Protestations

Iron Curtains, Steel Fences, The Great Wall...

Back at the times of the Cold War?... As the huge fence is being built round the g8-summit hotel up in Scotland, citizens start to realize that their civil liberties are treated like feared protesters, not to say like anarchists or even terrorists...



=Polit-Fiction DRAFT= MiniJournal On the eve of Saturday 11th June I am writing: Only this paragraph below is a quotation:

''I seem to have turned into a conservative. There's all this stuff going on in Burngreave - they want to knock it down in order to regenerate it. And now I find myself saying, 'No! wait! There are networks of trade there that have grown organically over time! You break them and you'll destroy the place!'''

This excerpt from Dan's journal User_talk:DanOlner

reminded me of an excellent fiction book written originally in Portuguese, THE CAVE, A caverna: a country which is recognized as Portugal nowadays is being sucked into another culture... a thriller in disguise, interesting for anyone wishing to get closer to Portuguese culture and deep beliefs. Written by Jose Saramago, a Communist all his life, from communist grandparents who were also pig-keepers.

So since this is my protestation piece, let me suggest that the true foundation underlying inventions like a social forum must also include some chaotic random chance element, like the Quakers Friends' house revealing themselves as the most revolutionary together with the left-ist in this fair city. Now, if the Quakers friends house (a truly friendly house, i've been inside) would become an emblem for the G8 sheffield, that would strike the world! Because this is rooted in this city, grassroots, just imagine the 70-year olds being driven out by the security forces...

(to be continued as Polit-fiction somewhere somehow).

The Absurdity of it All


See also: Ideas Bank;

a sincere and zealous protestation against the over-abundance of motorised carriages together with some suggestions towards the elimination of this disgorge in the form of an open letter to all motorists.

ProtestationsII

There are these large pieces of metal hurtling around at high speed in residential areas. They are such a menace to life & limb that every journey made by any other means is chiefly spent dodging these monstrous objects. They are the single biggest cause of atmospheric pollution and global warming. They are the largest market for the warmongering oil industry. Their noise is the noise of the city. These cars are so central to the organisation of this society, especially the organisation of work, that an illusion has to be maintained that nobody sees anything wrong with the ever increasing number of cars.

Protecting ourselves from them has become our responsibility as pedestrians. It is not you who are supposed to stop, look and listen. Road safety is the very first thing that children are taught. We are all supposed to identify our own interests with that of the economy, that is to say, economic growth. One of the main indicators of a growing economy is rising car sales. Newsreaders announce a slump in the sales of cars with the same sober tone of voice used for unemployment statistics or terrorists attacks. Adverts, the Media, the very design of our cities, all assert that what is convenient for you the driver is convenient for everyone. This is part of a broader assumption that we all live in car sized family units and all want to get where we are going as quickly as possible.

In fact many people do see something wrong with this situation. But most of them are not drivers. Those people who lack the widespread privilege of a car generally lack the rarer privilege of a voice that may be heard. Most of us just mutter darkly about the subject on the top of busses and wave our arms impotently at zebra crossings. But some go further...

[[ProtestationsII]

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Your Journeys, our Bodies
"Where the MX-5 excels is in its ability to involve the driver in its every action, so that you very quickly feel you are just one of a wealth of moving parts, all in total harmony. Take the gear change, the way it snaps around its close gate is a revelation."



Autocar & Motor
In 1991 a conference of British crime writers was asked "how would you kill someone?". Many ingenious means were proposed, some of which might make excellent mysteries: push them out the porthole, stab them with an icicle. Curiously, the commonest and most practical method suggested was to run them over with a car. Not only is the criminal already in the getaway vehicle when the crime is committed, but even if caught the punishment is likely to be footling. The alarming leniency shown towards murderous motorists is perhaps related to the dissonance between the declared purpose of penal justice and its practical results. To judge by these results, the chief function of legal punishments is not to deter crime but to create, consolidate and train an active criminal class. The spectre of such a subculture makes the rest of society more like a prison in its turn. We become fearful of leaving our cells and begin to regard our warders as protectors rather than oppressors. For criminality to be effectively terrifying it needs the figure of the rapist, the mugger, the burglar, the inexplicable outsider who strikes in the darkness, not the drunken sales rep driving home from the office party. Where fear of the outsider promotes conformity, fear of the sales rep promotes rebellion. So hit-and-run drivers do not get the publicity of serial killers. Their victims are just as dead.

In fact the laxity of punitive measures against deadly drivers is just one of a skein of double standards used to belittle the dangers of traffic. Politicians will dismiss a rise in crime figures as "mostly traffic offences", whilst becoming quite apoplectic about car theft and joyriding. Police complain that they wanted to catch villains but have "ended up on traffic duty". A single death in a rail-crash is headline news, meriting a public enquiry and the resignation of transport ministers, whilst the most horrific of motorway pileups is hardly worth a mention in the press.

In India the cow is supposedly a sacred animal to which motorists must give way. Nowhere in the world is the human being similarly sacred. The fact we cannot cross the road if you are coming is so obvious, so banal, that it scarcely seems questionable. Yet surely this was not always the case, there was a time when we had the right of way. So how did this happen? Imagine a world where you always had to stop for us. What would it be like? And would you spend $20,000 on a car under such circumstances? Perhaps this is the key to the mystery. Perhaps we should not ask: how does society tolerate the annual slaughter of 5000 people a year in Britain, of a million people globally? Perhaps we should ask: how would a society of motorists tolerate anything else? To us, this slaughter is one of the car's many drawbacks. To you, it is one of its many advantages. It is the risk of driving that makes it exciting for you. You consider your car a form of liberty because the only liberty you can imagine is the liberty to kill and maim others. Your life is planned and ritualised in its every detail. Your pension plan, your mortgage and your sexlife are finalised decades in advance. Is it any wonder you hunger for the thrill of reckless driving? Is driving not the only piece of work you do without a supervisor watching over your shoulder? Is it not the only thing you ever do, on your own terms, for your self? Is it even the only time of any sort that you get to yourself?

Could this be why you are so aggressive when you drive? Is it as much a bored kind of desperation as an arrogant kind of machismo? A man's car says a lot about him. But as you edge your way through a traffic jam at less than walking pace, you have only the potential to reach the dangerous, erotic speed promised in the advert. If this is true, then you have been sold a pup. You have been sold danger without excitement. You have the liberty to go anywhere you like, as long as there is a multistory at the other end. You have been sold a mere representation of freedom, an individuality that is just like everyone else's, that is just enough to allow you to tolerate your intolerable daily life. We do not weep for you or the time you have spent working to pay for your car and its petrol. We weep for ourselves because drunk or sober you are mutilating and killing us.

The Transformation of the City

".... the efforts of all established powers to increase the means of maintaining order in the streets finally culminates in the suppression of the street."

- Guy Debord. society of the Spectacle: 172. 1967

"Urban transportation has to do not only with moving people and goods into, out of and through the city but also with spatial organisation of all human activities within it."

- John W.Dyckman. Transportation in Cities. Scientific American September 1965

In the former Vicar Lane Bus Station in Leeds there is a notice which says: "National Car parks would like to apologise to bus passengers for any inconvenience caused by the demolition of this bus station and its conversion into a car park." That's OK lads, don't mention it. Simply in terms of passenger numbers, replacing a bus station with parking space for 20 cars is hardly efficient. And there is more to cities than efficiency. Vicar lane Bus Station was no pleasure-dome but it did at least provide a meeting place with shelter and seats. A car park in contrast is dead space, empty and functional. It is there only to allow work to happen somewhere else. Many other examples could prove the same point- that even if cars could exist without being traffic, for instance if they could jaunt through hyperspace from A to B without occupying any of the points in between, then they would still be a considerable nuisance in terms of their occupation of urban space. They are far larger than the single human being they often carry. They are privately owned and therefore stand idle much time (which makes the short life-span of their planned obsolescence all the more laughable). They take you to work, to the shops, to the cinema and home again, so that each car through parking occupies an area larger than most people's homes.

In any case, cars do not exist independently of traffic, they occupy far more space as moving traffic than as parked objects. They are such a poor mode of transport that they cannot go anywhere without special surfaces called 'roads' to drive on, without workshops to mend them, petrol stations to refuel them, without insurance offices, bridges, and of course hospitals. Car occupied land takes up shocking proportions of most cities: 23% of London, 29% of Tokyo, 44% of Los Angeles.

This would be a dreadful state of affairs in itself but it is exacerbated by the nature of the urban space that traffic has stolen. If we consider a threefold division of non-car space into: then several tendencies can be seen within the changing economy of space. Firstly when gender power is mediated by space, it usually happens within these categories, not between them. Although sexual harassment on the street is able to cross the boundary between car space and public space. Secondly, a gradual conquest of public space by corporate space is in progress. The replacement of city squares by corporately owned shopping centres is an example of this. Thirdly while private space is obviously unaffected by the conquest of public areas it is far from being equitably distributed between its various users. Lastly car space is in a continuous state of expansion with public space as its chief victim.
 * Private space Eg. Houses, Gardens
 * Public spaces e.g. parks, squares etc.
 * Corporate space, that owned by private firms or rendered inaccessible to public use by the state e.g. police stations, DSS offices, workplaces, shops and colleges;

These developments obviously do not provide the greatest freedom of movement for everyone. More finely guarded tiers of accessibility ranging from genuinely private (not just family) space through overlapping levels of community specific and use specific space to large expanses of genuinely public (not just traffic dominated) space, would provide far greater freedom of movement and so of activity. Though this could not happen unless everybody had at least the spatial control over their own bodies. Current spatial economies dictate activity by channelling movement along narrow corridors, which link highly controlled environments such as the toy superstore, the workplace and the family home. The prospect that a city could be something more than a convenient set of roads linking controlled spaces seems very distant today, at a time when even the most imposing buildings have an air of monetary expedience about them. But even in Victorian England, hardly a utopian society, public space was an automatic consideration of any architectural project.

Roads determine not only the relative proportions of each type of space but also their distribution. As more people have cars, or rather as more money is spent by motorists, the more places become out of reach to people who do not have cars, witness the exodus of shops from high streets to ring-roads. Ironically the machine that is sold on its ability to bequeath freedom of movement and its ability to cover distances actually creates as much distance as it traverses. So the two dominant tendencies in the spatial distribution of urban activities, namely traffic imperialism and urban zoning, are entirely due to the dominance of the motor vehicle over transportation as a whole. The car is replacing things you want to do with things you have to do, whilst simultaneously moving the things you have to do further away from each other. This impoverishes your already debased life, as you must spend longer and longer hours in front of the wheel. It also impoverishes our lives, as more facilities move out of our reach, our movements are channelled along ever narrower predetermined paths, we have more and more roads to cross and they are ever busier and more dangerous.

The final irony is that you can gain no satisfaction from all the space that is being so generously turned over to your use. you do not actually use the space that you pass through even though you prevent us from using it, all you do is try to mitigate it by passing through it as quickly as possible. As far as you are concerned you are never really in it at all, you just watch it go by, a boring television programme projected onto your windscreen. And the more space there is for you to wish that you did not have to drive through, the more unhappy you are because the more obstacles there are to your progress: other cars. You must hate cars, really hate them, more than we, as pedestrians, can ever imagine.

The Necessity of Driving
In a way though, driving has been forced on you. Many suburbs of Los Angeles do not even have pavements. Milton Keynes is little better. Life for many people is now impossible without a car. In order to either earn or spend money, the car has become a necessity. What is this doing to people? Advertisements claim that driving is a form of freedom, a kind of power. The ads are telling the truth but at the same time they're lying. Because cars are expensive, and speak of the physical control of space, they have become emblematic of wealth. Because male sexuality has been constructed as mechanical and thrusting, and because the car is a scale model of the nuclear family, cars have come to represent male power. As a driver you have power over pedestrians and passengers and urban space; so the car represents its own reality: motor power.

But the car can only take you where the car has already been. Driving is like shopping in a big supermarket. You are in a little bubble of your own and accountable to no-one. You can buy (drive to) any product (prefabricated destination) you like, but you can only chose from what is on offer. You are isolated and at the same time re-incorporated into a grand scheme of domination. You feel privileged but you are being used. The powers that be prefer roads to streets because a busy highway is just a prison with mobile cells. A driver can leave the road but can no more influence others to do likewise than a corpse can start an insurrection in a cemetery. A car is an accident looking for somewhere to happen and the more people have cars the more similar everywhere becomes, so the less meaningful is your "freedom of movement".

By arranging the space in which human activity takes place, the road network prearranges our movements. Even a 'Holiday' is nothing but one long journey, a linear sequence of experiences with no connecting structure but "What's next?". Ultimately the prescribing of experiences, prescribes emotions. You have no more power to influence the pictures on the windscreen on your way to work, than those on the television screen at home, so you feel powerless. Separation makes us feel lonely. Endless repetition of the same little rituals, enforced by the intractability of urban geography, makes us feel bored.

We can observe our boredom, just as we can observe a car park and feel as little empowered to do away with one as the other. The boredom is the consequence of the car-park and the car-park is the reification, the translation into the material world, of the boredom. This boredom is nothing less than the boredom of the market itself. It takes place within our tiny bubbles. It is a secret and lonely misery, as hidden as the misery of the widows of the motor-car, dreaming every night of their husbands burning helplessly to death, strapped to a plastic seat on a motorway.

The Transformation of the Planet And as if this is not bad enough, it is getting worse. This traffic system can only exist in a state of perpetual expansion. It increases the distances over which goods and people must be transported. Then, ingeniously, it offers a solution to this problem: the car and the truck. It creates unsafe, empty, hateful streets, then offers the car as a form of safety. It creates a rich world greedy for status lifestyles and endless raw materials, then offers itself as an index of the degree of "development" of the poor world. Just as it is transforming the city it is transforming the rest of the planet.

Mining ores for raw materials carves great opencast scars in the landscape, often dispossessing native pedestrians of their lands and livelihoods at the same time. The ores are processed in huge plants. The metals and components are shipped across the globe in leaky hulks. Lives are warped in factories that assemble components, on plantations that grow rubber, in the mines and in the refineries, in the forges and the crippling foundries. And at every stage, up until throwing the burnt out wreckage of the finished product into a concrete ditch, hauling the used tyres out to sea by the barge-load and chucking the acid leaking batteries into a river, pollution is pumping out into the atmosphere, seeping into the hydro-sphere and being buried in the mud.

On top of this, cars need petrol which pollutes at its points of production and consumption and at every point in between: the supertanker, the filling station and the engine of your car. The fumes from burning petrol are the largest artificial source of atmospheric carbon in the world. The main carbon sinks which take carbon out of the atmosphere are the rainforests and the plankton of the southern seas. Unfortunately the rainforests are being destroyed and the plankton threatened by the ozone depletion ( a process itself accelerated by car fumes). Even without this destruction, the sinks would be unable to cope with the current number of cars. What is actually at stake here is the ecology of the entire surface of the planet.

SUNDAY MIRROR, LONDON: 11TH JANUARY 1976.
 * Protestations II