Whose Streets

= should we consider the Streets as Commons?

Article: Whose streets? Christopher Smith

URL = http://www.yorku.ca/jmarches/visiblecity/Whose_Streets.pdf

Description

"When we stop to carefully examine the countless different urban redevelopment projects recently taking place in ‘world cities’ such as Toronto, Ontario, it becomes acutely apparent that what Zygmunt Bauman has called the “notoriously mobile boundary between the private and the public” is currently undergoing new, violent and dramatic processes of re-negotiation and re-conceptualization.

Directly corresponding, the politicization of urban space has become a prominent feature in the socio-political agendas of many Urban Social Movements (USMs), including most notably Reclaim the Streets (RTS), an international movement that originated in London, England during the early 1990s, as a reaction to car culture and highway expansion projects. In recent years, RTS has become highly conscious of the importance of situating their critique of car culture within the larger framework of global capitalism. As the London Reclaim the Streets website clearly explains: “The struggle for car-free space must not be separated from the struggle against global capitalism- for in truth the former is encapsulated in the latter … [t]he streets are as full of capitalism as they are of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious”." (http://www.taller-commons.com/?page_id=23)