Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Should City Driving Be Considered Terrorism?

[UPDATES: See below]

When an allegedly intoxicated driver plowed into crowds of pedestrians in the heart of Times Square today, you’d be forgiven for thinking this isn’t something that happens all the time in New York. Alas, you’d be wrong. Even in the densest city in America cars are allowed to race around at lethal speeds. The solution from police is of course to crack down on jaywalkers, with predictably bloody results.

But since this collision (we still don’t say accident) mowed down so many in what’s essentially a giant public plaza, the BREAKING-NEWS-AT-ALL-TIMES!!! mainstream media ran with lines about “Terrorism”, or at the very least “might not be terrorism”. We just don’t know!

Half an hour in, they were eagerly alerting us that this was, unfortunately, not an act of terrorism, just a regular act of traffic violence. But then readers of this blog and other livable street advocates declared aloud, ‘Well, it IS actually still kind of terrorism.’

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‘Scorched Earth Urbanism’ and other Quasi-Satirical Street Vocabularies

When defining a new term, or redefining a marginalized term, it helps to define its converse. The word ‘sustainable’ has become such a meaningless marketing brand. If we’re going to take this one back from the PR firms we’ll need to draw a few lines. The opposite of ‘sustainable’ should be understood to be ‘terminal’. So often, though, the term ‘sustainable’ is being used where ‘terminal’ should rightly go. ‘Sustainable development’ on a finite planet seems comically dishonest. ‘Smart growth’, ‘green capitalism’ – it’s all a smokescreen. We’ll likely never have anything close to a sustainable metropolis. Like an ant hill, the larger our mega-cities loom, the further its resources must be imported. A few community gardens won’t radically alter much. Maybe Detroit can ramp up wide-scale urban farming, we’ll see.

Anyhow, with so many words being tossed around with dubious authenticity, it seemed fitting to play a little game of fill-in-the-blank ‘Mad-Lib Urbanism‘. Not that this is a thing yet, but it could be. The idea being you can juxtapose just about any word alongside ‘urbanism’ nowadays and potentially create an entirely new process or school of thought.

This rising trend seems to have taken root recently – likely in part to beloved academic geographer David Harvey rekindling the romanticism of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. From Harvey in 2008, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”

So many different brands of ‘urbanism’ have emerged, and most not as new movements, but as a new way to label something that’s been around for a long time. It’s a fun trend to explore, as it can instantly introduce creative new theories of how we live and connect. While this lexicon includes actual studied references, others may be a bit less than sincere. For now, let’s just enjoy the ride.

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