29. Slowdown landscapes: Street fight
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Policy, BlackLivesMatter, Covid-19, Urban Planning, Design

Yet as freeways begin to fade, which has proved more valuable over the long term? Which do people keep returning to, given the choice? Perhaps “man (sic) has made up his mind” that the donkey was right all along?

The motif of the donkey is not completely coincidental: perhaps this is another sign that a designing around humans and nonhumans is a more profoundly complex, resilient, and equitable route through that city?

Black Lives Matter, and the line of most resistance

The dynamic of the political protest in the street is similarly slow and haphazard. It may be channeled or kettled by police, but its goal is hardly getting from A to B. Whilst its actual route may have more in common with that ‘donkey urbanism’, as Catherine Ingraham dubbed it, based on taking “the line of least resistance”, the protest march is clearly about being the line of most resistance.

Either way, the march exemplifies this richer idea of streets as not being about traffic. Instead, it is a place to articulate what the late Michael Sorkin, an early loss to the coronavirus, described as “the collusion of difference that only cities can produce”.

“People have always lived on streets. They have been the places where children first learned about the world, where neighbors met, the social centers of towns and cities, the rallying points for revolts, the scenes of repression.”— Donald Appleyard

The resilience of this less efficient but more effective and affective space, and the broader range of value it generates, may change not only our approach to urbanism, but a broader range of mental models. The short-term changes to many of our streets due to COVID-19 could presage longer-term structural changes in areas like public health, commerce and climate resilience, as well as an impact on our city more generally. This moves the question beyond the ‘urbs’ of the built form and into the ‘civitas’ of our culture, about public life.

So part of what is happening on the streets is a re-positioning of values, as well as a re-patterning of urban form. In both, we have to be clearer about the public life in question: whose lives, which public, to what end? The street is a such a beguiling combination of potent and open, unlike other urban spaces, that we cannot mess this up.

“The piazza is a space for encoded rituals. You know how to conduct yourself in the piazza, its ideal version, what we call civilized urbanity. The street is the space of indeterminacy.” — Saskia Sassen

Yet there is some significant ‘messing up’ occurring. Alissa Walker quite correctly and angrily takes down numerous urbanists and designers for their wish-fulfilment fantasies about what they wanted streets to become. Written before the protests about George Floyd’s death, her article seems remarkably prescient now, describing the need to reassessing “our broken cities” far more fundamentally than simply painting a bike lane and popping-up a parklet. Without a systematic transformation, centred on social justice, such moves would only reinforce existing power structures.

Walker’s scathing critique of American urbanists fiddling around with bike lanes whilst America burns should force a deeper level of participation and ownership in what places are for, in who decides, and what they are about. The outcome can tend towards bikes, birdsong, and barbecues over time — those are things we can also optimise around — but the way that we get there, what’s at stake and who decides, is far more important.

Destiny Thomas makes this point too, and forcefully. We must not leap ahead to a built form outcome, even with something so apparently intrinsically ‘good’ as open streets, without first assessing the power structures that build up or tear apart our cities and their people.

“Without a plan to include and protect Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people, or a plan to address anti-Black vigilantism and police brutality, these open streets are set up to fail.”—Destiny Thomas

This does not mean that streets should not be open, green, car-free, and with diverse applications. Quite the opposite. But without addressing this context of social transformation, and the way we get there, tactical measures may actually make things worse. As I wrote elsewhere, put traffic planners in charge of the street and you get traffic, just as if you put gardeners in charge of the street, we’d get gardens. But put a diverse range of people in charge of the street and perhaps we’d get a diverse range of people.

A single image somehow captures these collisions, depicting a group brunching at a parklet in the foreground, whilst a protest marches past in the background. COVID-19 is an accelerant for moving the street away from cars, freeing up the space for these activities, and more. But it is politics that decides what happens here in the end, and whether that turns into parklets for privileged white brunchers, or parklets for a more diverse wealth of applications and peoples. The way that happens, the values they embody, and what the street becomes, have now become crucial questions.

Optimising the street for brunch. Photo: Nick Swartsell/Cincinnati CityBeat

The prism of a shattered USA at this point means this ‘brunch versus BLM’ image is a lightening rod for the fiercest of debates — again, quite rightly, given the context. In this, it further reinforces that the street is where both these movements — the reclaiming of public space, the reclaiming of public politics — collide in real time and space, intrinsically linked.

Europe has its own significant problems with racism. We may not see it so clearly, simply because we are not as heavily-armed.

As Gary Younge wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Perhaps only because (Europe) is not blighted by the gun culture of the US, racism here is less lethal. But it is just as prevalent in other ways … The precariousness of black life in late capitalism is not unique to America, even if it is most often and glaringly laid bare there. To that extent, Black Lives Matter exists as a floating signifier that can find a home in most European cities and beyond.”

And find a home it has, on the streets of Bristol and Barcelona, Stockholm and Sofia. It’s been very powerful to see Europe respond to America’s pain, and across its former colonies, and reflect upon its own role in inflicting such pain in the first place.

Yet it’s unclear how much Europeans are genuinely reconciling with the racism at home. An EU report found Finland to be one of the most racist countries in the European Community, effectively, with a kind of pervasive background racism suffered continually by migrants and new Finns. Yet many, perhaps most, would see Finland as a paragon of progressive values in action. Are we reconciling these issues at home in Europe?

The protests are a genuine step forward. Without richer values being instilled, or at least discussed, however, the impact of these marches may be limited to tactics. Already, a few months in, the focus that Black Lives Matter was able to pull during May and June is blurring a little. And it should not take Black bodies to keep it on the agenda. Outside of these more obvious and fundamental social justice questions, if we settle for merely pop-up bike lanes on our city streets, the car lobby will find it easy to make the case for the hermetically-sealed existence of driving—“And through such decongested streets!” There will be calls to further optimise the city around solitary, individualistic modes like car-driving, which will do little to repair social fabric, never mind rebuild climate resilience or public health.