly true in Detroit’s rebounding downtown. Once a bustling capital of midwest industry, Detroit’s city center was hollowed out by freeways and parking lots. Only recently have big money billionaires like Quicken Loan czar Dan Gilbert reinvested in downtown.

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Detroit’s Arson Crisis: ‘We Don’t Need No Water, Let the Motherfucker Burn’

In Flint, you can’t drink the water. In Detroit, you can’t turn on the water.

Thousands of Detroiters have had their tap water cut by the city for late bills in what the United Nations considers a humanitarian crime. At the same time as water won’t flow from the tap, hundreds – if not thousands – of the city’s fire hydrants no longer function.

Arsonists know this. They also know barely any of the of fires set each year get investigated. How many fires are we talking here? Motor City Muckraker recently tallied the total.

10,000 fires in just three years. That’s how fast Detroit is burning. Like so many stories of collapse in Michigan, you have to ask: how the fuck did it get this bad?

Since the riots in the early 1940’s and late 1960’s, fire has been a common tool of the discontented, the outraged, the hopeless, and the pyromaniacs of Detroit. Devil’s Night (on the eve of Halloween each year) became a legendary evening of arson for the city, with one single night in the 80’s claiming hundreds of buildings.

Today, 4th of July has replaced Devil’s Night as the new date of mass conflagration. Last summer on July 4th the Detroit Fire Department responded to over sixty calls in 24 hours.

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The Sound and Fury of Portland on November 29th 2014

It took over a year for Portland’s Citizen Review Commission to issue a ruling regarding the police action of November 29, 2014. In January of this year, the panel came to a 5-3 decision stating that orders issued by the Portland Police Bureau to hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters were in fact unlawful.

CRC’s investigation was the result of some 40 complaints filed with the city auditor’s office the Monday morning following a weekend of unrest in the wake of a grand jury decision to not indict Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson earlier that summer.

The Oregonian reported on the night of Nov 29, 2014 hours after a rally attended by Rev. Jesse Jackson, over a hundred protesters were kettled by police and told they were under arrest. The entire crowd was held for almost an hour along with members of the media, while just 10 protesters were taken into custody for booking on disorderly conduct charges.

During the CRC’s hearing, one member asked how the 10 were chosen to be placed in custody. “That I can’t speak to, how the 10 were chosen,” Capt. Bryan Parman of the PPB replied.

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The Radical Urban Agenda of Bernie Sanders

Urbanists are always complaining presidents and other federal officials don’t focus enough on urban issues. They’re right to. National politics is framed around the Heartland of America, not dense urban centers where most of us actually live.

That could soon change. Bernie Sanders is currently waging an insurgent campaign for president inside the other corporate militaristic party, much to the shock of the Democratic establishment. And I was wrong. Other writers were too. We predicted Sanders would be a sheepdog who’d herd the Left to the doorstep of Hillary’s Starkiller Base, drop out, and promptly endorse her.

Instead we have the tie in Iowa, the record 3.5 million individual donations, the 84% youth vote.

And Sanders accomplished this by having two things Hillary can’t buy: authenticity and likability.

The other rare qualification Sanders has is being a former mayor. The only president in US history to ever have that in their resume was man-walrus Grover Cleveland.

Why does this matter? Because as a mayor, you’re far more engaged (hopefully) with the complexities of human nature and need, and likely less partisan or ideological. Liberal and conservative might be opposites in rural Ohio, but in cities such labels become meaningless. This might be why his proposed climate action plan includes increasing funding for transportation by a staggering 250%.

Screen Shot 2016-02-07 at 5.55.51 PMWhen you realize the guy feeding pigeons in his sandals might become president of America.

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