What is the difference between a street and a road? In a general sense, the street is a âpublic thoroughfareâ while the road is defined as a âsmoothed or paved surface, made for traveling by motor vehiclesâ. The former is symbolic of the âcommonsâ or temporary autonomous zones used by billions of people, while the latter is an outcome of limitless urbanization and âmotocracyâ - a private right-to-passage for millions and millions of cars, trucks, vans, bikes etc etc. The overwhelming majority of people on earth are subject to the dynamics imposed by the street and or the road, like millions of arteries spread across the far ends of our civilization.
As a quick ontological reference, streets also equate to âstreet parties, street festivals, street markets, street justice, street gangs, street children, street credibilityâ etc etc. Roads on the other hand, extend into âroad rage, road blocks, road warriors, hit-the-road, road safetyâ etc etc. Clearly one signifies democratic zones that have existed for thousands of years and are ecologically viable extensions of coexistence, while the other is a crucial aspect of the economy and the global car culture. Well, the âroad to peaceâ also merits a mention, however far and few be the actual cases in recent history.
While âstreetâ and âroadâ are often understood to mean the same thing, yet beyond their material construct, they are in opposition to each other, as concepts of space. As dynamics of territory. Roads are symbolic of tarmac and fossil fuels - linear and mechanical in nature, as an evolution that equates to âprivate enclosuresâ of the motors that drive current civilization. Streets are allegorical to âpublic arenasâ where common people can join together, collectively manage social affairs, exercise their civil rights, conduct small business and also throw parties. One being social and the other anti-social, in context of liberty, movement and survival. The following essay is an attempt to illustrate the involved conflict (and true cost) that roads and cars wield together, versus the socio-ecological value and utility of our streets. Regardless if you love cars (old or new) or favor public transport or bicycling or just walking, all of the above must have an universal measure, of responsibility and consequences. Roads, streets, public consciousness and the incoming Car-mageddon!
An Eternal Motocracy?
Across the Earth, one can feel and see the twin spirals, of overshoot and of decline, in terms of more and more cars, roads and highways, that are inversely proportional to less and less Nature, biodiversity and non-human ecosystems. âSince 1955 the UK has lost 43% of its rough grazing land, 65% of song thrushes, 90% of meadows, 50% of lowland woodlands, heaths and fens and 140, 000 miles of hedgerow. More than 80 commons have been deregulated.â (Council for the Protection of Rural England, 2010). Cars dominate every city and while doing so they pollute, congest and divide communities. Folks who drive cars throughout their adult lives, seldom stop to think that the private vehicle actually isolates people from one another. A individual dreaming of the latest âfancy carâ is incapable of such ecological attribution and ethics. Over time, every street becomes a mere conduit for motor vehicles to hurtle through, oblivious of the neighborhoods they are disrupting and polluting. Almost like a god-given right, to drive everywhere and at anytime. In reality and in a million movies, it is the car that takes up a silent but central position, almost as the true hero and savior of an otherwise unsustainable civilization. âCars have created social voids: allowing people to move further and further away from their homes, dispersing and fragmenting daily activities and lives and increasing social anonymity.â (Cracks In The Grey Sky -Ecological Resistance, Anarchist Library).
Even as it appears impossible to imagine current society without cars, the idea has tremendous value, regardless of what car owners justify most often as a âvital necessityâ. For it is not true, and in most cases a pathetic self-serving manifestation of capitalist tendencies. By ridding society of private cars, would allow us to re-create safer spaces and ecologically cleaner living environments. To return the streets to the people who live on them, and perhaps towards higher social solidarity and ecological sustainability. But, what about the electric car? Hardly makes a difference as to what type of car, when the prescient questions are about ecological damage and reformation, about unfair labor practices, first-world economic imperialism (human rights violation), endless extraction and irreversible environmental damage.
All that is involved in the production of electric vehicles and peripheral technology, is akin to the production of old (now out of fashion) internal-combustion vehicles. Be wary of the propaganda mills like âTop Gearâ and EV experts, who continuously advocate electric vehicles, all be it using hoodwink terms like âguilt-free mobilityâ and âtechnology adoption, S-Curveâ and âbest built, least glitchy and fastestâ. These people are merely out to make more money based on new technology, just like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler did a hundred years ago. For now, we can ignore the serfs of âHappy Motoringâ based on the fact, that like the endless proliferation of cities and suburbs, cars are also an unsustainable facet of an unquestionable capitalist and anti-ecological culture. Most self-styled experts of EVs believe in endless extraction, which is symbolic of a ravenous arrogant techno-fix capitalist society. A recent seminar, made of diverse grounded-in-reality opinions corroborates the above argument, especially in context of people living within the first-world.
We (common people) are unlikely to enter the much touted âelectric revolutionâ made of electric vehicles, that is currently rising thanks to tax-payers money utilized by a few giant corporations, backed by green colored propaganda and the âGlobal Green Scareâ. Hopping into a car, going to the movies, or to the shopping mall or Sunday picnic or an amazing road trip, will all be seen as âhistorical anomaliesâ in the not-so-distant future. The highways that span across nations and continents, for now symbolize a very exuberant but short lived period of our history, as a species. Roads and cars are good for the economy, however both are also catastrophic for the rest of the living planet, especially when we multiply millions of cars and billions of people.
âWith cars everywhere, North Americans were convinced, that one could live in the suburbs or have a country life and still drive to the city.. it seemed like a great idea and everyone went for it. That went very well for a while for some people. An era fraught with grandiosity⌠But now, there are so many dynamics of failure underway, within the global economy, that there is a very high probability that the wheels will literally come off⌠The crackup of industrial society also includes the entire population that depends on cars for daily transport, livelihood, medical support, food, education etc⌠Indeed the current grandiosity signifies the end stage of the current techno-industrial empire. The current rush to electrify industry and society is mainly held up by fantastical thinking and technological hubris⌠Wise green plans or a Jiminy Cricket Syndrome?â James Howard Kunstler (2022 interview). What Kunstler speaks of resonates back with social theorist, anarcho-ecologist Murray Bookchinâs verdict, on the impact of American style urbanization, more than 35 years ago. Owning more and more cars, by more and more people is akin to âmass formation psychosisâ as explained by Doctor Mattias Desmet (Ghent University).
Street Reality
Megacities like New Delhi, Mexico City, SĂŁo Paulo, Karachi and Bangkok, that nest millions of people also provide social perspectives, as to how common people utilize the old streets and old parts of the city, as opposed to people driving cars who claim and dominate the roads and new urban centers. Take for example, the following observation by Austrian philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich about Mexico City. âSome people sat on the road to sell vegetables, tobacco and charcoal. Others put their chairs on the road to sell tequila and fruit juice. Others held their meetings on the road. Some gathered to decide on the new headman for the neighborhood or to determine the price of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys, pigs and chicken through the crowd, walking next to the heavily-loaded beast of burden; others sat in the saddle. Children played in the gutter, and still people walking could use the road to get from one place to another. Such roads were not exactly built for people. But like any true commons, the small roads and street itself were the result of people living there and making the space livable. The dwellings that lined the roads were not private homes in the modern sense, but organic garages for the overnight deposit of workers. The threshold still separated two living areas, one intimate and one common.â
Alas all is not harmonized and congenial inside a seething roaring megacity. To bring us back to the violent subaltern nature of the megacity, check out what Theodore Adorno noted in Minima Moralia (Reflections Of A Wounded Life) way back in 1951. âWhich driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children, and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.â But we must thank the people who improved the suspension, the brakes and the overall efficiency and safety mechanisms of the modern car. Yet no thanks to âroad rageâ and âroad fatigueâ that millions of people experience on a daily basis.
This is especially true for a country like India, where the car is a direct extension of class and the corresponding power of the owner (or driver) imposing their will on others and the road. Deeply internalized as a social tendency, most Indians treat the road as a combat zone, where âthe other personâs disadvantage is my advantageâŚâ (KT Ravindran, Urban Planner). City roads in India have no space left, in terms of safe driving and instead symbolize an hyperbola of overshoot, made of more people, more cars, bikes, trucks, buses, rising emissions, noise, particle pollution and chaos. Is only a shortsighted opinion that explicates road-rage as âa sudden expression of anger triggered in a motorist in reaction to the behavior of other motorists or pedestrians on the road.â
Given that such images and conditions will shock the bourgeois of Europe and North America, yet we can understand (and appreciate) that streets across the world still provide common people with a valid base, to begin to with. A way to reassemble our spaces, as something likeable and liveable. Streets literally provide common people with directions to reassert control, in different ways, over those spaces that once belonged to us but have since been illegitimately taken away from common people, through the process of urbanization that ends up creating millions of private âenclosures.â Question being, can the street be redefined to serve itâs original purpose? Yes and better with anarchist principles leading to âdirect actionâ. Reformation always insists on direct action. Prepares the empowered towards resistance based on collective power, under one banner or many banners. Without dividing people further, as Left, Right, Conservative, Radical etc, the streets do not distinguish when it comes to host the disenfranchised and their given cause.
âWe are not going to demand anything. We are not going to ask for anything. We are going to take. We are going to occupy.â Graffiti along the M11 highway (Britain).
âReclaim the Streetsâ is one potent example of sustained public resistance, that was able raise awareness within British society about the limitless proliferation of roads and cars within the country. After all, there are negligible number of wild animals and Nature left within the erstwhile #1 empire of the world. Founded in mid-1995, the initial group of activists managed to gather wider public support over the next few years. RTS as collective resistance was built on a two-fold agenda. One that opposed the dominance of corporate forces (privatization of commons) and two against cars as the dominant mode of transport. The mobilization, assembly, and organization of RTS started small but over time larger crowds drew on the skills learned from local street protests and sabotage, which eventually spilled over into the highway and surrounding towns. The use of sound systems drew on dominant popular culture, whereas the initial inspiration for âStreet Partiesâ lead to the epic standoff between the people and police on the M11 highway in 1996-97. Members of RTS have retrospectively realized that their roots are akin to past events in history. âThe great revolutionary moments have all been enormous popular festivalsâŚthe storming of the Bastille, the Paris Commune, and the uprisings in 1968, to name a few.â (Cracks In The Grey Sky -Ecological Resistance, Anarchist Library)
What can we common people living in different parts of the world learn from RTS? Direct mobilization and action. Above all else, RTS encouraged British people to take part in direct action and spread awareness (without mainstream media) about the destructive impact of roads, highways, malls and cars. We must note, that as a movement it still failed to push the ruling politicians to intervene, in favor of people and Nature. Instead they sent in the cops by the hundreds. No surprise there, as the political class across the world is devoted to not only the destruction of Nature but gradually civil rights altogether. Plus staying in power and maintaining their authority over a vast majority of people, is utmost for capitalism to survive if not thrive. âDirect action is about destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for themselves. Direct action is not just a tactic: itâs an end in itself. It is about enabling people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by their own actions.â (Do or Die, Deep Ecology Diaries).
In hindsight, by and by certain European cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, Valencia and Berlin, have adopted a range of interventions and policies, where public transport, riding bicycles, walking, street markets & activities etc is encouraged and sustained at a local level. In spite of corporate pressure and interests, a few of these cities are even considering to altogether prohibit privately owned cars from the busiest parts of the city. Much of this ties up with earlier ecologically motivated actions, of not just of RTS, but a range of organizations based around the world, such as Earth Liberation Front, Critical Mass, Street-Child, BKU, Symbiosis, La Asamblea de los Pueblos IndĂgenas and the more radicalized and confrontational groups like Blac Bloc, Federazione Anarchica Informale, J25 etc. The European Union has recognized no less than 400 such organizations, involved in various kinds of citizen assemblies and anarcho-socialist reformation projects. The resounding logic from most of these organizations is âwhy waitâ or simply direct action now!
Back to that not-so-famous street, in front of my house or your, that also merits attention, also invites us to participate and to reorganize. Our homes, our streets and little town squares are spaces where direct action circles, alternative media and localized agendas can be hatched and given wings. Catalysts of forthcoming change or as the famous anarcho-ecologist Murray Bookchin explained âby taking back power to organize at a local level, most often equates to the first steps, that re-harmonize the relationship between society and Natureâ.
Ecological restoration, is not a task or a burden, but one of the most compelling experiences based on a necessity, that we face, if we are to âpatch up the battered cradle of life that sustains us, as well as renewing our own bruised mental ecologies.â (Do or Die Issue 1, Earth First! Movement). There is no doubt left, that removing the sources of the ongoing destruction is our only chance to salvage what remains of Nature. An ecologically sane or biocentric person finds it easier to realize the scale of damage, that capitalism has willfuly inflicted upon Nature, which in turn has exposed our ecologically fractured legacy. Maybe we will never be able to create the idyll from the current wreckage. Never if we keep recklessly driving millions and millions of vehicles all the time.
âThe Road To Hellâ by Chris Rhea (1989) in hindsight is a poignant and dark song. An artistâs impression, that could foresee a world of hyper-alienation and limitless motion, within a hopeless urban jungle. The streets which may leads us towards anything better, need not be made of tarmac, nor necessitate the motors which drive current civilization. To wrap, I believe that public desire, spontaneity and organization make for the foundations upon which we can build participatory politics, moving towards a slightly more liberated and whole lot ecologically sane society đŚđź đłđżď¸ đ đ§đ˝đ đŚ
My people shall never work. Those who work can not dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams. âSmohalla, Native American, 1887 Be RealisticâDemand the Impossible!
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Beautifully written. Thank you.
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