After strolling into the city center during a break we came back on a Calandria, a charming horse-drawn carriage still used in Guadalajara but mostly for tourism.

I just finished several days of networking and discussing in Guadalajara at the 10th annual “Towards Car-Free Cities” Conference. It’s not clear where the next one will be, or when, though my great friend Thiago Benicchio of Ciclo Cidade in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is planning one for 2013. I had a great time, as I always do at these kinds of confabulations. This is my second one, after my 2008 experience in Portland where I first met some of my Guadalajara friends.

They produced a number of charming promos like the one above, but we learned after the fact how close the whole thing came to being cancelled. Just three months before the Sept. 5 opening, there was no money, no publicity, and a barely functioning group producing the event. Two of the main organizers had dropped out for personal reasons, and a whole new team had to step into their absence and make it happen. Probably this was for the best, since now there are a number of women occupying key roles in the much more horizontal organizing group, and frankly, they did a fantastic job of producing the conference. Dozens of workshops with simultaneous translation, a good deal of media coverage, thousands of attendees during the week, and a real buzz around Guadalajara and even nationally across Mexico, all arose from their fine efforts.

A mural at the Iteso University to support the conference.

The future is the target of this ongoing international effort to move us “towards car-free cities.” How do we consciously redesign cities to move away from the seemingly inevitable domination of the private automobile? What are the alternatives? What are the mechanisms to move us? Do we engage with government and policy-making, or do we build grassroots, direct-action movements, or both? And if both, how do they reinforce each other or not? And can we really talk about mobility and transport in the absence of a more comprehensive critique of how we reproduce life in all its facets?

We emerged from the light rail system to a closed amusement park with this tell-tale children's ride, cars going round a gas pump! Perhaps this will be a relic someday!

My organizer friends gave me the great honor of giving my presentation in a most unusual location: in a pseudo-plaza amidst intersecting underground car tunnels! Somehow the organizers convinced a deputy mayor to sign off on closing one of the tunnels to cars, since the only access to the plaza is to walk or bicycle down one of the tunnel entrances on the roadway. About 300-400 people came, and the police diverted thousands of cars onto surface detours for the three hours of closure. Not surprisingly, this generated a fair amount of antagonism in the media, with journalists badgering the organizers (and me too, a little) about the inconvenience we “unjustly” created. But as I answered in various interviews, this kind of tension is actually quite productive. No one was really put out that far (Guadalajara is a big traffic jam, routinely), so another couple of hours of bad traffic can hardly be seen as a great tragedy. It’s actually perfectly “normal” here, as in most major cities. But because there was an identifiable “cause” of this road closure, the tension was productive, it generated questions, “who did this? what do they want? what is it to talk about ‘car-free cities’?” and so on. In fact, the media swarmed the conference organizers with questions and paid much more attention to the whole conference thanks to the unusual use of the subterranean plaza, and the consequent road closure. In other words, it worked like a charm!

Getting ready for my "muscular" presentation!

If you were in the back you probably couldn't see very well... projecting onto the big sheet didn't work in the bright evening light, so we moved a smaller screen into place.

Traffic diverted from tunnel to subterranean plaza.

The view from street level down into the plaza, two hours before the presentation.

Milling about in the traffic tunnel after the Talk.

The Conference demographics were skewed towards youth, with a surprising number of teens and folks in their 20s. I really enjoyed meeting a crowd of teenagers and learning that they had invented at their high school a “bike train” wherein they ride to school, going from house to house picking up their classmates until some 60-80 are riding together to school. Quite impressive! Most of the conference was held at Iteso University on the southern edge of Guadalajara, and that brought in hundreds of curious students to various workshops and lectures. Notably missing from the week’s events were the bike commuting construction workers and laborers, panaderos (bread deliverers) and other bike couriers, and the vast population of poor working class who depend on the widely disrespected public transit system.

Another view of the deserted tunnel and the traffic jam above.

The underground light rail system worked fine for us, but we heard it is pretty horrible at rush hour.

Of all the policy wonks, transit geeks, and bicycle activists who were in attendance, my favorite speaker was Miguel Valencia. He’s a chemical engineer who has been working at the Autonomous University of Mexico and he has an extremely articulate critique which goes well beyond the typical clichés of transit wonkdom. He built a much broader and deeper edifice on his rejection of the principles of modernism and industrialism. He went on to say that life has to slow down and the very notion of “the job” is part of the problem. Rather than belabor the obvious problems of cars and cities tied up in traffic, he emphasized the deeper assumptions about economic growth and urban design that are rooted in pre-WWII modernist thinking. He clearly advocated a “relocalization” agenda, putting transport into a larger agenda of social transformation and transition. I listened to him in Spanish (foregoing the translation headphones) so my understanding of him was well short of 100%, but later he mentioned that he had been in communication with Jan Lundberg (of Culture Change) and Richard Register (Berkeley) for at least a couple of decades. Clearly his thinking is rooted in a green city, post-petroleum, sensibility. His critique was as much of the capitalist organization of life as it was the obvious depradations of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them.

Roxana Kreimer of Argentina is the author of a book “The Tyranny of the Automobile,” and she gave the final keynote talk. I was not impressed, in spite of attending with relatively high expectations. Regrettably she lost me early, with bad use of statistics (comparing the number of deaths in autos to those in trains to make a case that cars are worse), and a repetitive and all-too-familiar critique of cars based on the death, disease, and societal mayhem they are directly responsible for. We left before she was finished, shaking our heads at the “sky-is-falling” Helen Calidicott approach that pounded the audience with arguments about cars causing fatalities and injuries, as though we all didn’t already know it.

Which highlights the biggest problem of these gatherings—too many people preaching to the converted, repeating the same tired points that have been said so many times previously. As Thiago wrote me in an email a couple of days before I got here, after he’d arrived and had been quickly swept up in local activities in Guadalajara:

“It’s really global and people are really starting to talk [about] the same things all over the world, at different levels of perception. I just don’t know how much it can reach the “outer world” and how much we’re talking [to] ourselves [about] things that we already know. At least, it’s a great exercise to spread the words and thoughts.”

It is heartening to see the surge of visionary activism here in Guadalajara, and to realize it is happening in fits and starts in places as diverse as Sao Paulo and Oslo, Norway, San Francisco and Quito, Ecuador. We got reacquainted with Anna Nygard here too, whom we’d first met in Oslo (she’s actually a Swede), where she’s helped launch the Planka.nu project there. I wrote about planka during my Scandinavian trip in 2009, a group that is committed to free transit for all (they favor having taxes pay for all public transit) and supportive of fare evasion (they offer an insurance policy against fare evasion tickets!). Unfortunately we missed her Talk but everyone said it was excellent.

We saw this odd religious flyer posted to the wall... Guadalajara's congested streets might "drive" a bicyclist to religion I guess!

Old friend Jason Meggs was here too. Imagine my surprise to walk in on his workshop to find him showing a series of impenetrable powerpoint slides and advocating for more on-the-ground statistical research about how people get around! Here’s one of the stalwarts of Bay Area activism, who was a crucial character in getting the bike/ped lane added to the new Bay Bridge east span with his incessant pressure and rides across the bridge a decade ago. Now he’s living in Bologna, Italy, where the University is supporting him while he studies eastern European cities and their relationship to bicycling. But Jason has long been a guy seeking that balance between wonky advocacy work and the soaring passions that sent him to jail dozens of times in the 1990s, so it was lovely to see him still going.

Eric Britton, founder of Carfree Day, gave a week’s worth of daily workshops to local bureaucrats, which somehow managed to cover most of the Conference costs. He made a splash in the Saturday newspaper, denouncing local politicians for failing to take advantage of all the free, high quality “transportation consultants” on hand during the conference. And he insisted that he could turn Guadalajara into the most bike and ped-friendly city in Latin America in a month, with the funds being squandered on another of a series of pointless bridges being built over big intersections around the city.

There is no question that a new vision of modernity and the future is taking shape globally, and one of the arenas of this emergence is the movement for bicycles and car-free cities. Miguel Valencia’s critique of modernism was on point, but he didn’t try to reclaim or reinvent the concept, perhaps because our confidence in a better future is at low ebb. It is hard to believe the future will be better in light of the collapse of social democracies in the face of relentless neoliberal redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the rising tide of climate chaos to boot. But it is precisely in the transition towns idea, for relocalization and resilience, reduced consumption/waste of energy and other resources, an extension of social rights to everyone regardless of nationality or race, etc., that we CAN imagine a world much better than the one we’re in now. No doubt the “Car-Free Cities” movement will have to break out of its dependence on a narrow slice of the population to contribute to this broader social transformation. And after ten years of meeting, this latest iteration of the Conference held many clues as to the directions that such a break-out might take.

My sweetheart Adriana Camarena brought a great idea forward that emerged from a conversation with her mother: the young people who attend could be encouraged to speak to the maids and gardeners who work at their parents’ homes, and insist that they be paid a regular day’s wages to come to such a future Conference, rather than working. Who better to describe the failures of existing transit options and to envision their radical improvement than those people who depend on buses and other options every day? They spend up to 2 or 3 hours a day moving across vast cities to get to low-wage jobs in rich people’s homes. Imagine allying with them and inviting them into the process of social transformation, of which the transit component is just one (vital) part? Clearly the car-free agenda needs to integrate more aggressively a class component, and this might be a good beginning…

Adriana enjoying the ride in the horse-drawn Calandria....

Jason Meggs, me, Gloria, and another friend during our drunken carousing around Guadalajara on a tour of Cantinas organized as part of the conference... a great evening!

An old bike sits on a type of altar in one of the cantinas.

My concluding slide from my presentation in the tunnel...

February 16, 2003, protesters fill Market Street in San Francisco, opposing the impending attack on Iraq.

(My presentation at the “Towards Car-Free Cities,” Guadalajara, Mexico, September 8, 2011)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it, but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

We meet here at the “Towards Carfree Cities Conference” to address how cities are designed, with an overriding interest in redefining what is proper and customary with respect to how streets are used. Part of the emergence of social movements in cities around the world to contest the car, whether bicycling, pedestrians, or street closures, is in response to the seeming inevitability of cars dominating our public space. But automobiles didn’t always fill our streets.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.” He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Critical Mass in San Francisco, August 2007.

But before we look at how motor cars took over our thoroughfares and our imaginations, let us go further back into history, to the end of the 19th century. It was an era of horses, wagons, and streetcars, muddy streets and wooden sidewalks. Different kinds of self-propelled velocipedes and bicycles were invented in the 1870s and became massively popular in the 1890s with the invention of the safety bicycle. In San Francisco, and around the United States, a movement emerged primarily among bicyclists demanding “good roads.”

In 1875 these "boneshakers" were all the rage.

Bay City Wheelmen, 1894, in San Francisco's Mission District.

An 1896 newspaper illustration of the notoriously bad road conditions in San Francisco at the time.

On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in San Francisco’s history. In the last decade of the 19th century, San Francisco was a muddy, dirty town, long past its glory years as a boomtown, but still one of the ten largest cities in the U.S. The streets were full of horseshit and between the ubiquitous cable car slots and tangled web of streetcar rails, pedestrians and bicyclists had a hazardous course to traverse en route to their destinations. After months of organizing among the thriving bicycling clubs of the city, a huge parade was organized that drew as many as 100,000 spectators.

The "Good Roads' bike parade-protest of 1896.

The Pasadena Cycleway, an elevated wooden bike path, in 1900.

Meanwhile, in 1900 an elegant bikeway was built along the Arroyo Seco corridor north of the Los Angeles River. It was the keystone of a plan to link Los Angeles and Pasadena with an eight-mile “great transit artery.” Pasadena Mayor Horace Dobbins dedicated public funds to an elevated, multilane, wooden cycleway, including streetlights and gazebo turnouts. The 15-cent toll didn’t dissuade hundreds of cyclists who showed up to the opening, going on to ride through a beautiful pre-urban Los Angeles landscape. More than 20 percent of the population were already regular bikers in 1900, and of course the weather was ideal. Cycleways were going to crisscross the area and provide a stylish and modern system for personal transport. As the 20^th century unfolded, the automobile rushed into the picture. Within a few years bikeway expansion was scrapped and even the Arroyo Seco Cycleway was soon turned into a motorway (now it is better known as the Pasadena Freeway).

As thousands of Californians became motorists, patterns of city life began to change. The chaotic crisscrossing of pedestrians, horses and horse-drawn wagons, streetcars, cable cars, and steam railroads, already joined by increasing numbers of bicyclists, now saw an influx of private automobiles.

As city centers choked with traffic congestion, and automobile injuries and deaths soared, a struggle to reshape city streets took place. Police and parents wanted to control speeds to promote safety. Highway engineers wanted to widen and streamline city streets to promote through traffic at higher speeds. Auto companies promoted the “freedom of the open road” and claimed that street improvements must properly be directed to bettering driving conditions since most of the money for road building and maintenance was derived from gasoline taxes. Bicycles and pedestrians were the obvious losers in this era, as highway engineers—reinforced by auto industry propaganda—focused on widening streets, increasing parking, creating parkways and highways (later freeways), while society subtly shifted the blame for car-related fatalities to careless pedestrians and cyclists, or individual bad drivers.

This video was shot on Market Street in San Francisco in April 1906, four days before the huge earthquake and fire destroyed almost everything you can see here. But it does a great job of showing the chaos of streets prior to their standardization by automobiles and government imposition of new rules.

Before cars entered the public streets, customary practice gave priority to people on foot. Going back for centuries, public roads were open to everyone and pedestrians enjoyed a type of seniority rights. Horse-drawn wagons, horse-drawn omnibuses or streetcars, and finally electrically powered streetcars moved thousands and then millions of people into and around the growing cities of the world.

The automobile quickly threw all the old patterns into disarray…

For decades, over 40,000 people have died each year in more than a million car crashes on the streets of the United States. This daily carnage is utterly normalized to the point that few of us think about it at all, and if we do, it’s like the weather, just a regular part of our environment. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when the private automobile was first beginning to appear on public streets a large majority of the population, including politicians, police, and business leaders, agreed that cars were interlopers and ought to be regulated and subordinated to pedestrians and streetcars.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the speed with which conditions on urban streets changed at the dawn of the motorized era. Here’s a quote from the California Automobile Association’s Motorland magazine in August 1927 describing the rapid growth in car ownership:

• In 1895 there were four cars registered

• in 1905 there were over 77,000 in use,

• in 1915 the total had risen to 2.3 million, (300% increase in 10 years)

• in 1925 there were 17,512,000 passenger automobiles on the highways, (another 750% increase)

Auto industry advertising shifted the blame for car deaths and injuries from drivers to irresponsible children playing in streets that "ought" to belong to automobiles exclusively.

But even with this huge increase in cars, only about 10% of the population was driving at this time, and the vast majority of the public moved through cities on public streetcars or on foot. The common usage of the streets by all was considered sacrosanct and attempts by motordom and/or police to regulate people’s use of the streets was widely resisted. Plenty of police didn’t agree that pedestrian behavior should be criminalized on behalf of motoring:

New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919 defended the “legal right to the highway” of the “foot passenger,” arguing that “if pedestrians were confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.” He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who “darts obliquely across a crowded thorofare”—to drivers…

By 1916 “jaywalker” was a term becoming used to describe people who walked across streets against the new rules. “Jaywalker” carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term… The New York Times objected, calling the word “a truly shocking name.”

Anti-jaywalking campaigns came to San Francisco too.

In a 1920 safety campaign, San Francisco pedestrians who thought they were minding their own business found themselves pulled into mocked-up outdoor courtrooms. In front of crowds of onlookers they were lectured on the perils of jaywalking.

As the 1920s continued, more and more cars were being sold, and the streets were both crowded and contested. Streetcar operators blamed cars for clogging thoroughfares and slowing down their lines, causing late runs and generally inconveniencing passengers. Motorists parked everywhere, jamming curbsides two-deep, when they weren’t weaving through chaotic urban streets. Cars were seen as reckless invaders of public space, slaughtering women and children, and driven by self-centered, inconsiderate louts. Attempts to regulate and standardize traffic patterns began during this era, with lanes, crosswalks, traffic signals, and parking regulations slowly emerging as “solutions” to the problems created by tens of thousands of private cars filling the streets.

Newspaper photos campaigned to educate citizens about "proper use" of the streets, increasingly dedicated to private automobiles.

When a business slump hit in 1923-24 and car sales plummeted, the press speculated that the market for private automobiles was already “saturated”. The car industry cleverly redefined ‘saturation’ from the market to the street. They claimed that the so-called “saturation” was a problem of space, and that the solution was to re-design streets and cities to accommodate many more cars.

"Jaywalkers" cross against signal at 5th and Market, San Francisco, 1942.

As late as the mid-1920s there was a wide consensus to control cars, slow them down, subordinate them to other uses. Over 70% of urban commuters used streetcars while only 11% used cars in San Francisco. The same 1927 San Francisco traffic study showed that one-third of 1.1 million daily commuters into the downtown area arrived on foot …

By the end of the decade the story had completely changed. During the years from 1924-1930, national business leaders had created new associations, with the full support of the government, which shifted the discussion by appealing to American individualism and patriotic appeals to freedom to gain the upper hand. The streets of America, which had been seen as public utilities that should be regulated for the common good, were reconceptualized as “products” that could be purchased by the motorists paying gasoline taxes. Traffic engineers were no longer tasked with designing streets to serve the most people most efficiently. Instead, they were to respond to market “demand” as exemplified by private car owners who supported the redesign of cities to accommodate wider streets and ample parking lots.

By the 1930s the new organization of urban life was taking shape. Cities everywhere were widening streets, building wide boulevards, increasing curb parking, and altering the rules of the road to restrict pedestrians and give more rights and space to cars. Separated, elevated freeways were the vision of the future, but it would take some years before they began to build them all over the country.

Black dotted lines on sidewalks indicate where they would soon be narrowed to make more room for cars in this 1939 photo of Capp Street in San Francisco.

In the 1939 Golden Gate Int'l. Exposition (Treasure Island World's Fair) this grim image of 7th and Howard is meant to show San Francisco in 1999!

After WWII, in the United States a massive federal program built the interstate highway system, a series of freeways that crisscrossed the country many times over east-west and north-south, with ring roads around every major urban center. Streetcar systems which had been going bankrupt since the 1920s finally were municipalized and often modernized with buses replacing streetcars. The conversion of U.S. life to fully auto-centric was nearly complete by the late 1950s.

The first transcontinental paved road in the U.S. finished well before WWII was dubbed the "Lincoln Highway," here used to advertise a brand of gasoline.

The U.S. was the overwhelming dominant power in the world during this same era, a period when countries were ranked as “developed” or “developing” and if in the latter category (as Mexico and all of South America was) it was considered urgent to adopt the patterns of growth that had been pioneered by the U.S. Car manufacturing emerged in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, in Mexico and Brazil by the 1970s, and in Asia by the 1980s. The so-called “world car,” assembled in factories across the planet, became the norm in the 1980s too, and everywhere national economies turned to the private car as the literal motor of domestic development.

The triumph of the car and the full conversion of urban life to revolve around private automobiles is the story of the 20th century. But it was also in the 20th century specifically in the late 1950s and 1960s that citizens in some places, notably New York, Boston, and San Francisco, organized to stop the onslaught of freeway building that was destroying their city’s neighborhoods.

Freeway revolt in SF

1948 trafficways plan for San Francisco, with plans for freeways crisscrossing the city and destroying many of its best neighborhoods.

On November 2, 1956 the San Francisco Chronicle graciously published a map of the proposed and actual freeway routes through San Francisco even though its accompanying editorial was already chastising protestors:

“The remarkable aspect of these protests and claims of injury is their tardiness. They concern projects that have for years been set forth in master plans, surveys and expensive traffic studies. They have been ignored or overlooked by citizens and public official alike—until the time was at hand for concrete pouring and when revision had become either impossible or extremely costly. The evidence indicates that the citizenry never did know or had forgotten what freeways the planners had in mind for them.”

Top image shows the final plans to complete crosstown freeways in San Francisco around 1960, but the bottom map shows what was finally completed (including the dotted sections of freeways that were destroyed after the 1989 earthquake).

Just three years earlier San Francisco had opened its first section of freeway. On October 1, 1953 the Bayshore Freeway opened and San Franciscans could now drive three unmolested miles of “divided no-stop freeways” from Alemany to Bryant. But as the plans unfolded, public opposition grew. By the time the Embarcadero Freeway along the city’s waterfront was under construction in 1958, a loud opposition had formed, going on to campaign for its removal after its completion. Over 30,000 people signed petitions at meetings organized in a half dozen neighborhoods. In 1959 the city government voted to cancel 7 of 10 planned freeway routes through the city, much to the shock of the California Department of Highways and the federal government. But that was not the end of the freeway revolt.

Some of the proposed extensions for the double-decker freeway to connect the Embarcadero with the Golden Gate Bridge (note the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway at lower left).

Freeway protesters march along waterfront with unfinished Embarcadero Freeway behind them. In distance is Ferry Building where it was walled off by the double-decker freeway.

Freeway builders continued to resurrect various routes, encountering persistent, well-organized resistance by San Francisco neighborhoods. In 1964 the battle came to a climax over the Panhandle-Golden Gate Park Freeway plan, with a May 17 rally to save the Park. Months later, in a final, climactic 6-5 vote, the Board of Supervisors rejected the Park Freeway on October 13. The only African American Supervisor, Terry Francois, cast the deciding vote, delivering a point-by-point six-page rebuttal to the pro-freeway arguments. The Supervisors’ Transportation Committee had received a petition with 15,000 signatures, 20,000 letters and telegrams, and had received opposition from 77 community organizations.

Taking down the freeway north of Market Street in early 2000s.

Today, San Francisco’s freeways have changed again, thanks to the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake. The much maligned Embarcadero Freeway has been removed. A raging debate over the future of the Central Freeway ramps that went north across Market was finally resolved and they were replaced by the surface Octavia Boulevard. New offramps were added to a freeway to serve a new waterfront roadway and the new baseball stadium in 1997, but no new freeways will be built in San Francisco. The rapid rise in value in both areas where freeways were removed, along the now open waterfront, as well as the rapidly gentrifying Hayes Valley/Civic Center area, show that profits can be drawn from forward looking urban planning, de-emphasizing cars and re-emphasizing neighborhood, community, and nature. We even have a new urban farm on former on- and off-ramps.

The Hayes Valley Farm was started on the former on- and off-ramps of the Central Freeway.

From freeways to food...

Freeway Revolts in Guadalajara and Vancouver

Vancouver's "Gateway Sucks" campaign, which gave rise to the Car-Free Vancouver Day, going on 7 years now.

Car-Free Vancouver Day started seven years ago as a part of the years-long campaign to stop a $10 billion freeway and port expansion plan that will bulldoze local farms, neighborhoods, and indigenous sites, in addition to wrecking a couple of extant urban wilderness zones at Burns Bog and Surrey Bend. The “Gateway Sucks” campaign emphasizes that this plan, which is still proceeding, will lock in more urban sprawl and sabotage the local greenhouse gas reduction plan, all to increase trade in raw goods and disposable junk.

The East Vancouver neighborhood was the first to propose a day-long closure of the its main corridor Commercial Drive as a way to demonstrate popular opposition to further freeway building. Car-Free Vancouver Day has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures in different parts of the city, and is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.

Vancouver's Critical Mass has been a big contributor to the shifting values of that northwestern city.

On a visit here in December 2010 to Guadalajara, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city.

The anti-freeway campaign in Guadalajara.

This movement leaned primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

A few months ago the campaign achieved its first success when the freeway plans were scrapped. Compared to San Francisco’s decades-long freeway revolts, or Vancouver’s still-going campaign to halt the Gateway project, Guadalajara is an inspiring success story that happened in less than one year! (Though it is not over yet, with possibilities of the plan being resuscitated after next year’s election, so the movement must keep going.)

In June 2010, just before our hosts this year left for York, England for last year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

This car was installed along the proposed route as part of the protests...

Pedicab vendor crosses tracks that would all be destroyed by the proposed freeway.

The Guadalajara activists brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day (maybe some of you remember?) and made two guerrilla video responses. The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos quickly began to circulate and galvanized local opponents, but neighbors of the proposed Expressway had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. During our December visit we met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she declared her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

Neighbors oppose freeway along Avenida Inglaterra.

A short time later Étienne von Bertrab was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and his colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Nobody anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

Park area made by neighbors.

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting regular Saturday work parties kept happening. There are now hundreds of new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days.

At a nearby university campus students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground were getting better every weekend.

One of the leaves hanging on the tree in the park...

The down-to-earth politics of this already successful Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!”

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

As we discuss the seemingly unrealistic idea of “car-free cities” it helps to remember the rich history that we are already living. Streets have not always been controlled and dominated by car industries. Private cars are a disaster for human and non-human life, and it’s high time we reconnect to the long history that has been resisting this monster. Life was very different before the car and it will be very different AFTER the car too!

The last slide of the presentation...

Thank you!

February 16, 2003, protesters fill Market Street in San Francisco, opposing the impending attack on Iraq.

“¿Calles de quién? El Pueblo Contra los Automóviles.

La Batalla del Siglo 20 Sobre Ciudades, Calles y Vías Rápidas”

traducido por Adriana Camarena (Gracias!)

“¿De quién son las calles? ¡Son nuestras las calles!”, gritan los manifestantes bulliciosos al avanzar en oleada de la acera peatonal a la vía pública. Lo cierto es que las calles son nuestro bien público común, lo que queda de él, pero la mayor parte del tiempo estas avenidas públicas están dedicadas al movimiento de vehículos, la mayoría autos privados. Otros usos de las calles son mal vistos, desincentivados por las leyes y normas y por lo que es ahora nuestra “expectativa acostumbrada.” Pregúntale a cualquier conductor que sea impedido por cualquier otra cosa que no sea una congestión de tráfico “normal” y rápidamente denunciaran el uso o bloqueo inapropiado de la calle.

Nos encontramos aquí en la “Conferencia Hacia Ciudades Libres de Auto” para discutir cómo son diseñadas las ciudades, con un interés primordial en redefinir lo que es propio y tradicional con respecto al uso de las calles. Parte del surgimiento de movimientos sociales en ciudades alrededor del mundo que confrontan al auto, ya sea pedaleando, caminando, o cerrando calles, es en respuesta a la aparente inevitabilidad de la dominancia del auto sobre nuestro espacio público. Pero, los automóviles no siempre llenaron nuestras calles.

Los ciclistas han estado trabajando para abrir espacio para el ciclismo sobre las calles de San Francisco, y para ello han estado tratando de remodelar la expectativa pública sobre cómo son utilizadas las calles. Predeciblemente ha habido resistencia de los automovilistas y sus aliados, quienes imaginan que la vida Norteamericana normalizada en el medio siglo 20 puede extenderse indefinidamente hacia el futuro. Pero los ciclistas y sus aliados naturales, los peatones, deben tomar valor de la historia perdida que ha sido iluminada por Peter D. Norton en su reciente libro “Peleando al Tráfico: Los Albores de la Era del Motor en la Ciudad Norteamericana.” Habilidosamente escava el desplazamiento que fue instrumentado en la opinión pública durante los años 1920s por las fuerzas organizadas de lo que se autodenomino “Motordom” o “Cúpula del Motor”. Sus esfuerzos convirtieron a los peatones en transgresores de las leyes llamándolos “jaywalkers,” – caminantes impertinentes – así desplazando la carga de la seguridad pública del chófer con exceso de velocidad hacia sus víctimas, y reorientando el diseño urbano Norteamericano para proveer más vías y más espacio al auto privado.

Critical Mass in San Francisco, August 2007.

Pero antes de que miremos como el auto-motor tomó control de nuestras vías públicas y nuestras imaginaciones, andemos un poco más atrás en la historia hacia fines del siglo 19. Era un tiempo de caballos, carretas y tranvías, calles enlodadas y aceras de planchas de madera. Diferentes tipos de velocípedos y bicicletas de auto-propulsión fueron inventados en los 1870s y se volvieron masivamente populares en los 1890s con la invención de la bicicleta segura. En San Francisco, y en los Estados Unidos de América, surgió un movimiento de los ciclistas demandando “buenas calles.”

Bay City Wheelmen, 1894, in San Francisco's Mission District.

An 1896 newspaper illustration of the notoriously bad road conditions in San Francisco at the time.

The "Good Roads' bike parade-protest of 1896.

El 25 de julio de 1896, miles de ciclistas llenaron las calles en la manifestación más grande hasta entonces vista en la historia de San Francisco. En la última década del siglo 19, San Francisco era un pueblo sucio y enlodado, pasados eran sus años gloriosos como ciudad de crecimiento rápido, pero aun era una de las diez ciudades más grandes de Estados Unidos. Las calles estaban llenas de excremento de caballo y entre las rendijas dedicadas al ubicuo carro tirado por cable (cable car) y la maraña de rieles de tranvía, los peatones y ciclistas tenían que atravesar un campo peligroso en camino a sus destinaciones. Después de varios meses de organización entre prósperos clubes de ciclistas de la ciudad, un enorme desfile fue organizado que atrajo hasta 100,000 espectadores.

Mientras tanto, en 1900 una elegante vía ciclista fue construida a lo largo de Arroyo Seco, un corredor al norte del Río Los Ángeles. Era la piedra fundadora de un plan para unir a Los Ángeles con Pasadena mediante una “gran arteria de transito” de ocho millas. El Alcalde de Pasadena, Horace Dobbins, dedicó fondos públicos a una ciclovía elevada, multi- carriles de madera, incluyendo iluminación y quioscos. El peaje de 15 centavos de dólar no disuadía a los cientos de ciclistas que se aparecieron a la inauguración, para iniciar un paseo por el hermosos paisaje pre-urbano de Los Ángeles. Más de 20 por ciento de la población ya era ciclistas regulares en 1900, y por supuesto que el clima era idóneo. Las ciclovías iban a entre-cruzar el área y proveer un moderno sistema de transporte personal de mucho estilo. Al desenvolverse el siglo 20, el automóvil entró acelerado en escena. En unos cuantos años, la expansión de la ciclovía fue desechada y hasta la Ciclovía Arroyo Seco fue convertida poco después en vía para vehículos motorizados (ahora mejor conocida como el Pasadena Freeway o Vía Rápida de Pasadena).

The Pasadena Cycleway, an elevated wooden bike path, in 1900.

Cuando miles de californianos se hicieron conductores, los patrones de vida en la ciudad empezaron a cambiar. El caótico cruce de peatones, caballos, carretas, tranvías, carros tirados por cable y ferrocarriles de vapor, al cual ya se habían unido los ciclistas, ahora se acrecentaba por el automóvil privado.

Auto industry advertising shifted the blame for car deaths and injuries from drivers to irresponsible children playing in streets that "ought" to belong to automobiles exclusively.

En la medida en que los centros de ciudad se ahogaban en la congestión vial, y los accidentes y muertes por automóvil se dispararon, una lucha para rediseñar las calles de la ciudad sucedió. La policía y los padres de familia querían controlar las velocidades para promover la seguridad. Los ingenieros de carreteras querían ampliar y rediseñar las calles citadinas para promover el paso del tráfico a alta velocidad. Las compañías de auto promovían la “libertad de la calle despejada” y declaraban que los arreglos a las calles deberían ser propiamente dirigidas a mejorar las condiciones de la conducción motorizada, ya que la mayor parte del dinero para la construcción y manutención de las calles derivaba de impuestos a la gasolina. Los ciclistas y los peatones eran los obvios perdedores de esta era, en tanto que los ingenieros de vialidades— apoyados por la propaganda de la industria del auto— se enfocaban a ampliar las calles, incrementar el estacionamiento, crear autopistas y carreteras (luego vías rápidas), mientras que la sociedad sutilmente transfirió la responsabilidad de las fatalidades por auto, al peatón y a los ciclistas imprudentes, o al individuo que era mal conductor.

Antes de que el auto entrara a las vías públicas, la práctica consuetudinaria era darle paso prioritario al peatón. Desde siglos atrás, las calles públicas estaban abiertas a todos y los peatones disfrutaban un tipo de derecho adquirido por antigüedad. Las carretas, los omnibuses y tranvías tirados a caballo, y finalmente el tranvía eléctrico movían miles y luego millones de gentes hacia dentro y fuera de las crecientes ciudades del mundo.

El automóvil en breve puso en desorden todos los antiguos patrones …

Por décadas, más de 40,000 personas al año han muerto en más de un millón de accidentes de auto en las calles de los Estados Unidos de América. Está matanza diaria ha sido completamente normalizada al punto que pocos de nosotros pensamos sobre ella, y si lo hacemos, es como el clima, sólo un aspecto común de nuestro ambiente. Pero, no siempre fue así. Al inicio, cuando el automóvil privado empezaba a aparecer en las calles públicas una gran mayoría de la población, incluyendo políticos, policía y líderes empresariales, estaban de acuerdo en que el auto era el interruptor y debería ser regulado y subordinado al peatón y al transporte público.

This video was shot on Market Street in San Francisco in April 1906, four days before the huge earthquake and fire destroyed almost everything you can see here. But it does a great job of showing the chaos of streets prior to their standardization by automobiles and government imposition of new rules.

Es casi imposible imaginar la velocidad con la cual cambiaron las condiciones en las calles urbanas en los albores de la era motorizada. Aquí hay una cita de la revista Motorland de la Asociación de Automóviles de California de agosto 1927 describiendo el crecimiento acelerado de la propiedad del automóvil:

• En 1895 habían cuatro autos registrados,

•En 1905 habían más de 77,000 en uso,

• En 1915 el total había incrementado a 2.3 millón, (un incremento del 300% en 10 años), y

• En 1925 habían 17,512,000 automóviles de pasajeros en las carreteras (un incremento adicional de 750%)

Pero aún con este enorme incremento en autos, solo un 10% aproximado de la población conducía durante este tiempo, y la gran mayoría del público se movía por las ciudades en transporte público o a pie. El uso común de las calles era considerada por todos sacrosanta y los intentos de la “Cúpula del Motor” y/o la policía para regular el uso popular de las calles fueron ampliamente rechazados. Suficientes policías estaban en desacuerdo de criminalizar la conducta del peatón a favor de la motorización:

El Magistrado de la Policía de Nuevo York Bruce Cobb, en 1919, defendió el “derecho legal a las calles” del “transeúnte a pie,” argumentando que “si el peatón fuese confinado a las esquinas de calles o a ciertos cruces, podría tender a darle al conductor egoísta una sensación en demasía de propiedad sobre la carretera.” A este último, le asigno la responsabilidad de la seguridad del peatón, incluso de aquel que “se lanza oblicuamente por una vía congestionada.”

Para 1916 “jaywalker” – el caminante imprudente- era un término que se empezaba a utilizar para describir a la gente que caminaba por las calles en contra de las nuevas reglas. “Jaywalker” – el caminante imprudente – conllevaba el ardor del ridículo, y muchos se oponían a etiquetar al peatón independiente con dicho término… El New York Times expreso su objeción designándolo como “un verdadero nombre chocante.”

"Jaywalkers" cross against signal at 5th and Market, San Francisco, 1942.

Las campañas anti-jaywalking o contra el caminante imprudente llegaron a San Francisco también.

En una campaña de seguridad en 1920, los peatones San Franciscanos, quienes pensaban estar atendiendo a sus propios asuntos, de repente se encontraban jalados al centro de simulacros de cortes al aire libre. En frente de la muchedumbre de espectadores eran aleccionados sobre los peligros del jaywalking o el cruce impertinente de las calles.

Al continuar los años 1920, más y más autos fueron vendidos, y las calles fueron colmadas y peleadas. Los operadores de tranvías acusaban al auto de congestionar las vías y alentar sus líneas, causando corridas retrasadas y en general causándoles inconveniencias a los pasajeros. Los motorizados se estacionaban por doquiera, atascando hasta en dos filas a las aceras, cuando no estaban entre-tejiéndose por las calles urbanas caóticas. Los autos eran vistos como imprudentes invasores del espacio público, matando mujeres y niños, y conducidos por gamberros inconsiderados y narcisistas. Los intentos de regularizar y estandarizar los patrones de tráfico empezaron a surgir en esta época, con el establecimiento de carriles, cruces peatonales, señalamientos de tráfico, y regulaciones de estacionamiento, cómo “soluciones” a los problemas creados por decenas de miles de autos privados que llenaban las calles.

Newspaper photos campaigned to educate citizens about "proper use" of the streets, increasingly dedicated to private automobiles.

Cuando un receso golpeo entre 1923-24 y las ventas de autos se desplomaron, los medios especularon que el mercado del automóvil privado estaba ya “saturado”. La industria del auto ingeniosamente redefinió esa “saturación” del Mercado como saturación de la calle. Argumentaban que la llamada “saturación” era un problema de espacio, y que la solución era re-diseñar las calles y las ciudades para abrirles espacio a más autos.

Black dotted lines on sidewalks indicate where they would soon be narrowed to make more room for cars in this 1939 photo of Capp Street in San Francisco.

Tan tarde como la mitad de los años 1920 había un amplio consenso para controlar a los autos y subordinarlos a otros usos. Por encima de 70% de los viajeros urbanos diarios utilizaba transporte público, mientras que sólo 11% usaba autos privados en San Francisco. El mismo estudio de tráfico en San Francisco de 1927 mostró que un tercio del 1.1 millón de viajeros urbanos diarios al centro de la ciudad llegaban a pie…

Para finales de la década, la historia había cambiado completamente. En los años entre 1924 a 1930, los líderes empresariales nacionales habían creado nuevas asociaciones, con el apoyo complete del gobierno, las cuales cambiaron la discusión apelando al individualismo Norteamericano y recurriendo a llamados patrióticos para que la libertad tomará la ventaja. Las calles de Estados Unidos de América, que se habían visto como infraestructura de utilidad pública para ser reguladas a favor del bien común fueron conceptualizadas de nueva cuenta como “productos” que podían ser adquiridas por los conductores motorizados pagando impuestos sobre la gasolina. Los ingenieros de tráfico dejaron de tener la tarea de diseñar a las calles para servir al mayor número de gentes de la forma más eficiente. Por contrario, deberían responder a la “demanda” de mercado, siendo ésta ejemplificada por los dueños de autos privados que apoyaban el rediseño de ciudades para dar lugar a calles más anchas y estacionamientos de autos más amplios.

Para los años 1930, la nueva forma de organizar la vida urbana se asentaba. Las ciudades en todas partes estaban ensanchando sus calles, construyendo avenidas anchas, incrementando el lugar para estacionarse al costado de las aceras, y alterando las reglas de la calle para restringir al peatón y darle más derechos y espacio a los autos. Vías rápidas separadas, elevadas eran la visión del futuro, pero pasarían algunos años antes de que las empezaran a construir por todo el país.

In the 1939 Golden Gate Int'l. Exposition (Treasure Island World's Fair) this grim image of 7th and Howard is meant to show San Francisco in 1999!

Después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en Estados Unidos de América un masivo programa federal construyó el sistema interestatal de carreteras, una serie de vías rápidas que entre-cruzaron el país en formas múltiples de este a oeste y norte a sur, con periféricos rodeando todo gran centro urbano. Los sistemas de tranvías públicos que habían estado titubeando en la bancarota desde los años 1920, finalmente fueron adquiridos por los municipios y con frecuencia modernizados con autobuses que reemplazaron al tranvía eléctrico. Para los años 1950, se completó la conversión de la vida en Estados Unidos de América hacia un enfoque totalmente centralizado alrededor del auto.

The first transcontinental paved road in the U.S. finished well before WWII was dubbed the "Lincoln Highway," here used to advertise a brand of gasoline.

Los Estados Unidos de América era el poder dominante mundial durante esta misma era, un periodo en que los países eran definidos como “desarrollados” o “en vías de desarrollo” y si un país era ubicado en la segunda categoría (como lo fue México y el resto de Sud América) se consideraba urgente adoptar las tendencias de crecimiento que habían sido introducidas por la industria manufacturera automovilista de Estados Unidos de América, y que emergieron en Europa desde los años 1950 y 1960, en México y Brasil para los años 1970, y en Asia para los años 1980. El llamado “auto mundial,” fabricado en plantas alrededor del planeta se hizo la norma para los años 1980 también, y en todas partes las economías nacionales se voltearon hacia el auto privado como el motor literal del desarrollo domestico.

El triunfo del auto y la conversión total de la vida urbana para girar alrededor del automóvil privado es la historia del siglo 20. Pero también fue en el siglo 20, específicamente en los años 1950 y 1960, que los ciudadanos en algunos sitios, notablemente Nueva York, Boston y San Francisco, se organizaron para frenar el embate de la construcción de las vías rápidas que estaban destruyendo los barrios de las ciudades.

La Revuelta contra las Vías Rápidas en San Francisco

1948 trafficways plan for San Francisco, with plans for freeways crisscrossing the city and destroying many of its best neighborhoods.

El 2 de noviembre de 1956, el periódico local – el San Francisco Chronicle – de buena gana publicó un mapa de las rutas actuales y propuestas de las vías rápidas por San Francisco, aunque su editorial acompañante ya estaba regañando a los protestantes:

“El aspecto notable de estas protestas y reclamos de daño es su tardía. Se refieren a proyectos que durante años han sido propuestos en planes maestros, evaluaciones y estudios costosos de tráfico. Han sido ignorados o pasados por alto por ciudadanos y servidores públicos por igual— hasta que el tiempo se arrimó para echar concreto y su revisión se ha hecho imposible o extremadamente costosa. La evidencia indica que la ciudadanía nunca se enteró u olvidó qué vías rápidas tenían en mente para ella los planificadores.”

Tan solo tres años antes San Francisco había abierto la primera sección de la vía rápida. El 1 de octubre de 1953 la Vía Rápida de Bayshore abrió y los San Franciscanos ahora podían conducir sin obstáculos por tres millas de “vías rápidas separadas sin paradas ” desde Alemany a Bryant. Pero al desenvolverse los planes, la oposición popular acrecentó. Para cuando la Vía Rápida del Embarcadero en 1958 se construía en paralelo a la costa de la Bahía, una fuerte oposición se había formado, pasando luego a una campaña para su demolición después de su conclusión. Por encima de 30,000 personas firmaron peticiones en reuniones organizadas en una media decena de barrios. En 1959 el gobierno de la ciudad voto para cancelar 7 de 10 de las rutas de vías rápidas planificadas para la ciudad, para el escándalo del Departamento de Carreteras de California y el gobierno federal. Pero eso no fue el final de la revuelta contra las vías rápidas.

Some of the proposed extensions for the double-decker freeway to connect the Embarcadero with the Golden Gate Bridge (note the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway at lower left).

Top image shows the final plans to complete crosstown freeways in San Francisco around 1960, but the bottom map shows what was finally completed (including the dotted sections of freeways that were destroyed after the 1989 earthquake).

Los constructores de las vías rápidas continuaron resucitando varias rutas, para seguir encontrando una resistencia bien organizada en los barrios de San Francisco. En 1964 la batalla hizo clímax sobre el Plan de Vía Rápida en lo zona conocida como el Mango de Sartén del Parque Golden Gate – el Panhandle- y el mismo Parque Golden Gate, con una manifestación el día 17 de mayo para salvar al Parque. Unos meses después, en un voto final y climático de 6 a 5, el Consejo de Supervisores rechazo La Vía Rápida para el Parque el día 13 de octubre. El único supervisor Africano-Americano, Terry Francois, echo el voto decisivo, con una ponencia de seis páginas refutando punto a punto los argumentos a favor de las vías rápidas. El Comité de Transportación de los Supervisores había recibido una petición de 15,000 firmas, 20,000 cartas y telegramas, y oposición de 77 organizaciones comunitarias.

Taking down the freeway north of Market Street in early 2000s.

Hoy día, las vías rápidas de San Francisco han cambiado nuevamente, gracias al terremoto de Loma Prieta en 1989. La muy maldecida Vía Rápida del Embarcadero ha sido removida. El agudo debate sobre el futuro de las rampas de la Vía Rápida Central que al norte cruzaban la calle Market finalmente se resolvió y fueron sustituidas por el Boulevard Octavia a nivel de calle. En 1997 nuevas rampas de salida fueron agregadas a una vía rápida para dar acceso a una avenida costera y al nuevo estadio de beisbol, pero ya no se construirán más vías rápidas en San Francisco. La veloz alza en valor de ambas áreas en dónde las vías rápidas se removieron, sobre la costa despejada, así como en la zona de Hayes Valley/Civic Center caracterizada por el rápido ingreso de nuevas poblaciones, muestra que se puede sacar ganancia de una planificación urbana progresista, que deja de enfatizar autos y vuelve a enfatizar comunidades, barrios y naturaleza. Hasta tenemos una nueva granja urbana sobre las rampas de entrada y salida de la anterior vía rápida.

The Hayes Valley Farm was started on the former on- and off-ramps of the Central Freeway.

From freeways to food...

Revueltas contra Vías Rápidas en Guadalajara y Vancouver

El Día Sin Autos de Vancouver empezó hace siete años como parte de una campaña continua desde años atrás para frenar un plan de expansión de vías rápidas y puerto de $10 mil millones de dólares, que demolería granjas locales, barrios y antiguos asentamientos indígenas, encima de destrozar un par de reservas naturales contiguas a la zona urbana en Burns Bog y Surrey Bend. La campaña “El Gateway Apesta” enfatiza que este plan, que aún procede, va asegurar una mayor expansión de la zona conurbada y sabotear el plan local para reducir los gases de efecto invernadero, todo con la finalidad de incrementar el comercio de materia prima y de productos de hechura para inmediato desecho.

Vancouver's "Gateway Sucks" campaign, which gave rise to the Car-Free Vancouver Day, going on 7 years now.

El barrio de Vancouver del Este fue el primero en promover un cierre por un día de su principal corridor Commercial Drive a manera de demostrar la oposición popular a la continuación de la construcción de la vía rápida. El Día Sin Auto de Vancouver ahora abarca cierres de calles en cinco barrios separados en diferentes partes de la ciudad, y es el resultado de movimientos de base comunitaria, con cientos de voluntarios trabajando duro durante meses para generar un día emocionante de habitación urbana de nuevo enfoque.

Vancouver's Critical Mass has been a big contributor to the shifting values of that northwestern city.

Durante una visita aquí en Guadalajara en diciembre de 2010, tuve el placer de descubrir un movimiento vigoroso de base comunitaria para bloquear la construcción de una nueva vía rápida elevada de 23 kilómetros que atravesaría el corazón de la ciudad.

Este movimiento encontró su base con la gente que vivía al costado de la ruta propuesta de la vía rápida, pero recibió apoyo crucial y activismo por parte de Ciudad Para Todos, un grupo de activistas de ciclismo y tránsito, entonces de tan sólo tres años de existencia, que en Guadalajara es el oponente más vocifero contra el reinado del auto.

The anti-freeway campaign in Guadalajara.

This car was installed along the proposed route as part of the protests...

Unos meses antes, la campaña tuvo éxito cuando los planes de la vía rápida fueron desechados. En comparación a las revueltas que tuvieron lugar durante décadas en San Francisco, o la continua campaña de Vancouver para frenar el proyecto del Gateway, Guadalajara es una inspiradora historia de triunfo ¡qué ocurrió en menos de un año!

Durante junio del 2010, justo antes de que nuestros huéspedes de este año viajaran a York, Inglaterra para la Conferencia Hacia Ciudades Libres de Auto, el Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco publicó un video en línea describiendo el plan para la Vía Express. El gobierno estatal de Jalisco (con sede en la ciudad de Guadalajara) declaró su intención de construír una vía rápida sobre la misma línea del ferrocarril que un gobierno anterior de la ciudad había propuesto para un parque linear y un corredor verde con zonas peatonales y para ciclistas. El corredor convenientemente atraviesa por la ciudad y es utilizado por trabajadores que andan sus bicis 20 a 30 kilómetros al día entre casa y trabajo.

Pedicab vendor crosses tracks that would all be destroyed by the proposed freeway.

Los activistas de Guadalajara llevaron con sí el video del gobierno a Inglaterra y lo mostrarón a los planificadores y activistas durante el primer día (¿quizá algunos de ustedes lo recuerdan?) e hicieron dos videos de táctica guerrillera en respuesta. Los videos guerrilla elaborados por Ciudad Para Todos pronto empezaron a circular y estimular a la oposición local, pero los vecinos de la propuesta Vía Express ya habían comenzado a organizarse antes de ver el video. Durante nuestra visita de diciembre conocimos a la Dra. Alicia Jaik, una energética doctora retirada, ahora administrando una pequeña tienda miscelánea sobre la ruta propuesta. Su vecino es un político local y cuando él le pregunto que pensaba de la propuesta, ella expresó su consternación. “¿Qué podríamos hacer?” preguntó el político. “¡A trabajar!” fue su respuesta inmediata. Los anuncios brotaron al costado de las casas a lo largo de la calle.

Neighbors oppose freeway along Avenida Inglaterra.

Al poco tiempo después, Étienne von Bertrab estaba caminando al costado de la vía del ferrocarril con un periodista local y se emocionó al ver los letreros. Con periodista en mano, tocó sobre la puerta de la Dra. Alicia y al darse cuenta que tenían mucho que discutir, fue invitado a una reunión convocada para unos días después. En la reunión Etienne y sus colegas les presentaron sus videos, su crítica más amplia, y los planes que el gobierno municipal anterior había propuesto para crear un parque lineal. Fueron recibidos con gran entusiasmo. “¿Qué podemos hacer? ¿Cuándo podemos empezar? ¿Podemos iniciar este sábado?” preguntaron los vecinos. No anticipaban que un plan de acción emergiera con tanta velocidad, pero pudieron reconocer una buena oportunidad, “¿Por qué no?”

Ese sábado fue la primera fiesta de jardín, que empezó con la remoción de una enorme cantidad de basura acumulada. A partir de julio, la fiesta sabatina para trabajo en grupo sucedió con regularidad. Ahora hay cientos de nuevos árboles plantados y por lo menos ocho distintas asociaciones vecinales involucradas. Los vecinos han establecido nuevas relaciones entre sí, y las fiestas públicas se han vuelto un rasgo característico de las reuniones de trabajo sabatinas y en otros días también.

En una sede universitaria aledaña, los estudiantes también se han vuelto participantes animosos. Mediante un trabajo esmerado con dueños de negocios locales se logró mayor apoyo, muchos de los cuales estaban molestos por las negocios tras bambalinas que llevaban las grandes e influyentes empresas Mexicanas como ICA, Cemex y Grupo México. Una conferencia de prensa de las dos principales asociaciones comerciales se llevó a cabo el 2 de diciembre apoyando la demanda para mayor transparencia, reuniones de consulta pública, y evaluaciones técnicas de los planes de la Vía Express, previo al inicio de cualquier cosa. Mientras tanto, las hechos sobre la ruta mejoraban cada fin de semana.

Park area made by neighbors.

La política práctica de esta ya exitosa Revuelta Contra La Vía Express en México es un ejemplo brillante para los activistas de cambio climático en todas partes. Tal cómo nos dijó la Dra. Alicia, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” Ella puso énfasis en que no estaban dependiendo de los partidos políticos o sus representantes, al contrario, no estaban invitados a esta campaña. Nuestros amigos de Ciudad Para Todos subrayaron el mismo punto: El diputado local (representante elegido del gobierno estatal) podía participar como ciudadano, pero no querían su oferta de traer grupos de trabajadores, equipos y recursos, por medio de los cuales su partido político podría colonizar sus esfuerzos para sus fines. La Dra. Alicia nos indicó, “Antes los vecinos casí no se hablaban. ¡Ahora somos una comunidad!”

Un árbol seco frente a su tiendita había vuelto a la vida con varias decenas de “hojas” de papel con escritos a mano. Una de nuestras favoritas decía “Salgamos del closet y sea ciudadano en todo momento.” Esta ciudadanía de vigor renovado y visionaria es el cimiento de la transición que debemos hacer en la segunda década del siglo 21, para hacer frente al Caos Climático, las Crises Económicas y Energéticas, y en general la falta de satisfacción en nuestras vidas diarias.

Mientras que nos reunimos para discutir la aparente idea fantasiosa de ciudades libres de autos, nos ayuda recordar la historia enriquecida que ya estamos viviendo. Las calles no siempre han sido controladas ni dominadas por las industrias del automóvil. Los autos privados son un desastre para la vida humana y no-humana, y ha llegado la buen hora de reconectar con la larga historia que ha estado resistiendo ha este monstruo. La vida era muy distinta antes del auto ¡y será muy distinta DESPUÉS del auto también!

¡Muchas gracias!

The last slide of the presentation...

Our journey finally ended in Lima from March 17-21, 2011. Seems like such a long time ago now… we had a lovely visit, staying with Nelida Silva, a friend I made at the TedXAmazonia conference in November last. I gave a Nowtopia talk at a “Charla Solidaria” sponsored by Programa Democracia y Transformación Global, a non-party left group in Lima, Peru. I also gave a Critical Mass/bicycling talk for Cicloaxion, the local activist group we met there, thanks to Octavio who contacted me ahead of time…

This was a typical scene in downtown Lima, gorgeous old colonial buildings painted in bright colors.

Wandering around Lima was a great pleasure. I have to admit that I’d been a bit worried about it, having heard countless fearful accounts of people getting mugged in Lima, how street crime is out of control, etc., but we didn’t have any bad experiences. In fact, we walked around and rode the combi vans all over and never even felt like we were in a risky situation. Lima is great! Of course we only saw a part of it in the four days we were there, but we did get around a bit…

We were heading to a small anthropological museum when we saw this plaza in the distance. After we came out of the museum we walked over to see what it looked like more closely.

The plaza was filled with campers under cardboard roofs. Sugar workers were occupying the plaza, turns out they’d been there for three months, demanding that the government take steps to preserve a national sugar industry. It didn’t seem that their protest was getting much traction, but the occupation was impressive nonetheless.

Sugar workers demand a law of national protection.

Hard to imagine living in this space for months, but these folks had been doing just that.

It's quite a picturesque plaza, surrounded by beautiful blue colonial buildings.

Plenty of traffic whizzing around at all times, too.

Somehow a poignant juxtaposition, the welder's mask and the Peruvian flag, flying over the cardboard village.

We did plenty of touristic wandering around too…

The colonial architecture of Lima is well-preserved, and painted in great colors. Here's a mustard-colored building... Plazas are generally color coordinated, so you can quickly figure out where you are by the color scheme, once you have it figured out.

Plaza San Martin is all white, very stately... adjacent to it is the Cathedral of Pisco where we had to have our pisco sours!

Pisco sour at El Bolivarcito, the cathedral of pisco...

Not far from Plaza San Martin we found ourselves walking along a narrow street that smelled of rot, but had a familiar charm. We found a building covered in murals and graffiti and we poked our head in to discover an anarchist social center called El Averno! Of course in all of Lima we’d stumble on this place!

The facade of El Averno.

A closer look at one of the murals on the outside of it.

Everyone gives, everyone receives at El Averno.

We loved the art and politics and spent a half hour being toured around by a very intoxicated poet, with whom we exchanged stories and jokes.

Neither yours nor mine, but everyone's... Freedom of Thought, Freedom to Create.

I liked this aging bus painting...

There were plenty of freight bikes rolling through the streets of Lima, in addition to some commuters too…

Love those freight bikes!

Mostly we saw recreational riders in the wealthier parts of town. Along the coast we saw this guy in a teensy bike lane.

Roomy bike lane!

Our friends from Cicloaxion took us on a night ride all over the center of Lima, ending in their bustling Chinatown with a big Chinese meal.

We pose in front of the Peruvian Supreme Court...

Moon over a colonial mansion in Plaza de Armas.

The Plaza de Armas is painted a lovely yellow and was full of locals hanging out during our visit.

Our great hosts... Octavio at right.

We went to a cheesy nightclub with folkloric dancing one night. We also took combis and taxis all over the city, seeking out museums and restaurants recommended to us. It was fun, but we were pretty tired during our last days of traveling, after a month on the road.

This is a small plaza we stumbled on, but typical of a lot of nice neighborhoods in Lima.

We went to a weird market called Polvos Azules, a gray and black-market paradise chock full of pirated DVDs, electronics, sunglasses, crazy t-shirts of Jesus on various soccer teams, and anything you can think of. From there we cabbed over to the Museo de Nacion, a grim structure that happened to be housing a grim exhibit on the dirty war in Peru that saw thousands killed by the military in the southern Andes, and hundreds more killed by the Maoist lunatics of Sendero Luminoso (followers of A. Guzman). Here are a few photos from the exhibit, which really brought home the sadness and futility of the whole period in Peruvian history.

The National Museum... or Mausoleum?

The military made militias out of local residents and they were pitted against the Maoist insurgency.

A funeral procession for victims of one of the many massacres in that era.

Adriana took up her spot next to these impressive women.

We were staying in Miraflores, one of the more upper class parts of Lima. Just a few weeks before our arrival the new “Ciclodia” had begun on the adjacent boulevard, Avenida Arequipa, every Sunday. Much like the Ciclopaseo we visited in Quito, and the Sunday Streets going on now in San Francisco, the Ciclodia is a weekly closure for bicyclists and pedestrians.

This three-seater was paused at one end of the Ciclodia, and behind him is a banner demanding politicians pay attention to climate change... it was also Global Day of Water.

This march for Dia del Aqua took place on the same avenue.

Ciclodia in Lima.

I wrote about Ciclodia and transit in Peru more generally over at Streetsblog, so I won’t repeat it all here. But we had fun with our bookends of Ciclopaseo in Quito and Ciclodia in Lima.

Fun in the streets.

A farewell portrait with our Cicloaxion friends.

Not far from our digs in Miraflores is a sprawling ruin of the original Lima culture, something I’d never heard of before getting here. We found our way to Huaca Pucllana and took the guided tour.

Huaca Pucllana, mud brick ruins under Lima of the original inhabitants, c. 400 AD.

The ruins are surrounded by modern city.

A fairly uninspiring ruin, they tried to bring it to life a bit with these characters.

We were about a mile and a half from the beach where we went on our last day. There’s a big strange sculpture in a park on the bluffs overlooking the sea. The park is called Parque del Amor, the park of love, so you can see why this hideous piece is there:

We couldn't stop laughing when we first caught a glimpse of this sculpture. But the park that hosts it is in fact a fantastic place that does attract lovers, especially at sunset.

We were wrapping it up and enjoying our last day in the sun...

Hours later we returned to the Park of Love for the sunset...

A great place to take in the sunset.

Dozens of couples fulfill the tourist photographer's need for subjects.

Good vibes to the end.

Going, going, going...

And into the sea it goes!

Nothing left but to indulge ourselves with a final ice cream before heading to the airport and back to San Francisco... a fantastic trip! Great way to turn 54!

Had a nice ride out to the Sunset last weekend, in our typical weird week of summer weather in January. Standing at the edge of the Sunset reservoir looking eastward I took this shot through the fence, over the acres of solar panels sitting on the reservoir roof.

I’m posting a text I distributed at last night’s Critical Mass here in San Francisco, reflecting some of the discussions I’ve been part of during the past months. The ride last night was lovely, about 1000 riders, a good spontaneous route that took us winding through South of Market and into the Mission before heading back north and then west into Golden Gate Park. I bailed after about 2 hours at Fell and Masonic where I took these photos. There were at least five “circle-ups” last night, in lieu of stops at red lights, which I don’t much like, but it served the purpose of getting the ride regrouped, while also pointlessly blocking traffic in all directions at the intersections where it happened.

I like the way the guy in the foreground is a blur while the woman seems to be holding the peace/US flag (an oxymoron if I ever saw one!), but actually it was another guy behind her. Fun with digital photography...

A bike lift is starting at Fell and Masonic, January 28, 2011 Critical Mass.

Anyway, here’s the text I wrote and distributed as a flyer last night:

Protest or Celebration? Or Something Deeper Still?

As long as you have a bike to ride, you don’t have to buy anything to participate in Critical Mass, neither object nor service, nor an ideology beyond a desire to partake in public life on two wheels. When hundreds and thousands of cyclists seize the streets for a convivial and celebratory use of public space, many of the expectations and rules of modern capitalism are challenged. Individual behaviors escape the logic of buying and selling, if only for a few hours. Once in the street together, unexpected connections emerge, unplanned events occur, and serendipitous relationships begin. Unlike a trip to the mall or the market, the conversations are unburdened by the logic of transactions, of prices and measurements. It’s a free exchange among free people. The experience alters one’s sense of city life immediately, and more importantly, shifts our collective imaginations in ways we have only begun to learn about.

Critical Mass cyclists are among the most visible practitioners of a new kind of social conflict. The “assertive desertion” embodied in bicycling erodes the system of social exploitation organized through private car ownership and the oil industry. And by cycling in urban centers in the Empire, we join a growing movement around the world that is repudiating the social and economic models controlled by multinational capital and imposed on us without any form of democratic consent. This mass seizure of the streets by a swarming mob of bicyclists “without leaders” is precisely the kind of self-directing, networking logic that is transforming our economic lives and threatening the structure of government, business, and (as more imaginative military strategists are coming to understand) policing and war-making too.

Critical Mass has a new cousin in town: the San Francisco Bike Party (SFBP). The party-like qualities of Critical Mass have always been present, but the Bike Party model as developed in San Jose and other cities first involves an organizing (and monitoring) crew of volunteers who direct the fun. The first official SFBP happened a few weeks ago on January 7 and drew around 1000 riders on a bitterly cold night. It was a lot like Critical Mass in some ways—I enjoyed dozens of conversations with people I found myself next to in the ride, there were music machines, and friendly vibes from riders and passersby alike. We were dozens and hundreds of bicyclists filling the streets and displacing cars, just as we’d dreamed back in the first months of Critical Mass in 1992.

Critical Mass is, or seems to be, political—but let’s admit that it is a relatively inarticulate politics, or perhaps so multi-voiced that it cannot be summarized easily by any given set of ideas. SFBP on the other hand is militantly apolitical, somewhat obsessed with obeying traffic rules, and—based on the repeated bellows of “Bike Party!” as we rode along—settling for a fairly shallow and empty idea of “fun on bikes” as its self-conception.

More interesting perhaps is the informal leadership that is behind the scenes at both SFBP and Critical Mass. There is a continuum from the SFBP organizing committee and its “birds” (monitors) at one end to the hardcore “no leader” anarchists leading recent Critical Masses at the other. In between—in a decidedly un-moderate role—are some of us who like both events for similar reasons but have problems with both too. We don’t want to have people hectoring us into the right lane or to stop at a stoplight where there’s no need (e.g. northbound along the Embarcadero in the right lane), or a stop sign when there’s no cross traffic. As one friend put it, “I don’t do this in my normal life, why would I do it on Bike Party?!?”

What motivates the Bike Party organizers and monitors? Do they have an urge to make sure groups of people obey their behavioral standards? We know there are a lot of bicyclists who are intensely committed to “good, lawful behavior” as the standard by which cyclists of all sorts should be judged. The Bike Party has just started and it’s likely to grow very large and attract its own police attention. When the organizers start negotiating with the police it won’t be long before the police are dictating what is acceptable in terms of routes, stops, and pace. How will Bike Party’s fun evolve when the “birds” are more obviously enforcers of police preferences?

That said, the first SFBP was a lot of fun, and in its self-discipline was a sight to see. Wherever there might have been a conflict with a motorist or a bus that needed to get by, people courteously cleared the way. No one rode into a red light or into oncoming traffic. This didn’t need monitoring and grew naturally out of the preferences of the riders.

Interestingly, this kind of common-sense courtesy could be adopted by Critical Mass routinely (it is now, but only sporadically) and by so doing, reduce the tension and increase the pleasure of the ride for most people. Some of us have modeled this approach and argued for it in flyers and online for years. But we don’t want to be monitors and don’t want to impose anything on anyone. We’d like people to behave courteously and respectfully because they want to, and because it’s more subversive than being angry and confrontational!

Critical Mass has always styled itself as radically democratic. In the public space of our streets, the people present determine their own fates by how they interact with each other and passersby, which can be profoundly democratic—not in the sense of majority-rule voting that we usually accept as the definition of “democracy” but in the directly democratic sense of open and unmediated participation. In other ways Critical Mass never has been “democratic,” because very few people influence the route the rides take (though almost anyone might exercise that influence on a given ride), and fewer still sometimes cause conflicts along the perimeter by riding into oncoming traffic or lurching into cross traffic ahead of the main ride.

In the early years routes would be proposed and “voted on” by a show of hands in Peewee Herman Plaza at the beginning of the ride. No more than a few dozen could meaningfully participate in that, even if hundreds were in the vicinity. In practice every ride is directed by the most convincing and assertive riders at or near the front. Ever since the 1997 attack by the police, after which there was a big drop-off of written communication among riders (the much-vaunted “xerocracy” seemed to wither away), there haven’t been more than a dozen proposed routes in as many years. As a result, many people who didn’t live through Critical Mass in the 1990s are ideologically committed to “no proposed routes” and “no leaders.”

Some of these same people seem to believe that Critical Mass is “a protest” and that the point of it is to occupy the major traffic arteries in order to screw up traffic as much as possible. They have been heard grumbling when the ride headed south or too far west, urging the ride to turn back towards downtown and the city center in order to pursue their tactical approach. In their own odd way, they ARE leading Critical Mass, but without explaining their idea of what it is, or how going where they want to go will fulfill their unspoken “mission.” This reveals the peculiar self-governing reality of Critical Mass: ad-hoc leadership groups make important decisions that influence the experience of everyone, but are completely unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

That leaves some of us oldtimers scratching our heads. Who said Critical Mass is “a protest”? Isn’t being an antagonistic cyclist counterproductive? What is it about youthful subcultures that think it’s really radical to act out and pick fights with people who don’t look or think like they do? Isn’t it more radical to try to turn these people into active allies in the fight for a better life? Isn’t the “mainstream” life the radicals are “protesting,” dependent on car transit, inherently worse than what it could be? Don’t we want to invite people imprisoned by it to join us, instead of giving them cause to hate us?

In some cities the police have been successful at stopping Critical Mass, maybe because the riders themselves haven’t been as creative with the ride and its logic. In Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and even in Manhattan, police departments have attacked and arrested Critical Mass cyclists and successfully discouraged a lot of people from participating in those cities. In Portland, Oregon, a very bicycle-friendly city, Critical Mass died out when the culture was too dominated by angry young men (in San Francisco we call them the Testosterone Brigade) who think there is a “class war” between cars and bikes. They go out of their way to block cars, to taunt and provoke motorists, especially those in expensive cars. Those doing it are proud and feel like they’re pushing things to the limit, but to the rest of us they look cowardly, hiding behind the mob.

Inanimate objects don’t have class wars, and to target people in cars as the enemy is a huge political mistake. Car drivers are not the enemy, but our natural allies! The folks stuck in traffic in cars or on busses are clearly more like than unlike the riders who are temporarily altering the rhythm of urban life by seizing the streets on bicycle. The point of Critical Mass, in my opinion, has always been to create an inviting, celebratory space that is so contagious that people who might not bicycle much are irresistibly drawn to trying it out. If you self-righteously call people names, try to make them feel guilty or ashamed, there’s little chance they will change how they think and further, change their behavior. Our pleasure is more subversive than our anger, and that’s hard for some people to remember in the heat of the streets.

It’s easy to forget that one of the best things about Critical Mass is that it puts hundreds and thousands of us in the streets together where the rules and etiquette aren’t always clear. That means we have to solve problems as they arise by talking to each other, working things out in the pressure of the moment, and getting important practice in political self-organizing and self-management.

In the United States during the past two decades a serious Culture War defined the society, with right-wing Christian fundamentalists increasingly emboldened to try to control the behavior of the rest of the society. On the other side are millions of people who believe in high levels of personal freedom and tolerance, and you can find a lot of the most ardent and articulate of those folks riding their bikes in Critical Mass.

There is real tension between the different values vying to influence these mass bike rides. Probably a large number of participants really don’t care, as long as they have a fun ride every month. That’s fine, but we’re not living up to our self-expectations if we leave these deeper issues unexamined. Whatever our preferences, neither Critical Mass nor SF Bike Party are good at communicating to passersby the deeper meaning of their existence. We may not like every turn the ride ahead of us makes, but shouldn’t we do our best to influence our shared culture by openly debating our behaviors, our “messages” (or lack thereof), and our purposes?

—Chris Carlsson, January 28, 2011

It was a full moon rising as I left the SF Art Institute campus. By the time I was in Chinatown riding home on a balmy January evening, the moon was much smaller and higher in the sky but in this shot, perfectly lined up over the Bay Bridge as I looked down Clay Street.

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

I was so happy when tropical rains began falling on us.

Ironically, we had come to the most fecund place on earth, facing a world economy based on a logic—endless growth–that has generated one of the greatest species extinction pulses in the history of the planet. Could we explore new ways of working and living that could ensure a quality of life for all species, without addressing the elephant in the room, the economic system based on perpetual growth? Apparently that was the hope, since few of the participants took on that larger question (notably, the two economists Enrique Leff and Hugo Penteado, as well as yours truly, DID try to attack dysfunctional economic thought). Opposing capitalism and growth wasn’t the stated purpose of our gathering, to be sure. TED is an organization rooted in the quasi-libertarian high-tech boom that started with the personal computer and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, and as such, seems to be a self-selecting culture of a subsection of the global elite that favors entrepreneurialism as the answer for the world’s problems, including the topic of this gathering in the Amazon.

Hugo Penteado's chart put it to economics: what is dependent on what exactly?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it’s a very specific brand that has been spreading itself globally with enormous success, especially during the past 8 years (it actually started back in the 1980s). The x after TEDx indicates that it is an independently organized event, licensing the format and reputation of the main TED organization, which is centered in the U.S. Former WIRED magazine publisher Chris Anderson took the helm of it in the early 2000s and absorbed it within his not-for-profit foundation. Their motto is “ideas worth spreading,” and you can find hundreds of their Talks online, free to watch, and many are indeed brilliant. That said, you won’t hear a lot anti-capitalist rhetoric or thinking at a TED conference. In general, they are fellow travellers of Stewart Brand and his early 1970s Whole Earth Catalog, followed by the new computer culture that accelerated in the 1980s after the emergence of the personal computer. Ideologically they share a belief that the gray bureaucracies of government and old-school corporate giants are the problem (on their website they advertise that the TED Talks are “untainted by corporate influence”), but the answer lies in independent entrepreneurialism rather than in any kind of social or collective action. Brilliant investors and inventors will continually produce technological breakthroughs that will solve the problems humanity and the planet face. (Fred Turner’s fantastic history of this is in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Milleniallism”—highly recommended!)

This TEDx event drank deeply from this long-running river of self-congratulatory entrepreneurialism. Let’s face it, the past thirty years has been a long nightmare (for people like me) of triumphant business ideology, and the folks at WIRED magazine, the Long Now Foundation (Brand and Kevin Kelley’s thinktank) and other quasi-libertarian tech culture types have been an important wing of that, complementing the straight-forward glorification of wealth and greed as pushed by Reagan, Bush, Wall Street, et al.

I saved a grouping of TEDx speakers for my last entry. These contributors include some of the people I made great friends with, but also represent the cutting edge of modern capitalism, in terms of their use of games, business, participation, and crowd-sourcing. I’ve been saying for the past couple of years, “better is better than worse,” and many of the efforts described here are bettering things in their own ways. But I’m interested in the way they also begin a process of renovating capitalism, of advancing this crazy, exploitative system’s capacity to capture new activities, new ways of thinking, and channel them back into the typical forms of products and commodities, markets, wage-labor, and monetary relations.

Rafael Kenski gave a presentation that revolved around the Portuguese word “Divertaçao,” which is usually translated as “fun.” He described a variety of multimedia projects and games, highlighting the successful ones for their ability to attract participants by being fun to use. In some basic way this parallels my own political thinking for the past years: that a politics of sacrifice and suffering is a dead-end. We need a political practice that is enjoyable in itself, and creates a contagious attraction through the pleasure of participation. Interestingly, this is what a lot of game-designers are trying to do too, but not to overthrow capitalism, but to bind us more tightly to it.

Paul Bennett is a congenial fellow who I got to talk to a lot. He’s from London, and is the creative director for IDEO, a multinational design consultancy with clients everywhere, including Brazil. He gave a talk that used the Amazon as a design metaphor, and encouraged us to seek the small idea that can become large. He showed slides of daily improvisations by Brazilians that he saw as great models for product design, and in particular gave high  marks to his client, the flip-flop and bag maker Havaianas (and he gave me a pair later too!)

Paul Bennett of IDEO talking about Brazilian design.

The hairs on my neck were standing up through a lot of Paul’s presentation, as he matter-of-factly described the launch of the OpenIDEO platform. It’s a separate website from their main corporate home, and offers for free a human-centered product design guidebook, targeted at NGOs and innovators in the Global South. It’s a powerful combination. On one hand, you take the latest in design process technology and open it up for free to anyone. Then you solicit ideas from the world (“What global challenge do you think innovation leaders should work to solve right now?” and “How can today’s technology address the environmental challenges we’re all facing?” are current queries on OpenIDEO). Bennett described a recent successful effort that gathered more than 500 ideas from submissions, which were eventually whittled down to 17 good ones, most of which are now being test-marketed and prototyped in various markets around the world. He didn’t describe the licensing procedures, the intellectual property agreements or waivers that one has to sign off on to get the IDEO push, nor how potential profits would be divided. Even if they offer very generous terms to the idea originators, it’s still a fantastic deal for IDEO, gaining huge attention, participation, and a river of ideas from unpaid world citizens.

I recognized it immediately in the same light as I recently wrote about the Levi’s campaign here on my blog too, an attempt to capture the enormous creativity and wealth being generated in urban environments but often remaining outside of the commodity circuit. My effort in Nowtopia was to describe a growing trend of refusing the logic of business, of working very hard precisely when we’re NOT at our stupid jobs, and exceeding the narrow logic of being “mere workers” when we’re doing it. Negri and Hardt also write about capitalism’s difficulties in measuring or capturing these new forms of wealth creation in their latest volume Commonwealth. And here in the Amazon we had a representative of the one of the world’s more successful product design corporations describing how they are co-opting that wide world of creative wealth, but framing it as a nearly philanthropic activity of their own, giving away their professional know-how for the good of the world.

The autorickshaw challenge.

Sustainable Dance Floor!

Stef Van Dongen is a contagiously enthusiastic young entrepreneur. He started a company called Enviu and sees himself as rooted in the “co-creation economy.” In fact his firm has been involved in some interesting projects. “We believe in the economy of  the crowd!” he declared. One project he shared that got a warm reception was the “Sustainable Dance Club” which consists of dance floor built on electric sensors that generate electricity as the dancers bounce up and down on the floor. Their slogan for this project is “People, Planet, Party!” and you can imagine how easy a sell that is among the global dance club culture. Facing a greater challenge, they launched a project to change the noisy, polluting technology of the ubiquitous autorickshaws (TukTuks) that fill the cities of Asia. They launched a “Hybrid TukTuk Battle” among a half dozen design faculties on campuses in India and Holland and after the dust settled two winners emerged, one with the 2-stroke engine and another for the 4-stroke engine. A partnership was established between Enviu and an Indian entrepreneur, leading to the founding of SocioEnviro, whose goals are stated on the Enviu website:

SocioEnviro has developed a business model around three pillars: financial services, advertising and clean technology. By offering fair loans and advertising income to rickshaw drivers, we aim to create better and more sustainable income for the drivers. The installing of clean technology will further increase the income potential and also decrease the environmental footprint of the rickshaw eco-system.

The new hybrid TukTuks.

So the Indian entrepreneur and our friends at Enviu will be developing new cleaner vehicles along with a more aggressive system of small business loans and advertising, all of which is promised to improve the lives of the poor rickshaw drivers, as well as reducing CO2 emissions and providing cleaner city air. Who could complain? Well, me for one. Because an idea like this could have been given away to the drivers in combination with encouragement to form cooperatives and collectives, depriving the middlemen of an endless stream of profits from interest payments and advertising revenues (only a fraction of which will go to the drivers under this system). The drivers could have been given a path towards complete autonomy and relative self-sufficiency but instead, this green entrepreneurialism seems committed to creating new forms of dependency and exploitation. Maybe I’m wrong but that’s what it sounds like.

Zoe Melo

Zoe Melo used to be a top model in the 1980s and lived life in the proverbial fast lane for a couple of decades. Now she’s older and wiser, and has long since abandoned that crazy life. I got to know her a bit in the Amazon and we became friends. Since she abandoned her alienated life as a model, she has become a product designer and gallery owner. After ten years away from her native country Brazil, living in Los Angeles, she is now returning to open a branch of her product design firm in Sao Paulo. She specializes in using sustainable materials, local and healthy sources, and is quick to state her aversion to exploiting nature or other people. But she is also a very typical modern entrepreneur, employing subcontractors to make products for clients. From her point of view, she respects their independence, and wouldn’t want to put them into a wage-labor relationship where she’s the boss and they’re her employee. But the so-called independence of the subcontractor is a fake independence anyway. In Italy and France and some parts of the U.S. and the UK, this model is better known as precarity. No one has any guarantee of work, but everyone must be continually available to work. Moreover, each individual has to constantly upgrade and renovate their skills as to be more employable when potential contractors do come around. The insecurity and lack of stability is a given, but there is no support either for the range of additional costs to reproduce labor, from medical and dental to the taxes that support the unemployment, disability and other “safety net” systems. No doubt Zoe herself suffers the same predicament, wondering where the next revenue will come from, watching the ebb and flow of projects and overheads with no certainty that she’ll come out in the black or sink into the red. But for sure, this is no model of personal and social emancipation, except in the narrowest capitalist sense of being free to sell (or not) your labor to whomever you choose in the open market. (I am in a similar boat in San Francisco as a small prepress book and magazine designer, never sure if my clients will stay in business or if I will get extra work or no work.)

Biologist and author Joan Roughgarden is now retired in Hawaii, but she ran for office in 2000 in the first district elections for San Francisco supervisor since the 1970s. After attending her first gay pride march in 1998 her resolve to change from Jonathan to Joan was strengthened and soon she carried out her desire to transition from male to female. She presented a compelling critique of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, an argument she’s developed more fully in her book “Evolution’s Rainbow.” She shows how Darwin’s assertion, parroted ever since, that males are “passionate” and females “coy” is patently false, and that there is an incredible diversity of roles, behaviors, and gender realities in the animal kingdom, not to mention that homosexual behavior is extremely common among many species. But I was disappointed when she concluded her argument by using microeconomic categories of “demand curves” and “real prices” to describe how baby birds differentiate themselves to their parents and get fed. I doubt Joan is really committed to those metaphors, neo-social Darwinian as they are, but it’s a commentary on how hegemonic neoliberal economics is in this time that a radical contrarian biologist who is also a transsexual would use such concepts to bolster her own arguments.

Aaron Koblin is from San Francisco and he’s an engaging fellow, an artist and computerist. He devised the famous software that showed daily airplane flights across North America as a series of flashing beams of light on a dark continent. He described his project of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to have thousands of people do small things as part of something much larger, but without knowing anything about what they were actually contributing to. To me it sounded exactly like the labor process of the Department of Defense, or even object-oriented programming, where dozens to thousands of skilled technical workers do finite tasks that satisfy some part of their desire to solve problems, but they never really know if they’re designing nuclear bombs, drone missile navigational systems, or what. Aaron’s projects are quite benign compared to that, at least so far! He offered 2 cents to anyone who would send him an original line drawing of a sheep facing left. He received thousands of them. Later he packaged them in collections of hundreds and sold them for $20 a block, earning a big profit and incurring the wrath of some of the original contributors. For him it was primarily an art project, a demonstration of the possibilities of a broad crowd-sourced creative process. Later he did another project having thousands of people collaboratively draw a forged $100 bill, which later everyone was free to download and use as they saw fit.

These kinds of projects make me uncomfortable. I don’t like the idea of a master entrepreneur hiring basically anonymous, brainless labor to do narrow tasks for teensy bits of money, and then use the results for any purpose. The methodology is bothersome, and based on what Aaron showed, the results don’t do much for me either. I suppose you could strike great subversive blow to the status quo, at least in theory, but there was no evidence of any such purpose lurking in the middle of the thousands of sheep or squiggles that became the $100 bill. Mostly it seems to reinforce the kind of alienated labor that we’ve been doing all along, and worse, it establishes the notion that you’ll work for fractions of money so infinitesimal that any notion of a minimum wage is forgotten.

Demos Helsinki promoting a "Superpower of Happiness" in Brazil!

Simo and Roope, the guys from Demos Helsinki, had come even a longer way than I did. Their consultancy works on quality of life issues with a particular focus on trying to understand happiness. Coming for a long-established social democracy in which the basics of life are guaranteed to all, from clean water and good housing, education, and medical care, they realized their prescription for happiness might be a bit out of place. But they went ahead and gave it a shot anyway, and it was quite amusing when they gave a rousing pitch for Brazil to become a “Superpower of Happiness” especially considering that Finland, along with Sweden and Norway, is considered among the more depressed countries in the world! I liked their argument though it is mostly couched in terms of what policy changes can be made at the governance level: e.g. more free time, longer vacations, shorter workdays, support for bicycling vs. private cars, more childcare support, more time off to raise children and care for elderly, etc. Why not? But coming from the land of Nokia, it seems a long way to the Brazilian Amazon, and their prescriptions might have universal application if we were able to see the planet more universally in terms of distribution of wealth, resources, technologies, etc.

Lastly, Edgard Gouveia, Jr. was easily the most charismatic guy I met at TEDx Amazonia. He’s about 6’5” with his big afro, and has one of the most beautiful smiles you’ll ever see. He is on fire with warmth and creative ideas and it only took him about 15 seconds to get the audience on their feet when he took the stage. A minute later we were all tied in pretzels trying to keep in contact with the people on either side of us with our left and right hands, as well as our left and right feet, and then he said we had to tip our head to reach yet another person!

Edgard got all of us out of our seats...

He got everyone laughing and then launched into his own creative use of game-playing applied to practical dramas. His best example was the massive flooding that afflicted southern Brazil a year ago, and how it had left the region under water and paralyzed for weeks. He and his colleagues devised some games to get the locals to start taking matters into their own hands, and before too long a whole series of challenges were being pursued by teams in many of the submerged areas, often with the younger teenagers taking the lead. “Build a bridge over this creek, but you can’t use any money and must get all the materials and labor donated. You have 3 days.” And the job would be done in 1 day! He was passionate about bringing people together in practical projects, but using online social networks and gaming metaphors to promote an activist and engaged population. I was really impressed and quickly came to share his excitement, but the more I thought about it later, the more skeptical I grew. And then a few days ago someone pointed me to the Gamepocalypse Talk by Jessie Schell, which plays the logic out to its logical (capitalist nightmare) conclusion. This is not to say that Edgard is trying to generate a world of game-playing to serve the needs of capitalist marketers, but that his use of it and enthusiastic adoption is probably not going to find it easy to avoid co-optation by the larger society’s rush to the same kinds of ideas.

Human ecological reinvention depends on adapting better to natural systems, but the latest business schemes to capture the value of all these experiments and keep them safely within the logic of commodities and privatized resources undermine the deeper transformation, don’t they? Is planetary and human survival only possible if we proceed through price signals and market relationships (or games) or can we reinvent a democracy that represents our best interests but also those of all species, as this conference set out to do? Heady questions to be sure.

I hope I haven’t written too harshly about people I just spent a lovely time with. I want to separate genuine human affection and an all around respect for everyone I met, from my disdain for some of the assumptions embedded in some of their Talks. In other words, I hope my new friends from this event will read what I write as comradely criticism, rather than a personal attack on anyone. I don’t doubt anyone’s good intentions and only want to challenge the comfort zone so many appeared to have with business models as the appropriate way to organize human and planetary life.

Farewell for now friends!

Antonio Nobrega opens the event with a beautiful performance.

Nelida Silva dances to open day two of the conference.

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference

Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians

Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

Each day began with a beautiful dance, Saturday’s a wild modern piece by Brazilian dancer Antonio Nóbrega and Sunday’s a traditional village dance from the Peruvian highlands by Nelida Silva. A baroque orchestra serenaded us at the start of the sixth and final bloc on Sunday afternoon, while Saturday’s four blocs ended with Bahian musician Lucas Santtana, who never called himself an anthropophagist, but the way he cannibalized musics from the rich treasure of Brazil as well as elsewhere certainly made him one.

Andre Abujamra

My favorite musical presenter was André Abujamra, a funny thoughtful musician who has made his name more outside of Brazil than inside, even though he’s played behind Tom Zé and other iconic stars. He gave me a copy of his latest CD called “Mafaro” and it’s fantastic! He came up wearing a shoulder-covering sequined garment and waited for his cue that didn’t come. He finally said “fuck it” and launched into his bit a capella. The slides played and eventually the music came on too. It was a charming, funny piece. The very last speaker at the end was the American “Sound Chaser” Gordon Hempton who played bird songs from all over, including a one-minute trip around a 24-hour soundscape of the world’s natural areas. He’s a big noise pollution activist too, much to my happiness, and helped shift our thinking by calling the Earth a huge solar-powered jukebox. He even used maps to show how the more sun falls on an area, the louder it is in terms of birds and bugs.

It wasn’t all lecture, but a lot of it was. I went early, number six in the first bloc (the event was divided into six blocs of 8-10 presenters each, four blocs on Saturday from 10 a.m to 10:30 pm with 15-20 minute breaks as well as lunch and dinner, and two blocs on Sunday, ending much later than planned, around 4:30). I was given 10 minutes, which was the average length, though some folks got 15-18 minutes and others only 5-8 minutes. And we were expected to stick to it, though a lot of people, especially the Amazonians who spoke, took all the time they wanted and went way over their allocations (I only blew my limit by about 90 seconds).

Escola da Amazona: We only know what we're taught.

There was a cluster of really inspiring Amazon-based projects presented by at least a dozen different speakers. Leinad Carbogim is a typical northeasterner, short and stocky, and she described a remarkable years-long effort to create a web of sustainability along the Ceará coast. Centered in her town of Icapuí, she described how they pursued a “systemic vision of territory, inspired by the famous community self-education model of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire as well as the paradigm-shifting thinking of physicist Fritjof Capra. Silvio Marchini works with the Escola da Amazonia, where he tries to shift our epistemological framework. He presented three basic assumptions that underly his efforts: “We only know what we’re taught; we only love what we know; we will only conserve what we love.” He showed how efforts to teach local farmers to coexist with jaguars had already showed some success, demystifying the common fears people have of large predators while also teaching them the importance of those keystone species in the wider health of their forest environment.

Deise (pronounced "Daisy") Nishimura with an image of herself cruising the river.

Biologist Deise Nishimura told us an incredible story. She was working in the Amazon on the river dolphins, her true love. One day while cleaning a fish on the side of her boat, a huge alligator leaped out and grabbed her by the leg, pulling her into the river. She was tossed and twisted by the massive reptile, snapping her leg off, but by luck her artery was twisted shut in the process. Somehow she surfaced and made her way to the side of her boat and called for help. Eventually she was taken to a hospital and after ten months of rehab with a new prosthetic leg, she was standing before us in her first public appearance since the attack, fully intending to return to her riverside life to study her dolphins!

Deise Nishimura's drawing of what the scene was just before she was attacked by a large alligator.

José Roberto Fonseca is an engineer who came to the perpetually drought-stricken sertâo of northeastern Brazil in the early 2000s to install solar panels. After a while he launched a new foundation, the Eco Egenho Institute, which helped develop a whole pepper farming boom in the area with hydroponics using deep wells he helped construct after seeing that the entire hydrological economy of the area was still dependent on buckets, carts, and donkeys. He called his Talk, “Water, Sun and Pimiento” and billed it as “a spicy solution to chronic poverty” in the arid northeast. Using his H2SOL solar pump system, plus extensive rain harvesting, they are now producing 3000 jars of peppers a month. The deep poverty is not entirely relieved, but thanks to placing jars in local hotels, the local project in self-sufficiency is relatively successful. “We measure success in smiles, not income,” was his final word to us.

H2SOL solar pump system

A pepper orchard blooms where it was once desert.

Apparently they're producing 3000 jars of peppers per month. Local hotels have agreed to put them in each room, in addition to supermarket distribution.

Fonseca with a local family of 8 children, "before."

The same family, after the new prosperity brought by the solar hydroponic pepper business.

Ze Ribeiro is apparently a marked man. He is a long-time extractivist, gathering Brazil nuts from the castanheiras around his town Marabá in Pará. His public campaigning against deforestation has put him in the sites of the local fazendeiros, the large cattle ranchers who have not hesitated to have working-class forest activists assassinated in the past (Chico Mendes, Sister Dorothy Stang, to name but two famous ones). He offered simple wisdom in his talk: “In the place of a tree that falls down, I plant another one. If you cut down a tree you only have it once. If you leave it standing, others who come later can benefit from it too.” Another extractive worker, Manoel Cunha, a rubber tapper, spent years mired in debt peonage. Thanks to organizing among the rubbertappers they were able to establish the first extractive forest reserve in 1997 in Jururâo. He reiterated a common admonition of all the forest folks at the conference: “There is no water or air without forest!” His co-op cut out the debt peddling middlemen by establishing a direct relationship to the Brazilian cosmetic company Natura. They sell most of their output to Natura, and seem satisfied that it is a fair and dignified relationship.

The Indigo Blue Macaw.

Pedro Lima is an ornithologist who gave a presentation on his project to protect the Indigo Macaw (Arara Azul de Lear in Portuguese). He convinced local businesses to adopt the bird, and a number of other charismatic forest species, as logos for their companies. Apparently an effort to drum up support for a local cancer patient also used the Macaw as a symbol. Lima claimed, “Animals are saving human beings! This is not conservation… in any case there can be no conservation without human communities.” He also used some of his time to emphasize the role of bird scat in spreading seeds around the forest, ensuring its biodiversity and health. Shit was a refreshingly common topic here!

A look at what shit actually is, from permaculturist Andres Soares presentation.

Larissa Rosa de Oliveira is a Brazilian biologist who helped discover a new species of walrus off the coast of Peru, and she described an interesting campaign that altered the eating habits of Peruvians. Apparently the industrial exploitation of sardines and anchovies off the Peruvian coast, mostly to serve as fish meal for animal consumption, was destroying the habitat and food sources of the newly discovered walrus population. Going to the media and many of the best restaurants in the country, she and her colleagues launched a campaign to encourage eating sardines among Peruvians. It led to a 46% increase in domestic consumption, and along with it, a new respect for the fishery as well as the walrus.

One of the most impressive presentations came from Vincent Cavelli, who helped establish a School of indigenous cinema. When I visited the Amazon in 1989 I attended a big gathering of indigenous on the Xingu River to protest a dam-building plan (that dam has recently been approved but relocated somewhat further north than its original location). Already then there were Kayapo Indians walking around with video cameras, recording their own lives and history. Cavelli quickly dispatched a common reaction by modern urban dwellers, objecting to the idea that the technology is somehow being imposed on otherwise innocent indigenous. “We are not polluting Indian communities with technology. There is an intense process of change underway. Biculturalism is a fact of life. For the Indians memory is a fundamental question. The emergence of native media is a global process, also happening among the Maori, the Inuit, the Sami, and others.” Felipe Milanez is a Brazilian journalist who has visited hundreds of indigenous villages throughout the Amazon and he came with a blunt message: “Progress and development is producing the worst crimes against humanity,” describing in some detail the genocidal persecution unleashed against the Kawahira, who have been reduced to less than a dozen members.

The Baniwa are a particularly industrious and economically successful tribe from the northwest of Brazil.

A less bleak portrait of Indian life was presented by Andrés Baniwa, a member of the Baniwa tribe of the far northwestern corner of Brazil (they also exist across the borders in Peru and Colombia), whose many thousand members are thriving, in part thanks to their having developed a range of products that are sold all over Brazil, from woven baskets to lotions. He also defended their use of video technology in their self-run school where they mostly teach traditional values. He argued that they learn technology “so it can be known that the Baniwa should be respected.” Self-representation, after all, is the only way to have a hope of shaping one’s image in the world.

Randy Borman, chief of the Cofan Indians of Ecuador.

Randy Borman grew up in the Ecuadorian forest, arriving at 2 months with his missionary parents. As a result he is fully identified with the Cofan Indian culture in which he came of age and is now the chief. But he sounds and looks like a guy from the Midwest of the U.S. too! So he gave us a strangely hybridized talk in plain U.S. English about the arrival of roads and oil companies in destroying the idyllic, self-sufficient culture and economy in which he matured, and how the Cofan have managed to survive.

Portraits by Alexandre Sequeira, transferred to traditional cloth used as doors and room separators.

I had the pleasure of meeting Alexandre Sequeira, a photographer from Belém. He has spent several years integrating himself into a small village in Pará  called Macajuba, where after a while he started taking photographs. Before he knew it, the locals were all clamoring to have their pictures taken, and he happily complied, giving them copies while developing a uniquely deep look at one small village. Photos become repositories of our memories, and the villagers were soon bringing out old photos too, while sharing stories among each other. Sequeira took his work to another level, though, when he hit upon the idea of blowing up the images and silkscreening them onto the old, sometimes tattered fabrics that serve as dividers, doors, and wall coverings in the town’s homes. Rubens Gomes is a maker of wooden stringed instruments and he had two pupils from his school of instrument manufacture and repair play his guitar made of local tropical woods.

Marko Brajuvic, architect from Croatia by way of Spain and  Brazil, showed his design for floating architecture, which during the parched drought seemed a bit unneeded. But catastrophic floods ravaged the Amazon just six months earlier, and the south of Brazil just a couple of years ago, not to mention the likelihood of rising oceans due to global warming, so planning for a floating future seemed quite prescient! Paulo Chang, publishes Etiqueta Negra in Peru, and he gave an overview of some of the interesting articles they’ve run in the past year or so, much of it covering edgy looks at culture and politics. I wish I’d had a chance to look at an actual copy of the magazine!

Thiago Vinicius described the Uniao Sampaio, a multi-generational effort to create a new urban neighborhood in the periphery of Sao Paulo. It started, like most of those areas, with a mass squatting of open lands, and over time has evolved into a tightly knit community association, now well embedded in the sprawling urban territory. Interesting that they’d developed their own local currency, paralleling efforts in many other parts of the world.

Local currency from an outer neighborhood of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Thiago de Mello. I hope I look this good when I'm 96!

Thiago de Mello, 96 years old, exiled by the Brazilian military in the 1960s, and then again by Pinochet in Chile after 1973, was clearly a much-loved figure for the Brazilian attendees. I was not aware of him before, but he held the audience in rapturous attention while he spoke a bit about his life, ultimately taking the time to read a Pablo Neruda poem and another of his own, “It’s a Matter of Love.” Bernardo Toro, an elderly Colombian philosopher, urged us to simply care for one another. And the Brazilian Buddhist Lama Padma Samten opened the speaking on Saturday morning by reminding us to be open, to listen, and to see what we’re looking for.

A quick shout out to Zach Lieberman who did a hugely popular presentation on his programming work for a graffiti artist known as TEMPT1, now bedridden with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). He has invented, for very low cost, an eye-tracking software/hardware combo that gives TEMPT the ability to write graffiti from his bed. Then they go out and in real time project the graffiti he’s writing on the computer with his eyes onto the sides of buildings around Los Angeles, and then beam that back to his bedside computer so he can see his own work out in the world. Quite impressive! Diana Whitten presented a rough excerpt of her forthcoming documentary on the organization Women on Waves who are bringing a mobile birth control clinic to international waters offshore of countries where abortion is banned. Some amazing footage and an inspiring story, which was juxtaposed to the previous speaker, Suely Carvalho, a Brazilian midwife who has helped create a network of midwives around northeastern Brazil, taking the ancient practice to new levels of coordination and modernization, while maintaining the hands-on, low-tech, traditional skills that are the backbone of human reproduction.

There was an impressive range of presentations. So many practical projects in the Amazon that were improving lives in the here and now, using solar and other new technologies. But these projects, whether extractive collection of rubber or Brazil nuts or fruits, or producing peppers, or making baskets, all face the dilemma of markets and money. How to use the creative efforts of local communities combined with their usually limited (but often unique) resources to connect to the larger world? Does it always have to be through markets and money and exchange? Or might we start to think of new ways to organize the sharing of life (along with the talents, resources, and finished goods we can make)? Difficult problems, not fully addressed by these folks, but given the short time available to each speaker, it was heartening to see such a breadth of ingenuity! More critical thoughts in Part 3.

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

Strange to be at a conference on the topic of “quality of life for all species” and have all the water available to 400 people delivered by way of tiny plastic bottles and cups.

I was so annoyed that I improvised an opening lament/complaint about it when I gave my Talk in the first of six blocs over two days. The audience cheered in support.

It’s quite difficult to summarize the just-completed TEDx Amazonia. Brazilian organizers (mostly from Sao Paulo themselves) staged the event Nov. 6-7 at the Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel which sits about 45 minutes up the Rio Negro River from Manaus in the heart of the forest (the enormous expense of flying in all the speakers and fancy hi-tech equipment was covered by corporate sponsors Santander Bank and a variety of Brazilian media and marketing companies). Normally it’s a floating hotel that can be reached directly by river ferries of all types. Here’s a photo of the place when the waters are running high (this was also taken before the conference center and dining hall we used were added).

Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel prior to some of its recent additions, and long before the drought left it aground in the forest.

But we had quite a different experience, as detailed in my previous post. We were on what felt like an ocean liner that had run aground in a lost corner of the jungle, and was slowly disappearing into the sun-baked mud as the river evaporated around it. By the time we left the rains had started again, but it wasn’t clear how long it would before this historic drought would end.

So having a gathering of 50 speakers and 250 hand-picked audience members in the heart of the jungle to address the official theme of “Quality of Life for All Species” took on a different hue once we were here, facing the impressive and unanticipated (for me at least) drought. My first stab at dividing up the presenters into thematic clusters or types produced this list: artists (including musicians and dancers), game makers, scientists (biologists, a chemist, a couple of permaculturists), residents of the Amazon involved in local business and ecological activism, and economists (which for lack of a better place, I’d put myself too), and some straight-up business people representing their companies. At least 60% of the speakers were Brazilian, but we were also from the U.S., Finland, Peru, Mexico, England, Ecuador, Colombia, and the audience made it broader still.

I should pause because it’s important to understand how we all became quite chummy and actually gained real affection for each other. We were hanging out with each other very intensely for three or four days. We were living a very privileged experience. We’d been flown across the planet to be here, we’d been met at the airport like corporate executives or rock stars and whisked to a fine modern hotel, where drinks and food were provided. Then we were taken by boat to the surreal luxury of the Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel, and each given a private room and treated like stars. We met each other in this euphoria of attention and wealth and very few speakers (myself included) can resist the temptation to feel like you’re one of the cool ones, that somehow you have earned this experience, and that your presentation along with the others is actually quite important. Why would they have spent so much money to have us there if it weren’t? An air of self-flattery inevitably clouded our judgment, and the wildly enthusiastic reception—including many standing ovations by the audience—confirmed this. While there were more than a dozen brilliant speakers, most of the presentations were not so remarkable that they deserved the adulation they received, in my (not so humble) opinion.

This atmosphere of self-importance is reinforced by our shared material experience in the lap of luxury, and it combines with a format that squelches public critical engagement. The TED format, with speakers grouped in blocs, each going for a set amount of time, leaves no room for audience Q&A or immediate feedback, and certainly no rebuttals or disagreements from the floor. You are expected to find the speakers you want to go further with during the break times, or as a speaker, you are expected to find your critics over coffee and cakes, or during one of the hurried meals when we all sit together in a huge dining hall. OK, that does happen a bit. But what is lost is any risk for the speakers or the event that actual conflict will erupt. It’s designed out of the experience. Private disagreements among “gentlemen” (whatever their actual gender) can be easily ignored or more likely, never encountered. I think there should be at least 2-3 questions of each speaker while the whole 300+ audience is assembled so a sharp listener can challenge assertions and assumptions that are, or should be, political issues for everyone. (To make time for that, there should be fewer total speakers, too.)

Case in point: one of the lectures somewhat lost in the blur of Saturday afternoon was by Brazilian geneticist Paulo Arruda. I’m sure he’s a good guy. But he was uncritical and utterly lacking in nuance as he gave a speech declaring that genetic science had already solved so many problems and that with further research (he’s one of the three protagonists of the Brazilian Genome Project which has been good for agribusiness in Brazil) there’s nothing that genetic science can’t solve! That’s just patently ridiculous! But there was no way to engage these wild assertions as part of the event. It would have to be in private later.

A funnier example happened later when Dr. Michael Braumgart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle, gave his talk. His slides and original talk had failed to arrive, so he improvised. He went up on stage with one of the audience chairs, our plastic-encased ID badge and the program booklet, and sat there very deadpan, announcing that he can’t sing, dance, or entertain like so many of the others had done. Then he stood up and said we were in deep shit, because we are afraid of shit. (Andres Soares, a Brazilian permaculturist, brought this up at the beginning of his talk on Sunday too, talking about “fecophobia.”) Then he asked who likes to eat organic food? And a bunch of us raised our hands. He was dismayed. “If we romanticize nature, we always feel guilty,” he admonished. He gestured to the fake leather chair, the plasticized badge holders we were all wearing, and the multicolored program guide printed on fresh paper as examples of design catastrophes. He suggested if you want to save the planet and conserve energy, you should always take the elevator because the electricity used in moving a human up was far less than the calories you’d burn if you walked up the stairs. Midway he threw out a random statistic, that 35 million flip-flops are thrown or lost into the world’s oceans every year, along with a half million tons of plastic. This was after Paul Bennett of IDEO had used his client’s success (Havaiana) with the flip-flop design as an example in his Talk titled something like “The River of Design.” Paul was aggravated at that stat and assured me later that it was completely preposterous, but I’d sort of gathered that anyway… 35 million?? That’s an insane number, but of course it’s true that many thousands, along with untold tons of plastic, DO make their way into the ocean every year and contribute to plunging fish and marine life. Braumgart wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb in the Amazon, though given the audience it wasn’t too risky. He urged us to become native to this planet, and wondered why we delegate “nativeness” to aboriginals? “WE are natives to this planet!” the German chemist declared. (There were only a few actual indigenous in the audience, along with a somewhat larger number of local mestizos, with no way to answer this somewhat insulting assertion in the moment.)

Funny misanthropic joke from Braumgart that I hadn’t heard before: “Two planets run into each other. Planet #1 says to the other, ‘you look terrible!’ #2 says, “Yeah, I have homo sapiens.” #1 says, “Oh I had that. Don’t worry, they go away.”

So here is the speech I gave at Tedx Amazonia:

Me on stage, November 6, 2010, at Tedx Amazonia. Photo by Zach Lieberman

I am happy to be in the Amazon to talk about “quality of life for all species.” What a simple and direct concept! And yet, so much of our life activity, our work is dedicated to other purposes, to other goals both abstract and practical, that impede the quality of life for countless species, including humans! To put it bluntly, as a global society we’re doing a ridiculous amount of stupid work.

Most of us think and talk about work in terms of our jobs, the things we do in exchange for money to survive. We are living through one of the greatest speed-ups in human history, which has both lengthened and intensified our working hours. Many people have two or three jobs to make enough money to meet their needs. Meanwhile, the hours of work are ever more intense and closely monitored. Sometimes our home lives and our familes can feel like yet another “job.” Most of us are so busy that we often don’t have time for the most simple human interactions. What does it take now? Four or 5 phone calls, a half dozen emails and twenty text messages, all to find a time three weeks in the future to see a good friend for a half hour over coffee!?! What happened?

This is not an accident. This is the outcome of a social logic over which we exercise no control, and yet our lives are strongly shaped by it. Somehow the system under which we live keeps expanding, keeps using the energy and goodwill we bring to our work lives, to make a world quite different than any of would choose freely. How is it that so many of us start to work with the best of intentions, and yet find ourselves contributing to a world that is brutalizing so many? How is it that the frantic pursuit of growth and profit has produced a world with billions of people living in abject poverty?

In fact, we are living in the midst of a Planetary Work Machine that has steadily expanded the amount of work humans do along with the consumption of earth’s natural resources over the past 250 years. This Planetary Work Machine is not improving the quality of life for all species, but instead is a machine that is out of control, and increasingly, threatens the survival of life itself.

In spite of how everyone is working all the time, where I live there is no working class. At least no one thinks there is! Instead, nearly everyone thinks of themselves as being in the American Middle Class. If you’re not so poor that you’re pushing a shopping cart down the street looking for discarded aluminum cans and bottles, or so rich that you’re riding in private jet to your next golf course, you’re considered Middle Class. This is important because as the self-identity of “middle class” fully took over, people’s sense of where politics happens shifted too. Instead of organizing at work, and challenging the structure and purpose of what we do all day, we are expected to act politically when we’re finished with work, mostly when we’re shopping.

So in the U.S. most political campaigns (outside of elections) are designed to make you feel guilty or proud about buying one product or another. Don’t eat meat! Don’t buy sweatshop garments or unfairly traded coffee! Do buy local organic vegetables! Do support small businesses in your neighborhood. And so on. But this is the perfect capitalist paradigm. You are an isolated consumer who votes with your money. At no point should you imagine you have the right to decide what work is worth doing, nor how it should be organized. And it’s no concern of the employees at a company how resources are used, what poisons are dumped in waterways on the other side of the planet, or how much carbon dioxide is produced by the corporation’s normal business practices.

Let’s face it. There’s a great deal of work to do to make an ecologically sane, healthy and comfortable life for everyone. But mostly we’re not doing that work. Instead we’re working at jobs and in industries that are perpetuating the destruction of habitats, species, and human communities, while plundering natural resources and threatening the stability of planetary ecology.

As individuals we have no easy way to address this drama. Growing up, I lived in San Francisco where there was a big downtown financial district and I was soon employed temporarily at Bank of America. I didn’t expect to stay there long and as it turns out, neither did most of my co-workers. When I looked around I saw people who looked a lot like me. We were young, college educated, smart, talented, and we were doing simple, repetitive jobs in the banking bureaucracy. When I asked my coworkers about themselves, nearly everyone would say they were just at the bank for a few months to make enough money to go on with their “real lives.” We weren’t bankworkers! As someone cleverly put it, “What you see me doing, isn’t what I do!” We were photographers, dancers, historians, philosophers, political activists, musicians, and many others things, but no one would pay us money to pursue those creative choices.

We were already living the typical modern experience of a bifurcated life. We do one thing for money, something we don’t really care about and have little respect for. And we do something else entirely that emerges from our creative capacities, the fullest sense of our humanity and our possibilities. The need to engage in useful work instead of useless toil is growing.

In other words, when we’re not at our job, we’re often working quite hard on projects and activities of our own choice, and without money as the purpose. Across the planet people are taking their time and their technological know-how OUT of the market, out of the business world, and in small invisible ways, are making life better right now—but also setting the foundation, technically AND socially, for a genuine movement of liberation from market life. I call these people Nowtopians!

These initiatives are a mostly invisible challenge to the Planetary Work Machine. Acting locally in the face of unfolding global catastrophes, friends and neighbors are beginning to redesign many of the crucial technological foundations of modern life. These redesigns are being worked out through garage and backyard Research & Development programs among friends, using the detritus of modern life. Our contemporary Commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and leftover deep fryer vegetable oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. Ecological restoration work, usually done by volunteers, is reviving shorelines, riversides, urban creeks, and expanding remnant habitats on hills and in canyons, on behalf of thousands of plants, bugs, birds, and animals. Festivals, free services, restored natural areas, and anti-commodities are imaginative products of an anti-economy, provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from government or business, but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.

Many people are now engaged in new ways of working, precisely to gain some control over the purpose and structure of their own activities in ways that wage-labor prevents, and a politics of consumption ignores. Most of these activities get the acronym in English DIY, or do-it-yourself (better to say DIT, or do-it-together!). Sometimes these DIY efforts are reclaiming ancient practices that have been lost to us in the modern urban environment, like growing our own food, while other times they involve a prefigurative reinhabitation of the urban environment, as in Critical Mass bike rides, or in the efforts to restore native habitats for other species, or in aquifer and water management projects.

In the community gardening movement, for example, the first impulse is often to grow some tomatoes or zucchini for oneself. It goes much further though. By putting your hands into the soil in your own city, learning about the cycles of weather and seasons, where the water comes from, what grows well and what doesn’t in that particular soil, a whole ecological sensibility is born. Moreover, it’s not an isolated activity. You meet your fellow gardeners, you learn the lessons they’ve already digested. A social exchange takes place outside of the market, where surplus produce and technical and ecological knowledge are all freely shared.

In San Francisco other efforts are also underway to restore habitat for native plants, butterflies, and birds, and some people are agitating to “daylight” creeks that have been long buried underground. On one San Francisco shoreline, restoration efforts have led to the sighting of over 80 bird species as well as seals, sea lions, and bay porpoises! We’re increasingly aware of nature in the city, and that the city IS in nature, and are working to integrate urban life with the natural systems on which it depends.

An ecological transportation alternative emerged in the new bicycling culture that has exploded across the world’s cities, often beginning with Critical Mass rides. Critical Mass is an “organized coincidence” in which dozens or thousands of cyclists meet and “ride home together” in large enough groups to displace cars. In this new public space, transforming the urban environment while rolling through it, people meet and new initiatives are hatched. Learning to rely on self-propulsion quickly leads to a simple desire to fix one’s own flat tire, or adjust one’s own brakes. From that impulse is born the DIY bike shop (in Italy they call them Ciclofficine or cycle garages). In these bike shops though, something rather different takes shape. Starting with discarded and broken bicycles and parts, a new social space emerges too. If someone like me goes to one of these shops with my broken bike, asking them to fix it for me, they look at me and just say “no, we don’t fix bikes here. But we will show YOU how to fix YOUR OWN bike!” Instead of purchasing a service, I’m being given new skills and new relationships, the kind of meaningful and practical connections that have been lost to us during the speed-up and social fragmentation that have accompanied globalization.

We want to be more self-sufficient, more locally resilient, more artistic and creative, and less dependent on large complex systems. We want to shape science democratically, and embed technologies in an ecological sanity that is often opposed by business and profitability. We want to reinvent urban life based on ecologically sound natural systems. A movement of exodus from destructive, stupid work is well underway, though still small compared to the dominance of the Planetary Work Machine. Global climate change, war, crashing biodiversity, waste and industrial pollution, mass starvation, and epidemic disease are just the top of a long list of pressing reasons to radically change how we live on earth. We work together but don’t often decide about it together. Work is shaped and driven by invisible hands and uncontrollable forces when it should be directed by us. Getting from the disparate experiments in work and technology, and early stages of new social communities that we see in these Nowtopian initiatives, to the big political challenges ahead, is an open and unknowable process of politics-to-come.

But in that effort lays the hope of a true quality of life for all species. Our shared fate is bound up in our ability to consciously redirect our collaborative energies to a world of our own design. Life could be far more wonderful than it is now. Shouldn’t that be the work we do everyday?

After my whirlwind tour of Italy (with a day in Switzerland too), I made it back to Rome on Friday, Oct. 8, in time to help Rossella Ottaviani (aka Santa Graziella) celebrate her birthday. Her husband Livio, another stalwart of the local cycling and Nowtopian scene, met me at the Termini station and after an interminable walk across a seemingly endless expanse we made it to a far corner where we took a tram loaded to the gills in the hot Roman evening. We disembarked in their neighborhood, which looks mostly like this:

Typical apartments in the Rome neighborhood where I stayed, not far from the ExSNIA social center and ciclofficine.

After an hour of decompression it was time to head to the bar for the birthday. There were dozens of people spilling onto the sidewalks, and of course, there is no problem with drinking in public there. Free wine was flowing and everyone was getting pretty drunk. Rossella and a guy who seemed to be the folk music specialist of Rome broke out guitars and started singing classic songs, and while I couldn’t understand much of the lyrics (well, none really!), I did enjoy immensely the energy and humor they brought to their impromptu performance.

Rosella and friend sing classic Italian folk songs...

I spoke with a lot of friends, mostly people I’d met when I was there in 2008, and had a great evening. The next morning we rose earlier than anyone wanted to, headed a few blocks over to the ExSnia ciclofficine (an abandoned factory, social center squat, with a DIY bikeshop in it that I visited before and is still going strong).

The garden at exSnia...

Gathering in front of exSnia, most of us pretty hung over from Rossella's birthday the night before... That's her in the foreground in orange speaking with Carlo, who later moderated my Nowtopia Talk in Zagarolo.

By 11 we were riding about two dozen strong towards Zagarolo and the Good Bike Festival, one of my co-sponsors for this lovely Italian trip. It’s about 30 kilometers east-southeast of the city, and getting there was mostly on narrow two lane roads that were clogged with cars as often as not. A lot of angry honking and swerving accompanied us the whole way, but the locals were used to it and I too was soon oblivious to the incessant bad vibes.

A consultative pause on the road to Zagarolo.

I had a great ride on a fancy Italian racing bike (thanks Nunzio!) and got to catch up a bit with Ilaria en Bici, my pal from 2008, a grad student in urban planning and economics. Later I turned to a greeting and met another Ilaria, this one a cognitive neuroscientist, cyclist, squatter, and a graduate of Boston University where she spent a couple of years doing post-doc work. We had a great time for more than an hour riding along talking about her work, my book, the squatting and housing activist scene in the U.S. (she knew way more than I did actually), the gay marriage story in California, and whatever else occurred to us. It was very fun to have such a stimulating conversationalist to ride with for this journey. We finally arrived at Zagarolo and had to climb the hill into the very old historic center.

Me and Ilaria the cognitive neuroscientist after arriving in Zagarolo.

This is the piazza where we first stopped for pizza and champagne on arrival.

Ilaria en Bici, Luciano, and me, later in the weekend.

A typical small residential piazza in the historic center of Zagarolo.

Tiny alleys called vicolos are off the main piazzas and pedestrian streets in the center.

Back in the car zone, people still walk down the middle of the street.

My luggage preceded me to Zagarolo and I found it at the Wiki Hostel where the band Tetes de Bois, my hosts, booked me for the weekend. What a nice surprise that was! Turns out it’s an experiment of a bunch of young radicals from the social center in Milan called Cantiere. They took over this abandoned mental clinic on the outskirts of the historic center and fixed it all up and now it’s a very comfy and beautiful hostel. Ulia and the others working there treated me like royalty and I really enjoyed hanging out with them and learning about their project.

Bamboo line the entry to Wiki Hostel.

Wiki Hostel grounds from the roof.

I was invited to share the staff lunch, along with Claudia and Giulia (at right) who first fed me pasta before the rest of the meal arrived.

Back into town on one of the hostel’s bikes, I wandered around prior to my own appearance at 9:30 that night, taking in the small piazzas with discussions and performances.

Piazza San Pietro where I did my bicycling talk a few hours later.

I did my Nowtopia talk on Sunday night in this small piazza.

Clown act audience in the main piazza.

Carlo cruises through on a tallbike while kids race around the piazza.

My translator for the two appearances in Zagarolo was Silvia Baraldini, a woman who sounds like she’s from New York when she speaks English, and turns out to be a famous radical who spent 19 years in federal prison in the U.S. She was convicted of being an accessory to the jailbreak of Assata Shakur in 1982, who is still living in Cuban exile at this time. Here’s a trailer from a documentary about her:

I got her to talk about it a little bit but not much. She did tell me that she is good friends with Rita “Bo” Brown, with whom she was in jail for a number of years, and by coincidence Bo was just speaking at CounterPULSE in our first Talk of the season on Incarcerated Women… small world!

from right: Andrea Satta of Tetes de Bois, Silvia Baraldini, myself, and a guitarist whose name I don't know.

Me and Silvia Baraldini.

When we went out for a glass of wine after our bicycle/Critical Mass talk, she really wanted to talk about sports, especially NBA basketball and NFL football! Turns out she survived all those years in jail, including a couple of years in an unimaginable underground solitary confinement in Lexington, KY, by doing 3-4 hours of sports a day, and avidly watching all the games she could. Luckily I’m a bit of a sports nut so I could roll with that, but it was a funny surprise. Silvia is great. She’s quite relaxed and funny, and it was great to meet her.

Ciclofficine crew (Mark, Carlo, Cristian, Livio) at their mini-repair shop in the piazza during the Good Bike Festival in Zagarolo.

On Sunday, it was the day of Removing Training Wheels for the children of Zagarolo. Dozens of them crowded the piazza where the Romans had their crazy cycles and mini-repair zone. It was a beautiful site and you had to wonder what the long-term impact of the weekend’s Good Bike Festival would be on them. Maybe it started a bunch on a life of bicycle mayhem!?!

Ilaria with one of her five successes, new bicyclists!

Ilaria was particularly good at teaching kids to ride without training wheels, getting five different kids rolling on their own in the course of a few hours.

A father teaches his daughter to ride without training wheels.

Giulia watches while some kids go to work on a bike.

Later as a kind of reward for all the kids there was a ride down the main street from piazza to piazza that turned into a Pamplona-like running of the bulls where the kids on bikes played the bulls! They were led by a Giro d’Italia racer whose name I never heard.

Kids get to race with a real life racer!

I had a great time at the festival. I really enjoyed how they did my speaking events. In both cases I didn’t have to present anything like a lecture, but instead, they posed questions to me. The first night Andrea Satta had some questions ready on bicycling, Critical Mass, etc., and the second night Carlo posed questions after the guy who was “my voice” on the Tetes de Bois CD “Good Bike” read some excerpts from the Italian edition of Nowtopia (Now Utopia in the Italian edition). He has a great voice so it was fun to hear him read and then all I had to do was roll with the questions… a very nice way to do an author event, much better in some respects than the occasionally tedious lecture style. It was a particularly nice way to end the trip and the dozen public talks I gave while in Italy.

Thanks to everyone who hosted me and made it such a great trip! Ciao tutti! I hope you’ll all come and visit San Francisco…

At the Move-up Ciclofficine table in town, staffed by the same folks running the Wiki Hostel with whom I'd lunch a couple of hours earlier.

I spent the past four days with Fernanda and Mario in their beautiful house in the countryside of Marche, nearest the tiny village of MonSamPolo, not far from the coastal city of San Benedetto del Tronti. They are incredibly generous hosts, in addition to being very enthusiastic conversationalists, avid Nowtopians, and protagonists of the “Happy Degrowth” movement here. After all the busy days prior to this stop, it felt like a writers’ retreat, or an oasis, a place of true rest and hospitality (not to say everyone prior to this wasn’t also wonderfully hospitable, but I had to keep moving the whole time, so I was growing more and more tired as the days went by).

Monsampolo del Tronti, seen from the farm where I was staying.

The countryside around there mostly like looks like this, vineyards, olive groves, and more.

I had met Fernanda via Skype a year ago when they interviewed me online, and I’d seen photos of Mario. Also meeting me at the station was Paolo M., whom I’d met briefly in Siena. He loaned me his bike and we took a great ride on Wednesday, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Sometimes you meet people with whom you share an automatic affinity, and for me and Mario and Fernanda it is like that. We just enjoyed each other’s company enormously!

Me and Fernanda and Mario on the last day of my visit, in a wild glacial valley in the Appenine mountains.

Mario, posing as a proper farmer with his elegant pear, though he is actually quite an avid pear poacher from any roadside orchard he comes upon!

Fernanda is an incredible live-wire, always laughing and telling stories or bringing an unyielding earnestness to her thoughts and inquiries. Rather tall, she doesn’t sit still for long, with an ebullience that is totally endearing. She’s originally Portuguese, and spent her childhood in Mozambique where her father lived for 50 years before choosing Portuguese citizenship when the revolution decolonized the country. She has a lot of experience in EU-funded projects, lived in Belgium for some years, and has a son in Lisbon. Mario has a charming daughter, Francesca (or Kika as she’s known) by another woman who lives nearby, and  he’s a dentist when he’s not tending his horse, his garden, shooting video, working on his amazing home, or agitating with friends against the privatization of water in Italy, for a degrowth agenda, etc. Unlike Francesca he’s not quite so frenzied, always relaxed, curious, with a huge heart and a sweet warmth. He and Fernanda also maintain a close relationship with a community in Guinea-Bissau whom they visit every year, and will be helping at the Slow Food Terra Madre Congress later this month in Turin.

The capital of this region is Ascoli Piceno, which apparently was once considered as a candidate to be what became Rome, but lost out and remained a fairly small city. It’s on the Via Salaria, or “Salt Way,” the road by which salt was delivered from the Adriatic Sea to Rome. Fernanda and Mario live on a small hill beneath the aforementioned village, about 20 minutes by car from Ascoli Piceno.

The first piazza after entering the town from the underground parking garage.

Near the 2000-year-old Roman bridge, some buildings that are nearly that old!

A government building on the piazza del popolo.

Interior courtyard of same building.

We went to see the town on the first morning as the rain hit, following me down from the northern regions where it pelted the trains I rode all day on Monday. Indicative of the kind of charming good will Fernanda is able to manufacture by dint of personality, we were leaving the parking garage without umbrellas in a downpour, and she thought, “why not ask the attendants if they can lend us an umbrella for a couple of hours?” Mario and I both thought it unlikely and perhaps not worth the effort, but she was not to be denied. And lo and behold, the guys in the booth said sure, wait a sec, and went into their storage area where they had a whole box of tiny cheapo folding umbrellas left over from some convention or another. They gladly gave us two of them and off we went laughing, tickled by the combination of serendipity and openness that had solved our problem.  The rains relented pretty quickly but left the piazzas with a mirror-like surface reflecting the ancient stone buildings. We wandered among the old narrow alleys and eventually made our way to the 2000-year-old Roman bridge, still in use, but we skirted it and stayed on the walls above.

The rain stops in the Piazza del Popolo.

Piazza del Popolo from opposite direction.

Roman bridge in Ascoli Piceno.

Mario and Fernanda enjoying the view above the bridge.

And my turn again for a photo...

These men were sitting out of the rain under an old arch, and above them was the original place for locals to check the size that bricks that they were buying in the nearby market were of proper standard size.

After our tour of the town it was time to head to the Aurora cooperative winery for lunch. It’s actually an anarchist community though I didn’t get too far into politics with anyone while we were there. As Fernanda lamented later, it was a case where we should’ve been more deliberate about focusing a conversation, but since we didn’t, everyone just stuck to their familiar topics and friends in smaller clusters and there was never a shared discussion around the big table. We did have a lot of great food and some of their really spectacular wines. They make several reds and a white that I liked a lot too from the Pecorino grapes.

Grapes!

Views from Aurora were wild with the passing storm.

These are their experimental plantings of different varietals to see what else they might grow on their farm.

Fernanda gets an explanation from one of the collective members in the wine cellar.

The gang at Aurora after lunch.

On the way home we cruised through the countryside near their home, seeing a half dozen sprawling installations of solar photovoltaics, which Mario explained was a classic greenwashing disaster in the making. Covering excellent south-facing slopes, and in one case buried in a shaded canyon, these installations are being driven by speculators who are cashing in on some combination of European subsidies for solar, and Italian incentives to make farms net energy producers. The panels being installed are very obsolete though, and while they might produce some electricity, they are far from state of the art. And the solar electricity is being produced at the expense of permanently wrecking some of the world’s finest agricultural lands. Massive application of herbicides turns the land beneath the solar panels into a desert, while the cement fittings and long-term neglect of the soil will be hard to remedy later. The speculators try to sell their schemes to elderly farmers, insisting that they needn’t worry about the long-term effects on the land since “they won’t be around to see it anyway.” Supposedly the European law that requires the price of disposal to be included in the original purchase price of a commodity will assure the removal of the panels when they’ve reached their lifespan.

These are popping up all over the area.

Construction sites for new solar installations were all over the place.

We hit a cheese farmer for some fresh ricotta and I snagged a fresh dry pecorino wheel too.

Cheese...

Where there aren't vineyards there are usually olives!

Later that night a big feast was prepared for twenty, all coming to have a friendly discussion about Nowtopia and Descrescita Felice. Roberto Mancini is a local intellectual who Mario was very excited to have me dialogue with, but since his mother had just gone into the hospital the day before, he couldn’t stay too long. He did offer what I thought were good comments on my brief summary of the Nowtopian thesis (especially considering that he hadn’t read it yet), emphasizing the need to reinvent a new kind of politics, autonomous and independent from the moribund political parties and forms we’re mostly still stuck with. A few questions and thoughts came from various folks around the table, but eventually it came to two locals, a woman named Olympia (last name I didn’t get) and Massimo Rossi, both folks who had been in the local government for a number of years, and had brought the consultative budget process from Brazil where they picked it up in 2001 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. They both challenged me on the question of politics, whether or not policies can be enacted at the local governmental level to help promote some of the transformations Nowtopia is advocating for. Massimo in particular spoke at some length about the necessity of organizing, of creating a political movement to advance beyond sporadic, individualistic, and isolated projects (and to his credit and my good luck, he’d read the book!).

Massimo Rossi lays out his criticisms while Mario films, and Fernanda translates for me in the back right corner.

I really appreciated that they took the time to seriously challenge me, and did my best to offer a nuanced reply. Ultimately, the social subjects who might develop a serious alternative to the current organization of life need time to cohere, to discover each other, to learn to trust one another through practical projects of cooperation. Maybe in Italy there’s more of that kind of “raw material” already on the ground, but I’m not convinced. I think the decomposition of the working class I describe in Nowtopia is very much a part of the story here too, and the precarious workers I’ve met along the way offered a lot of support for that thesis. Moreover, the left as it once was is in a state of precipitous decline, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place. Perhaps the “degrowth” concept has a chance to be a rallying point, a set of ideas that puts quality over quantity, a pleasurable life over a life dedicated to some future and ever receding satisfication. More importantly “degrowth” starts us thinking about the transition process towards using less energy and water, producing less waste and stopping the profligate misuse of resources.

The next day was a chance to sleep late and hang around until about 3 pm when Paolo came, along with a local journalist and former bike racer, Davida, to take a bike ride along the Adriatic coast. Paolo drove me down to the shore at San Benedetto del Tronti, and we rode north along the coast for about 10 kilometers or a bit more, before turning back.

Paolo and Davida on the coastal bike way on the Adriatic sea near San Benedetto del Tronti.

Whoever designed the bike lanes here had some odd ideas, and they get used in haphazard ways as a result.

Cruising the Adriatic coast...

Paolo and Davida chatting along the way.

We returned to the center of San Benedetto to find a small group of cyclists waiting for us to start a mini-Critical Mass ride through town. We soon found ourselves in a group of about 15, cruising slowly through the town to the great annoyance of motor traffic who whenever they could zoomed past us with horns blaring.

The inaugural "mass" in San Benedetto...

We ended at a small vegetarian organic restaurant where after another nice dinner, a meeting was held of the local committee involved in a national campaign to stop the privatization of public water supplies.  Massimo Rossi was here too, and I could see he is a skilled political mover and shaker, dominating the meeting with his command of facts, laws, and political strategies. But a good group of about 15, equally divided among men and women, took part, and after a couple of hours of discussion we headed home. I think it’s pretty unusual to have a national referendum on much of anything in Italy, let alone the plans to privatize water. So they got 1.3 million signatures to put it on the ballot and are now gearing up for an election, I think next June.

The water committee meets.

Thursday was another chance to sleep late and enjoy the slower pace of rural life. We hung around until mid-afternoon when we headed north to a public trade show, mostly focused on print advertising, but ostensibly about other things too. Mario and Fernando’s friend and colleague Maurizio Pallante, founder of Descrescita Felice with them and some others, and author of a half dozen books on degrowth and the politics of conservation, was speaking, and afterwards he was going to come home with us and give he and I a chance to discuss our respective efforts and how they might support each other (or not!). He gave a good talk that reminded me at times of an Amory Lovins presentation (Lovins was a big voice in the 1970s anti-nuke movement who later founded the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is probably best understood as an industrial design consultancy that applies whole systems—almost permacultural—thinking, to factories, machines, transportation, and almost anything you want), and at other times of a GreenFest speech, exhorting folks to reduce their consumption through efficiency. He is a sophisticated advocate though, and he talked about how a lot of jobs would be created by a degrowth agenda, and that relying on GNP was a misguided way of measuring social well-being. Then he emphasized that his agenda is not focused on creating jobs but on changing work itself.

Ding! The connection with Nowtopia was right there.

He also made an important distinction between social goods and merchandise (commodities for sale). A lot of what we depend on are social goods (water, shelter, food, cooperation, etc.) and are only sometimes turned into merchandise. He used the distinction to emphasize a need to reduce our relationship to merchandise and to increase our ability to enjoy social goods outside of the commodity system. I was with him on this.

But when it was over, and we were driving home, I started discussing with him what I felt was a missing piece. Who are the social subjects in this transitional process? It’s not enough to invoke rationality and efficiency. Arguments for more efficient use of resources have been around for a long time and still we go on producing an eco-cidal world. Somehow the mechanism of coercion, and the subjective revolt that might undo its power, is missing from the Descrescita Felice argument. Granted, the addition of Felice, or Happiness, to their organizational name, is a good step, emphasizing as it does pleasure, a good life, satisfaction independent of transactions. But the overwhelming nature of his presentation seemed to hinge on the kind of rational arguments that we already know don’t meaningfully erode the system that keeps us running in place while destroying the planet.

We found a great deal of common ground and I was very glad to have the chance to hear him speak, and discuss his thoughts. I hope we can continue the exchange over the years to come.

At the printing show where we met Pallante, there was a beautiful exhibit of Iranian graphic arts. Here are two of them.

Happy Degrowth!

The last day we headed across the Appenine Mountains to Perugia where a technology fair was behing held. We took a long somewhat leisurely ride to get there, including stopping off in the national park of Mt. Sibillini and in the glacial valley where Castellucio sits, far from the country’s population centers. We stopped of in Norcia too, a famous town in the heart of Italy, where Mario crazily bought me a jar of black truffles! Yum!

Autumn starts to show as we climb into Mt. Sibillini National Park.

Above the clouds in the Appenine Mountains.

After descending from the mountains we passed Trevi and other fantastic towns perched on the hills of Umbria.

In Perugia, it was quickly apparent to us that the technology conference we came for wasn’t super interesting. A local politician blathered from the stage inside an ancient stone building.

The tech conference was in here.

Gorgeous old room, tired old words...

Another civilized central city without cars, this in Perugia.

One of the main plazas in Perugia.

Hmmm.... what's going on with this sculpture?

We decided to spend our last hours together walking around in old Perugia, seeking a view, and finding a good lunch.

One view from Perugia's city wall.

Annoyingly cars are still allowed inside some areas of the old town.

Incredible stonework in this pre-Roman Etruscan arch.

Our most perfect lunch spot!

We went down an alley at Fernanda’s suggestion and came upon a gorgeous garden restaurant but it was closed. As we returned to the main street, I looked back at them and noticed that the storefront, an unassuming place that looked like a small nondescript restaurant or bar, had the same sign on it, and Fernanda immediately struck up a conversation with the young men at the doorway. One was the proprietor and the other a musician who would be playing later that night. The proprietor gladly opened the garden for us, and spent some time showing us how it’s an urban garden, full of pepperoncini, bell peppers, tomatoes, a great variety of fresh spices, and some fruit too. Wow! It was so beautiful, the sun shining, sitting in the garden under ancient medieval walls… the place is apparently owned by the local church and its priest encouraged its use as a restaurant. Lucky us!…

The hidden garden in the center of the old historic town.

The proprietor showing us flyers from some of the cultural events they hold in their place.

We finished our time together sitting and talking, imagining plans for future rendezvous perhaps in other countries altogether! We’ll see. For sure, we’ll meet again!

A final photo before leaving Perugia.

A curious stencil in the historic center: Even today I still can't fly!