At Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico.

I went to Yucatan state in Mexico over the New Year holiday. We engaged in all the usual touristic activities, from visiting the amazing Mayan ruins at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and other lesser-known archeological sites to beaches, cenotes (sinkholes with clear turquoise waters), haciendas, and remarkable wildlife, especially birds. While we were seldom far from a car or modern life, the combination of entering 2012 and being amidst both centuries-old Spanish colonial towns and even more ancient Mayan cities, made it easier to feel the longer stream of history we too are floating in.

Here in Northern California the New Age hype is already at fever pitch for the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the “end of the world” in 2012. But as we drove along country roads to long-abandoned cities of elegant stone towers, massive edifices that were apparently “apartment complexes,” and sophisticated systems of water management and interurban roadways, we came upon a surprising text in the local tourist magazine “Yucatan Today.” Anabell Castañeda writes that the Mayan prophecies do not predict an end of the world at all, but rather a “change of time:”

Not for a single moment have the Mayas feared the arrival of this date; on the contrary: the ancient Mayas have always told us to wait patiently for a change in consciousness and the evolution which that change will bring… Human beings don’t exist by chance or a work of fate, they are part of a plan to carry out a mission in this part of the universe. Nor is the world totally complete in its creation and perfection; mankind has a job to do on this planet and must be a part of its conservation. It could be said that life on planet Earth depends on humans and what we do during our existence…  The Popol-Vuh is their book of advice and it tells us: “It is time for a new dawn and to finally complete the task.”

… within this long-awaited change, it is expected that there will be a reawakening of the Mayan world in all its complexity…  We have an opportunity to experience a change of conscience which will help us to evolve as a species, protecting the natural resources which we need for our survival, and bringing about the long-awaited urgent social equity, finally understanding the importance of the human being in the universal order.”

It was charming and serendipitous to find such a prosaic interpretation of the much-cited Popol Vuh. In a way, Castañeda is placing the prophesied changes into the context of the political movements already underway, from the global efforts to put the brakes on chaotic climate change to the sweep of occupations from North Africa through the Middle East, to southern Europe and across the U.S. in 2011. Imagining the “Mayan world re-emerging in all its complexity” wasn’t so far-fetched while standing on the top of the ruins of Uxmal or Ek-Balam. In fact, Mayan life is quite present throughout Yucatan, albeit a relatively modern and Mexicanized Mayan life. (My neighbor David Miller, a practicing witch, just finished a rather different look at the Popol Vuh in “The Cosmic Ballgame” where he reads the myths and stories in it as the point of origin for cultural obsessions with sports and ball-playing!)

The massive ballcourt at Chichen-Itza, Yucatan.

Yucatecans playing baseball in their own "field of dreams," in rural Yucatan.

I was reminded of an excellent book I read many years ago, “Stolen Continents: The ‘New World’ Through Indian Eyes” by the Canadian writer Ronald Wright. He traces five great civilizations (the Iroquois, the Cherokees, the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas), describing their first contact with Europeans, their centuries-long struggles to resist subjugation, and their remarkable re-emergence in the late 20^th century. In fact, since the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-1971, Indians in the U.S. have regained cultural pride, political initiative, and with the indigenous from around the world, a global treaty on the rights of indigenous peoples passed at the United Nations. The descendents of the Incan empire, a vast and highly sophisticated urban culture that spanned much of western South America (from today’s southern Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to northern Chile), have been making themselves felt in all the countries of the Andes.

While travelling in Yucatan I was reading an interesting book recently published by AK Press in Oakland, a translated work by a Uruguayan writer Raúl Zibechi (and ably translated by Ramor Ryan) called “Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces”. It’s not a long book, only 140 pages, but as the double forewords from John Holloway and Benjamin Dangl emphasize, Zibechi’s look at the rebellions in Bolivia during the past decades is an incredibly important contribution to the wider political moment encompassed by everything from the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados to Occupy Oakland and the rest. Zibechi is well-versed in the broad shift to the left that has been unfolding across Latin America during the past two decades, and has been an important critic of that process—not from the right though, but from the point of view of the social movements that pushed the states across the continent to move leftward, and then found themselves isolated and marginalized as the old hierarchies and political parties institutionalized and defanged the movements themselves. Not in Bolivia though, and this is why this is such an important book.

The Aymara of the altiplano (the indigenous of Bolivia’s highlands) have managed to create social movements that remained active, creative, and resilient even after Evo Morales and his socialist party came to power in 2006. Moreover, the epicenter of their movement has been El Alto, a sprawling urban zone of several hundred thousand adjacent to the nation’s capital in La Paz. John Holloway (author of “Crack Capitalism” and “Change the World Without taking Power”) says it well in his foreword, juxtaposing the urban Bolivian movements to the rural, peasant-based Zapatista movement that inspired so many in the 1990s:

“The question for us who are not peasants is how we create an urban Zapatismo. How can we create autonomous, anti-capitalist, anti-state spaces or moments in the city? El Alto offers us many suggestions… The real forces for social change are not where they appear to be. They are not in the institutions or in the parties but in the daily contact between people, the daily weaving of social interactions that are not just necessary for survival but the basis of life.”

Zibechi traces the history of Bolivia back through earlier social upheavals based on the once-powerful tin miners, visiting the insurrections that arose in response to the privatization of water (by San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation) in the city of Cochabamba in 2000, and the natural gas war that gave birth to new community (self-)organization in 2003 to refuse the multinational appropriation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon wealth. With great understanding of the nuances of the Bolivian context, Zibechi shows how the community itself became a “machine of dispersal,” refusing centralization, refusing to allow its new-found powers to disappear into political parties, state-based patronage machines, or even into the organizations they built themselves at earlier moments. Insisting on recallable and rotating delegates they have developed social mechanisms where individuals “lead by following,” ensuring that power keeps devolving back to the grassroots.

The Occupy movements that swept the U.S. in fall 2001 instituted the General Assembly as the main decision-making institution, with its often ponderous inefficiencies and frustrating problems with people learning an entirely new way to do politics in the heat of the moment. The form, while new to many Americans, is far from new in history, and community assemblies were and are the bedrock of the Bolivian social movements that have kept even Morales’ government in a state of constant reaction. Zibechi’s book is a fantastic in-depth look at how they’ve done it, without overly romanticizing or distorting the actual histories he describes. To be sure, the Bolivians have not unburdened themselves of the crushing weight of the state and the world market. Zibechi traces the interaction between the forces of dispersion and liberation and those tendencies that move toward forms of the state, new dynamics of centralization and cooptation through representation. In Bolivia, like in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere, the process is unfolding and is far from settled. For those who are looking for inspiration, new ways to think about self-organization in urban contexts, “Dispersing Power” is an important book.

The famous arch at Labna, Yucatan, as illustrated by Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s.

This iconic arch at Labna is used in a lot of tourist promotions. In a book called "The Lost Cities of the Mayans" the illustration above shows the same arch as it was just being dug out of deep jungle and soil.

By happy coincidence I was given for Xmas while in Mexico a beautiful big art book called “The Lost Cities of the Mayas,” which features the watercolors of Frederick Catherwood, an artist and lawyer who came to visit Yucatan and Central America in search of “lost cities” in the 1830s and 1840s. Published by Artes de Mexico in 1999 in a big 14”x10” hardbound format, the images Catherwood drew of Mayan ruins in the 1840s leap to life, most of the buildings in far worse shape than they are today, then still partially buried in dense jungle and beneath centuries of accumulated tropical soils. The Victorian romance of exploring and discovery obscures any self-awareness of empire, and was no antidote to the inevitable malaria that hit Catherwood and most of his contemporaries who arrived in those early days. Within a decade of his visit, the Mayans long descended from the builders of these incredible cities rose up against the colonizers and by the early 1880s had driven Spaniards and Mexican upper classes two walled cities at Campeche and Merida. The nearly unknown (to U.S. visitors) “Caste War” lasted for more than a half century and perhaps provides a foundation for future revolts of the Mayan peoples going forward.

Uxmal Pyramid by Frederick Catherwood, early 1840s.

Pyramid at Chichen-Itza by Frederick Catherwood, c. 1840s.

Iconic temple at Chichen-Itza.

Standing on ancient ruins in Yucatan reminded me of our temporality, the transience of civilizations, even ones which seem quite established and permanent. Perhaps someday someone will be standing on the flooded ruins of San Francisco’s Financial District ruminating in similar ways about the fleeting passage of our own strange claim to “civilization.”

Documentary proof that the Mayans invented Lego!

We went to see the flamingos in the wild at the northern edge of Yucatan...

This vast structure is in Sayil, south of Uxmal, a lesser known/visited Mayan ruin.

There’s a lot of funny hype about how the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012, so we found ourselves going to Yucatan state in Mexico for New Year’s, and laughed that we were getting a head start on the end of the world!. What a beautiful place! And once upon a time, densely populated by urbanized Mayans, who lived in cities dependent on complicated water capture and storage schemes, with stunning temples and massive stone buildings covered in ornate sculpted hieroglyphs that tell stories of battles, kings, and conflicts of various types. We visited five different archeological sites, including world famous Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and the lesser known Labna, Sayil, and Ek-Balam (the latter is also the name of a large undersea oil deposit in the Gulf of Mexico). We learned about Sac-Bé, the name given extensive “white roads” that connected the many Mayan towns and cities from the Yucatan down into Central America, rivaling the roads of the Incas in Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia, and the Roman roads across Europe.

One of the Mayan roads that cut across the Labna ruins, south of Uxmal.

This iconic arch at Labna is used in a lot of tourist promotions. In a book called "The Lost Cities of the Mayans" I saw an image drawn in the 1840s of the same arch as it was just being dug out of deep jungle and soil.

The North palace at Labna.

We landed in Merida, the state capitol, a smallish city of about 800,000, where we took a quick tour of the historic center on our first night. We walked through the city founder’s elegant mansion with soaring ceilings, antique furniture, and huge paintings and sculptures. The colonial architecture is quite charming, and much of the city center has been restored to enhance its appeal to tourism. A local chocolate cooperative has a small shop where they sell outstanding chocolate (our hosts explained that a Belgian chocolate maker had teamed up some years ago with local cocoa farmers to establish the excellent product line).

Of course no visit is complete without an accidental encounter with local bicyclists! We were driving home from the center of Merida on the first night in town and went by a guy on his bike with a bullhorn over his shoulder. Moments later as we approached the big central monument in the middle of a major traffic circle we saw a couple of dozen cyclists waiting on the steps and voila! We knew there was a night ride assembling, maybe a Critical Mass? They called it and their group “Cicloturixes,” which means cycling dragonflies in the neologism of Spanish and Mayan. We weren’t able to hang out, but we did meet with them a few days later, and had a fun time telling stories, and thinking about the politics of bicycling in Yucatan with them.

Meeting with Cicloturixes in Merida, December 31, 2011.

Helpfully for the Cicloturixes is the fact that in most of the small towns in Yucatan the bicycle is still a major form of transportation. We were driving around to see ruins and other sights, and couldn’t help but notice how common the freight bikes are everywhere, on main roads as well as in small villages. Kids were on bikes, adults rode with machetes hanging off their hips while cycling, and freight bikes were ubiquitous, used for everything from pedicabs to hauling goods. In various places there were ciclopistas being built, too, and very occasionally they already has separate bikeways along major highways. The heat in Yucatan is really extreme for much of the year (not bad at all during our New Year’s visit) so canopies are essential. Here’s a small gallery of various bikes we saw in Oxkutzkab, Izamal, and other Yucatan places.

Pedicab in Izamal, Yucatan.

Cycle taxis in Oxkutzkab, Yucatan.

A group of kids hanging out near a touristic hacienda an hour south of Merida...

Nice custom job on this vendor's bike, particularly the canopy, in Izamal.

Check out the homemade child seat!

Sturdy freight bikes in Izamal.

Adriana’s uncle Lorenzo and family generously loaned us a car (after the rental car reservation we made through Expedia turned out to be useless, being refused by EuropCar as invalid; and then we found out there were NO cars to be rented in the whole city for the rest of the week!) and gave us their beach house to stay in in Chicxulub (pronounced “cheek-shu-loob”). We began a series of day trips exploring the layered histories of the region.

View from our terrace in Chicxulub, Yucatan, looking at the Gulf of Mexico.

History is everywhere in the Yucatan, the Mayans being an obvious one. The Spanish conquest was completed in the mid-1500s, but the local indigenous resisted continuously. For a period after Mexican Independence in 1810, the Yucatan was an independent republic with the former Spanish colonialists holding power over the highly segregated population beneath them, at the bottom being the Mayan Indians who outnumbered the colonizers by three to one in the west of the peninsula and more than 5 to 1 in the east. In the 1840s various factions disputed power in the area, with two separate capitals being established in Campeche and Merida, and Indians being incorporated into the opposing armies. At one point some of the Yucatecan aristocracy tried to gain international support from the U.S. but eventually the region was reincorporated into the Mexican Republic. The Mayans, now armed, began to fight against the interlopers and by the 1880s had the two walled, capital cities under siege, and the rest of the peninsula under Mayan control. The Caste War, as this conflict is known, lasted from the 1840s until the early 1900s, and the last known military operation in the Yucatan against Mayan Indians wasn’t until 1933!

Somehow no matter what we did, we arrived at the best known ruins near the end of the day, and had beautiful golden light, but also dusk-like light to deal with. This is Uxmal from the top of one large ruin looking back at the iconic pyramid and the so-called "monastery".

This remarkable wall is mostly restored, as it was in a bad state when first rediscovered in the 1840s.

This wall stands alone in the jungle to the side of one of the major Uxmal pyramids.

You were allowed to climb this one, and as you can see, it is quite steep!

Coming down is harder than going up!

One day we went with Lorenzo to find cenotes (sinkholes) to swim in, and also to visit one of the old restored haciendas that dominated the local economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Yucatan was responsible for 90% of world trade in henequen from 1880 to 1920, though it lost its pre-eminence long ago (today Brazil is the world’s biggest producer). Henequen, or Sisal, is a great source of rope and twine, and can be used in burlap bags and floor mats and many other industrial uses. These days they are beginning to find it useful as an ecological alternative to petrochemical-based fibers. You can see how rich they were once upon a time when you come upon abandoned haciendas like the one we found in Uayacel. Some of the haciendas have been rediscovered by international investors determined to kickstart a local tourist business staying and eating at these once-again luxurious places.

Lorenzo and Adriana amidst drying sisal, or henequen.

Henequen turns out to look a lot like agave, and is a close cousin, but rather than being used to make tequila like agave, it is a great source of the sisal fiber.

The hacienda we were headed to was closed on January 1, so we kept going and found ourselves wandering through the ruins of an impressive hacienda in the small town of Uayalceh.

The abandoned hacienda at Uayacel, as we entered.

The inner courtyard at the hacienda at Uayacel, very European-influenced.

Reverse view of same courtyard.

Rusty remnants of old industrial equipment, most of the place had been completely stripped of anything useful.

Gorgeous tiled outer corridor still being maintained by some locals who live in the dorm next to the adjacent chapel.

Further meandering led us to a fantastic meal at Hacienda Ochil, where we enjoyed local specialties like Poc Chuc (grilled pork marinated in sour orange and pickled onions), Sopa de Lima (Chicken soup with limejuice),Papadzules (tacos with hard-boiled eggs, covered in pumpkin-seed salsa) and Cochinita Pibil (a stewed, marinated pork or chicken dish). Yucatecan cuisine is everything it’s said to be, and more!

The cenotes are a famous feature of the Yucatan’s weird geological history. 65 million years ago a meteor landed near the town we were staying in (centered in the Gulf of Mexico, just north of the peninsula) and along the crater rim you find dense clusters of cenotes. They are a bit like oases, beautiful turquoise fresh water in clear pools either in partial or total caves, or in the open air, surrounded by steep walls covered in tropical vegetation. Of course I assumed there’d be strange and dangerous things in the water, or crawling around, but actually there’s only very tiny fish and nothing dangerous at all. And the water was delicious! I could only imagine how refreshing jumping into a cenote would be when the normal summer temperatures way over 100 are prevailing. We had very temperate weather, barely into the 80s at most, and dropping into the low-60s on our last day when a northern weather front blew down from Texas. Hilariously, local headlines warned in screaming 100 pt type “Here Comes the Cold!”

The open-air cenote we visited near Cacao.

To all my skeptical friends: See, I did go in!

We went off for an overnight journey to top off our time in Yucatan, stopping first for lunch in Izamal, a beautiful colonial city where a huge convent is built on the ruins of an old Mayan temple.

Ascending the ramp to the Convent in Izamal, built on the ruins of a massive Mayan pyramid.

Three friars are entering the beautiful courtyard at the Izamal convent. The whole town is painted in this pretty yellow.

The vast courtyard gives a hint of how large the pyramid beneath must've been...

After another great Yucatecan lunch, we made our way to Chichen-Itza, a “wonder of the world,” and unbelievably overrun with tourists and vendors of tschotskes. We arrived to wait in line to buy entry tickets for over a half hour, and then when we got in, after running a gauntlet of vendors we popped into the vast central plaza in which the iconic temple sits. Thousands of tourists milled about the plaza, it was like being in St. Marks Square in Venice!

Iconic temple at Chichen-Itza.

Dense crowds made it seem a bit like Disneyland, like we were seeing a replica of the real thing.

We made our way to the further reaches, trying to escape the crowds.

There is no restriction on the vendors, so they are at your elbow throughout your visit, hawking their mawkish wares. In spite of the crowds and the vendors, which we could only laugh about, we had to admit it was still worth it to see Chichen in person. The Temple of the Warriors was particularly impressive, as were the ballcourts and the observatory. Everything is quite huge there, the ballcourt much larger than any one we’d seen before at Uxmal or anywhere else.

The temple of the warriors, each column has its carvings representing warriors and their battles.

One of the columns.

Profile shot of the Warrior Temple.

The famous observatory at Chichen-Itza.

Incredibly, they allow hundreds of vendors of tourist schlock to line the paths throughout the archeological zone.

By far the largest ballcourts we saw at any Mayan site were here at Chichen-Itza, where they must have had their Super Bowl once upon a time.

We spent the night in Valladolid, one of the larger cities in Yucatan, at a pleasant if pricey bed-and-breakfast owned by an American ex-pat, originally from North Dakota by way of New Jersey. The next morning we went north to see the ruins at Ek-Balam, which had been highly recommended. Indeed, they are quite impressive. Massive structures, many still buried in the jungle, and a lot of restoration going on.

Here I am at Ek-Balam, looking back at the amazingly huge pyramid, which is undergoing a lot of restoration, hence the fresh thatched coverings.

Another big climb up and down at the main pyramid at Ek-Balam. Great that you can still scale it!

Those trees behind me hide an as-yet-unexcavated pyramid.

From there we headed to the north coast at Ria Lagartos, which was an important destination for Adriana, because her grandfather had filmed movies there in the 1940s, shooting beautiful early kodachrome of the flamingos in the wild. Now the sleepy fishing village at the north edge of the Yucatan is trying to attract an ecotourist crowd, but given the complete absence of tourist shops or souvenirs, I’m guessing that they’re not too successful. Mostly because it’s a very long drive to get there, some 50 km north of Tizimin, the last big town in the area, which is already a long way from everywhere else. It was a great experience! We got a launch for $75 for about 2.5 hours, and off we went. Our guide was quite knowledgeable and showed us crocodiles and countless birds. Over 350 species have been observed in this area, a major wintering roost for migratory birds, as well as year-round home to many charismatic shore birds, most especially including the flamingos!

On our boat ride into the wetlands at Ria Lagartos we came upon this studly crocodile. A second after this photo was taken it whirled around and lunged into the water, just beneath our launch!

Black eagles were in great abundance, apparently all paired up in specific areas.

Great Blue Heron.

This heron, not sure which particular variety, was quite a bit more shy, and moved away from us as we floated nearer to get a good view.

These pelicans swooped in for some free fish...

The flamingos are amazing!

They can even fly!

They would walk through the shallow water in perfect step.

And feed simultaneously too!

Big white stork behind on the shore...

Finally it was time to go, and we headed back to Ria Lagartos.

Approaching Ria Lagartos in late afternoon...

After a great fish dinner, sunset over the harbor, fishermen putting their nets away.

It was a great visit! We felt we could have stayed another month and not seen all there is to see in Yucatan, so we’ll be going back for sure. Mexico is endlessly intriguing. Every part of the country has its own history, cultures, architecture, foods, and more. Visiting the Yucatan was a revelation!

“Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.”

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After The Future

The Occupy movement is going through a pivotal moment right now, with various camps—notably Oakland, Portland, and New York City—being destroyed by police action during the past few days. The punditocracy and the politicians are all hoping this will bring it to an end, but that is not going to happen. It is likely that the focus on camping and holding public plazas may give way to new tactics, but the newly vocal populations all over the U.S. are not going to be silenced just as they’ve rediscovered their voices.

Arriving at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland on November 2, we were met with this amazing scene.

Walking around the area, the scenes of everyone together were endlessly inspiring. An historic day!

In particular, the Oakland General Strike of November 2 was an historic event. For the first time in the U.S. an urban General Strike emerged from the new working classes, the precarious, the unemployed, the unorganized, and the poor, brought together 2,000-strong in the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on October 26 and voting 96% in favor. One week later it happened, and it was an amazing day.

General Strikes are not so rare in other parts of the world, of course. Several cities in Syria have been out for almost two weeks as I write. Italy and France have had many one-day general strikes in the past decades. But those have been led by giant trade union confederations, and kept under pretty tight control.

The Oakland General Strike was an opening salvo from an unexpected quarter: the “precariat” (a neologism made by combing precarious and proletariat). Local unions could not formally endorse the call in such a short time, and are often bound by no-strike clauses in their contracts. Nevertheless, rank-and-file members of the Service workers (SEIU 1021), the Teamsters, the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and others, enthusiastically joined in during the day-long festival that gripped the center of Oakland, culminating in the mass marches towards dusk that shut down the Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth largest. But organized labor was following, not leading this General Strike. The people filled the city center with music, banners, marches, humor, performance, food, yoga, meditation, childcare, art-making, and more. Rappers, hip-hop spoken word artists, and folk musicians all performed in the streets. Urban farmers showed up with free vegetables grown in the city’s reclaimed lots. Free valet bike parking was provided by local bicycle advocates. Dozens of economic and environmental justice activists were in the mix. The Oakland General Strike not only halted business as usual in much of Oakland, but demonstrated practical everyday alternatives that are already well entrenched in the area.

Much to my surprise, the Teamsters showed up with a truck load of hamburgers and hot dogs from the Alameda County Labor Council which they fed to all comers for hours.

This table offered free veggies from the East Oakland schools farmers market.

This booth had already given away all its food by the time I took this photo.

Most hopefully, the Oakland General Strike excited everyone who turned out, leading to cascading feelings of solidarity and possibility, which in turn flows out of Oakland and across the networks of occupiers everywhere. Solidarity messages flowed in from as far away as Egypt, while Oakland suddenly found itself in the eyes of the world. The one-day strike was a powerful demonstration to local and national elites, but more importantly, it was a powerful demonstration to participants and allies, shifting imaginations about what is possible.

This boisterous Children's Brigade was amazing, hilarious, and wildly inspirational!

This Children's Village was an integral part of the Oakland Commune at the plaza in front of City Hall... hardly looks like a security or public health hazard does it?

The medical tent at the Occupy Oakland camp, November 2, 2011.

This IS what history looks like!

Mona and her great sign.

Music and dance erupted all over the area.

Habana Matanza played right along the route of the big anti-capitalism march during the afternoon.

The attempt to seize an empty, nearby building late that night, leading to a skirmish with police and some minor property damage in the area, gave rise to a counterspin that dominated the following days’ news coverage. In fact, a vigorous debate erupted among many participants about the limits of various tactics, the meaning of nonviolent mass action, democracy, accountability and more. All of this demoralized some, but were necessary steps in the evolution and maturation of the movement. With the state repression of the past days, occupiers will be seeking new ways to creatively advance the larger challenge to the status quo.

Several banks along the afternoon march got vandalized and windows broken.

Bank of America rebuked.

The black bloc during the anti-capitalist march, a while after the attack on Whole Foods and moments before an attack on the Bank of America near Lake Merritt.

Postcards from the revolution? The theater of the black bloc is unmistakeable, as is the petty vandalism some of them engage in. One protester was dogging them saying "this is how the Nazi Party started!"... I do wonder how anarchists and left communists can feel comfortable adopting a black uniform, masking their identities, and engaging in macho actions that depend on the safety provided by thousands who have no say about their choices.

Just after this banner we came upon an unusual sight...

... a small group of marchers had already broken off to clean paint bombs from the bank walls!

How long before this strange political theater is added to promotional advertising for the cleaning products?

Let’s take a deeper look at the social context that the Occupy movement has emerged from.

For the past few decades American politics has shifted steadily rightward. Neoliberalism swept the world and in the U.S. it was anchored in the “Washington consensus” that promoted privatization, reduced government spending, shredded social safety nets, all backed up by police and military. The 9/11 attacks were the pretext for restriction of civil liberties and expansion of police state powers, as well as a decade of wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia. Ten years later the U.S. is still bogged down there and is now murdering its own citizens in Arabian deserts (ostensibly at peace) without trial, conviction, or sentence. Obama was elected by a population ready to restore civility, honesty, and social solidarity but like every politician from our One-Party (two-faction) system, his exercise of power has served the 1% at everyone else’s expense.

The siren song of democracy dies hard though. People have streamed into the Occupy camps, often to visit and talk rather than to stay and camp. In the General Assemblies countless people are discovering a nascent direct democracy that slakes their long unquenched thirst for genuine politics. The 99% meme has been enormously helpful in opening a space that invites everyone in. Obviously the actual campers are not 99% of the population. But by holding to that claim, everyone from the unemployed white middle-aged factory worker and the laid-off middle manager, to the unemployed Ph.D.s and newly minted college students, to the millions of foreclosed and laid off, to the permanently unemployed underclass living on the streets of the U.S., have been welcomed into the process.

In the Occupy camps people from different economic situations have met face to face again after three decades of stigmatizing and ostracizing the people labeled “homeless.” To be sure, there are many people with severe mental health issues living on the streets, victims of a callous dismantling of social services during the rise of neoliberalism. The Occupy camps have been an obvious beacon to people who are hungry, cold, and alone in the harsh life of the streets. The camps have been feeding thousands of people, providing basic medical services, and reconnecting participants to a genuine social solidarity. The daily interactions and shared life of the camps have helped reduce the walls that poverty, race, and class animosities have built. Too many folks living paycheck to paycheck have been able to believe the myth that “I’m not like THEM!” That false bravado has reinforced the moralistic judgment that people living on the streets have somehow brought it on themselves. Now that most of the 99% realize they too are being robbed, and their precious lifestyles are in jeopardy, the fissures cultivated between middle-working class people and the very poor are starting to shrink.

The people of North America have watched their wealth diminish while the super-rich have grown immensely richer (often overlooked in this saga is how most of the Global South has been kept in desperate poverty during the looting of their economic resources by the same super-rich). While this shift in wealth has gone unchecked, the work that most of us do to reproduce life has changed too. Manufacturing work has plunged while digital “infolabor” has grown enormously, along with a huge expansion in low-wage jobs at Walmart, McDonalds, and other “service sector” businesses. The rapidly rising cost of health care has also fueled the vast growth of hospitals and drugstores but especially the insurance bureaucracies, with the legions of employees needed to keep it all going.

The well-documented deindustrialization of North America has also led to the destruction of many once-thriving neighborhoods and even whole cities like Detroit, and led to the hollowing out of many others, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the wake of these jarring economic dislocations, people have been on the move. Not only do we have millions of recent immigrants from Asia and South America, but Americans have been on the move too. This has led to a breakdown in established neighborhoods and communities, and a further fragmentation of daily life at the residential level. Who knows their neighbors anymore? Who knows the people they work with very well? Everyone is constantly changing jobs, changing homes.

These changes in work—in how we make our lives—have changed our social conditions too. The most obvious change is how many hours every day many of us spend on the internet, looking for jobs, looking for love, reading emails, following friends on Facebook, uploading and linking images and ideas, etc., trying to stay “connected.” But no matter how long we’re online, we are always falling behind the rush of information, the mounting pile of messages, the articles we’ve bookmarked or downloaded but not returned yet to read. All of this individualized hyperproductivity is at the root of the fragmented, atomized lives we’ve been living. No matter how much we “connect” online, we find ourselves quite isolated at home in front of our computers or TVs.

The Occupy movement, by returning life to public spaces, is a passionate rebuke to that isolation.

A smart book called “After The Future” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi provides insights into these deeper changes. He connects the increased digitization of work with the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide in the recent past.

“I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system… This … produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic … Cybertime (the time of attention, memory, and imagination) cannot speed beyond a limit. If it does, it cracks. And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The crisis of the new economy at the beginning of the zero zero decade has to be seen as a consequences of this nervous breakdown…. In the sphere of net-production, it is the social brain that is assaulted by the overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of net-production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual class. We have to become aware of it; we have to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in permanent electrostimulation.”

Not everyone is embedded within the realm of digital labor. But the vast majority of the population is increasingly precarious. Full-time permanent jobs are a thing of the past and only a tiny few will ever have them. I’ve written about this in Nowtopia, and often on this blog too. Berardi does a fine job of summarizing this new social situation:

Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right to life, independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labor time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value and rethought in terms of free social activity.

“The word “precariat” generally stands for work that no longer has fixed rules about labor relations, salary, or the length of the work day. However, if we analyze the past, we see that these rules functioned only for a short period at the heart of the twentieth century, under the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment. Thanks to a generally strong regulatory role played by the state in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamics could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain periods have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded on political and material relations of force (workers’ violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force, it became possible to affirm rights, establish laws, and protect them as personal rights. With the decline in the political force of the workers’ movement, the natural precariousness and brutality of labor relations in capitalism have re-emerged.

If we analyze the technical transformations introduced by the digitalization of the productive cycle, we see that the essential point is not that the labor relation has become precarious (which, after all, it has always been), but the dissolution of the person as active productive agent, as labor power. The cyberspace of global production can be described as an immense expanse of depersonalized human time… Capital no longer recruits people but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers… The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.

As we go about our daily lives in the U.S., we are bombarded by endless rhetoric about freedom. Politicians constantly brag about how free we are, how this is the greatest country in the world, ad nauseum. We know better. The Occupy movement has brought us into public together to repudiate the lies that dominate this society. Among the biggest lies is the notion that we are free as individuals when we are at work. On top of that illusion, we are also repeatedly admonished that we need a lot of education to be capable of holding the high-skilled jobs of the 21^st century. In both cases, these claims are false. We are far from free, and most jobs can be learned in a very short time. Now that we have an insecure relationship to work, too many people bury themselves in endless rounds of skill development, trying to remain desirable for at least the occasional contract job.

Here’s Berardi again, describing the real world we find ourselves confronted with:

[The person’s] liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of human, proletariat and cognitariat, is actually carried out in our time, if we examine the conditions of the average wage globally, if we consider the current cancellation of previous labor rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regime of slavery… From the point of view of the valorization of capital, flow is continuous, but from the point of view of the existence and time of cognitive workers, productive activity has the character of recombinant fragmentation in cellular form. Pulsating cells of work are lit and extinguished in the large control room of global production. Infolabor is innately precarious, not because of the contingent viciousness of employers but for the simple reason that the allocation of work time can be disconnected from the individual and legal person of the worker, an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital.

The Occupy movement is a sudden sea change in how we respond to this fragmented world. Instead of accepting our individual predicament, thousands of people have rediscovered public space, and in it a public, shared life. The implications of the Oakland General Strike in this context are huge. Sure, a portion of the working population of one city of less than a half million took a day off during an unusually summer-like November week. But having stopped our participation in the planetary work machine, even for a day, beckons us to consider what we might do instead, what we might do if we stop working for the 1% not just for a day, but forever. The possibilities that emerge from a collective strike are infinite: the beautiful world we COULD make together is suddenly almost within grasp.

It’s difficult to imagine redesigning the basic activities by which we produce our shared lives. Science and technology seem to be independent forces, outside of social or democratic control. Clearly the thrust of technological development for more than a hundred years has been to remove skill and decision-making from workers and embed it in technical systems. One outcome of this is to leave us all feeling that there’s nothing we can do about the overarching stupidity of modern life—“that’s just the way it is,” we tell ourselves. Berardi describes how this shapes democracy itself: “Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism… No room for political choice is left, as corporate principles have become embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.”

Berardi wrote the chapters in After The Future as separate essays over the years 2000-2009, and he did not imagine something like the Occupy movement being possible any longer. His diagnosis of an epidemic of depression can easily be directed at himself, but he amusingly reminds us that he could be wrong. In fact, he has a number of suggestions for the future of social revolt that dovetail closely with what I’ve written previously, especially the way I described the Critical Mass bike rides as an act of collective “assertive desertion.” (Interesting too to note Portland’s Elly Blue’s essay noting the presence of CM cyclists in many Occupations.) At this important juncture in the Occupy movement, maybe these ideas should be in the mix, especially as the tired polarization between theatrical vandalism and moralistic pacifism has again emerged to try everyone’s patience.

Berardi rejects the macho posturing of the young militants who, dressed in black masks engage in bursts of targeted vandalism and occasionally skirmish with police lines. “Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafia?” Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House” takes the argument a major step forward:

The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make us more like them, and if we’re like them they win twice—once because being unlike them is our goal and again because we’re then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is not; some call our power people power. It works. It’s powerful. It’s changed and it’s changing the world.

But it’s likely that this movement for deep change and deep renewal of society will take longer than a few months. Thousands and millions of people filling the streets, occupying plazas, blocking highways, and stopping their stupid jobs through General Strikes may happen, but it won’t be sudden and overnight. In the meantime, to rebuild the social solidarity that has been so damaged by the last decades’ shattering of communities, we need a strategy that begins to build the new world in the crumbling shell of this one.

Reclaiming our time and technological know-how from the market, and directing our own work ourselves can start anywhere, and has already started in countless efforts across the world. Here’s how Berardi describes assertive desertion in his own terms:

Only withdrawal, passivity, abandonment of the labor market, of the illusions of full employment and a fair relation between labor and capital, can open a new way. Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope. … In this context, passivity does not mean ethical resignation, but refusal of participation. Capitalism is demanding participation, collaboration, active intervention in the economy, competition and entrepreneurship, critical consumption, constructive critique. All this is fake. Activism is fake, when no horizon can be seen. Radical passivity means active withdrawal, and withdrawal means creation of spaces of autonomy where solidarity can be rebuilt, and where self-relying communities can start a process of proliferation, contagion, and eventually, a reversal of the trend.

The beauty of this is that it is already underway. It’s not what most people are doing yet, but enough are that we can see in such initiatives the seeds of a new life sprouting. In Nowtopia I talked about the Marxist concept of “general intellect” as finally becoming a terrain of open contestation. Withdrawal and repurposing of our technological know-how is a good example of that in practice. I like this last excerpt from Berardi as a guidepost to the coming era:

The task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech-low-energy methods—while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

The confrontations have been at the heart of the Occupy movement. No doubt they will continue to be for some time. But if they begin to wane, or even just take a winter break, it’s good to think of the many things we can do that get us ready for the next wave of refusal and reinvention.

Here, to conclude, are some last images from the march to the Port of Oakland and its successful closure during the November 2, 2011 General Strike in Oakland.

I was with about 80+ bicyclists who rode ahead of the 4 pm march to reach the Port in time to stop the evening shift from arriving to work. We felt like a cavalry arriving as we approached on this overpass.

Other early arrivals and the bicyclists stopped the major port access area.

The 4 pm march left downtown across the freeway, heading to the Port.

At Maritime and 7th, a cluster of cyclists stopped traffic in all directions for more than an hour, preventing longshore workers from getting to their piers to work (most local workers, including the folks in the blocked cars and trucks here, expressed support for the action).

Thousands of marchers filled the Port and shut it down for the evening.

Banner hanging near 14th and Broadway in front of Oscar Grant Plaza across from Oakland's City Hall.

We’re living in the midst of a fantastically exciting historic moment. I don’t know about you, but I have spent years thinking about these kinds of social ruptures, wishing for that sudden lurch in history when things change so fast. I spoke about this at the conclusion of many of the Nowtopia talks I gave around the world during the past 3 years, the palpable frustration that many attendees had with the snail’s pace of history. I reminded that history can suddenly accelerate, make a dramatic lurch… forward? Sideways? Backwards? You never know ahead of time, and you can’t predict what will catalyze it (for sure, the planned actions of a vanguardist minority cannot will it into being). Right now, clearly, we’re surging into exciting directions.

Like a sudden rain covering a desert landscape with incredible wildflowers after years of drought, the Occupy Wall Street movement has connected us across the world, but just as importantly has connected folks in the U.S. to our own histories from past decades. The triumphalist domination of the ultra-right in U.S. media and politics has done its utmost to deny, ridicule, and obscure the vital social movements and histories that entered the historic narrative loudly in the 1960s and 1970s, and never went away. Of course, the parties and organizations of the New Left and its aftermath crumbled, and most trade unions in the U.S have gone through massive shrinkage while accepting a junior role at the heel of the Democratic Party. But the social revolution that helped subvert the military and end the Vietnam War, that demanded equal rights for women, that advanced ethnic studies and racial diversity, that put pleasure and cooperation ahead of sacrifice and competition, and that began the reconfiguration of our material lives under the guiding sensibility of ecological sanity, deeply changed U.S. life. The Culture War still being fought so viciously by Faux News and its acolytes speaks to the ongoing power of these social transformations.

But many of us have lacked a political voice for more than a generation. We are not represented in our “representative democracy,” and many of us have long stopped expecting to be. There are very few politicians who speak for the values that we are already living by. Even if a “progressive” voice gets into office, they are drowned by the monied interests that surround them in a corrupted political system. In the larger scheme of things, these past decades have also seen the seizure of economic and political power by an increasingly brazen class of white-collar criminals who have done their best to subvert the rule of law, and will engage in any kind of fraud, even mass murder, to keep their power and this system intact. Obama has proven to be a very helpful servant to this gang, what with his refusal to prosecute the countless crimes of his predecessors, not to mention the impunity that financial criminals have enjoyed.

The system itself is broken, and that’s what the Occupy movement speaks to, loudly and clearly. The emergence of General Assemblies as the embodiment of a true direct democracy has been breathtaking, especially in its wide adoption across the middle of the country where we’ve all come to expect only reactionary conservatism. But these ideas haven’t fallen in from the sky, or emerged from a vacuum. They are the product of nearly a half century of organizing, of transforming how we live on a personal basis day to day, in addition to creating a panoply of new projects and cultural efforts. Formal political organizations withered away, perhaps deservedly, and it is only in the Occupy Movement that we are finding a collective political voice for the millions who have been left out, economically, culturally, and politically.

The Oakland Commune, or “¡Que Se Vayan Todos!”*

Around the Bay Area, Oakland has been the core of the Occupy movement. There are occupations in San Jose, Berkeley, Santa Rosa, and of course San Francisco, but none have had the size, coherence, and political savvy that Oakland’s has had. From its inception on Indigenous People’s Day, the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza (formerly known as Frank Ogawa Plaza) in front of Oakland’s City Hall has been built on long-standing principles of horizontality, inclusiveness, and a frank refusal to collaborate with existing politicians, police, or institutions. Even still, they found support among local unions, notably ILWU Local 10, a Teamsters local that sent a semi- over full of supplies, the Oakland Teachers and Librarians, California Nurses, and others. The brutal military operation that dislodged the occupation for 24 hours only strengthened and broadened its support. Having a so-called “progressive” Mayor in Oakland proved the point that so many of us have made for so long: you can’t work within the system and expect to successfully change how it behaves.

Banner on tent in Occupy Oakland camp.

Mellow afternoon at Occupy Oakland, Oct. 15, ten days before military assault.

Much like the camps that popped up when people gathered to oppose the G8 in Germany, or at the Climate conference in Copenhagen, a festive, well-organized camp took shape, seen here Oct. 15, 2011.

Free food 24/7, free information, places to discuss and plan...

... even places for kids to be.

Ye Olde Supply Tent!

But a deeper problem is unmasked in this assault, and the following evening’s confrontation between protesters and police. Local police departments have been fully militarized. The disgustingly named Dept. of Homeland Security has spent the past decade pouring billions into preparing to handle domestic unrest. This is not entirely unprecedented either, since the federalization of local policing goes back to Nixon and his founding of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which gave us such paragons of domestic tranquility as SWAT teams. But the global war unleashed during the Bush years is going strong, with U.S. citizens assassinated in far-off lands without indictment, trial, or conviction, just the OK of the president and the spooks he commands. How long before Ninja Turtle cops start snatching people off the streets and “renditioning” them to some dark secret prison for interrogation? So far, there are no limits in a society dedicated to “fighting terror,” which actually means a society dedicated to “living in terror” by categorizing dissent as “terroristic”.

What did Oakland spend over a million dollars trying to destroy? A camp of 150 or so tents, with a fully functioning public kitchen distributing free, healthy food 24 hours a day, a thriving childcare zone, a free speech “constant caucus” tent, a bulging supply center with stores of basic necessities free to those who needed them, a beautiful amphitheater reinhabited for direct democracy all day every day, a free library and info-zone. Mostly they tried to destroy an autonomous, open community of people determined to reinvent the basics of our shared life. The heavy-handed, pre-dawn military attack, ostensibly to “protect public safety and hygiene,” can’t be understood without understanding how much this genuine form of democracy threatens the status quo. They had to blatantly lie about their motivations to justify it—there were no problems with Emergency Medical people getting in to the camp, and the porta-potties were adequate for the camp’s needs (perhaps they could have been maintained more regularly, but that would be a cheap problem to fix, if that were really the issue). Public safety was well-maintained within the camp by the campers themselves. When police tried to enter the camp they would be surrounded and escorted out as quickly as possible. The riot cops guarding the perimeter of the plaza on Tuesday night were barraged with chants of “Who Are You Defending?” and they responded with tear-gas and stun grenades. One cop called in with his troop from the Hayward police glibly refused to accept responsibility for his participation when queried by a friend of mine. “Hey, I’ve got my pension, and I just don’t think about it!”

Sheriffs defending the plaza they overran in pre-dawn hours, late afternoon, Oct. 25. They would relinquish it the next day.

Far from intimidated, thousands turned out to repudiate the attack that morning. This is on Broadway near 13th.

Over-equipped militarized police defend the Oakland jail, Oct. 25.

Echoes of the Paris Commune?...

So the fear and loathing of local police, well established after BART police murdered Oscar Grant and Charles Hill, finds its further justification in the military attack unleashed on Occupy Oakland. Remarkably, popular outrage has been so strong and so widely shared that Oscar Grant Plaza is already reclaimed for the Occupation, and the police have had to stand down. Mayor Quan is finished, her credibility and authority has been shredded by events. But what is so exciting is that the social movement is intact and stronger than ever.

This is not to say that it’s clear sailing ahead. Far from it. The “oogles” (the anti-social, largely dysfunctional street kids who have been all too present in the OccupySF camp) are an ongoing problem, as are the genuinely psychotic people who live on the streets all over the country, and are understandably attracted to the vibrancy and material support available in the occupations. The influx of liberals underway also represents a huge challenge. To wit, the self-appointed Occupy Wall Street financial committee in New York has already begun to act like bankers, unilaterally withholding the $20,000 pledged to Occupy Oakland by OWS while attaching various conditions to the money.

The urge to fold this movement into the moribund political structures of the U.S. is still there too, with unionists, Democrats, and various leftists all bent on creating an acceptable list of reformist demands, or pushing occupiers into supporting or opposing various politicians on the grounds of “realism.” So far, most local movements have resisted this, and in the General Assemblies and attendant working groups, new ground is being opened on a daily basis.

History is still unfolding, we’re soaking in it every day! Don’t miss this! Occupy Everywhere!

* “Out with All of Them!” the slogan of the Argentineans during their upheaval in 2000-2001 wherein they deposed 4 presidents in a few months…

October 25 marchers in downtown Oakland.

On October 22, Occupy Oakland took to the streets and marched across the city.

Banned books in the lead!

Humorous home-made signs are everywhere these days.

Mainstream support is surprisingly widespread too...

This is a shortened version of an article I wrote in the wake of the 2003 Mayoral campaign in San Francisco, and published in The Political Edge. With all the excitement and promise of the occupation movements around the world, I still find myself balking at the slogans and framing, whether the “corporate greed” idea I critiqued in the previous entry, or the incessant clamor for “jobs”… if you want to pursue a radical reformist strategy in the here and now, i.e. in capitalism, please, AT LEAST demand a basic minimum income for all (say $1,500/mo for all residents of the planet) rather than asking to be put to work on agendas over which we have no control… anyway, here’s the piece, with an old graphic Jim Swanson drew in the early 1990s (can that really be 20 years ago?) when we were blasting demands for “jobs” at Processed World.

“Jobs” Don’t Work!

With mind-numbing regularity, we are expected to trudge to the polls and cast votes for politicians who promise to pursue policies that will “fix the economy” and “create jobs.” Predictably, nothing much changes. Why do we expect politicians and their policies to affect “the Economy,” when the rest of the time we treat it more like the weather, something that gets “better” or “worse” according to events beyond anyone’s control? The label “economy” is used to cloud in abstraction specific choices made by specific people that shape the rest of our lives for better or more usually, for worse. By framing our own daily lives of work within the abstract framework of “the Economy” we disconnect ourselves from a deciding, subjective role in determining our own activity and instead leave ourselves as unaware and relatively helpless pawns of forces beyond our knowledge or control. “The Economy” becomes a mystifying category, full of nonsensical and inexplicable categories that only experts can decipher; it is our era’s religion, an explanatory framework that offers fictional and strangely “natural” explanations for what are simple (albeit confusing), observable relations between human beings. Politicians and economists who claim they will fix “the Economy” are playing the role of contemporary priests in the Church—they and they alone are competent to communicate with the higher power that ultimately controls our lives.

This underlies the emptiness of our democracy. Clearly there is little democracy in our lives when it comes to “the Economy.” Our much-vaunted “freedom of choice” supposedly allows us to “choose” any jobs we want. By this “free choice” we exercise our tiny influence over the giant “invisible hand” of the market. But as we all know, most of us are only “free” to take one shitty job or another (or several!). In taking a job, no one asks for our ideas about what kind of work the enterprise should do, how the company impacts the environment locally and beyond, or what quality standards our work should meet. We have no say over who works there or how hiring is decided. In fact, on the job we lose most of the basic rights we take for granted as citizens in a democracy, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from search and seizure, freedom from random drug testing, right to due process, trial by peers, and so forth. On the job we are wage-slaves—if we depend on our wage, our condition can easily be construed as a version of slavery “with a human face.”

Curious, then, that people across the political spectrum, especially “progressives,” are so ready to demand “jobs” without a murmur of qualification or criticism (at best, the demand is qualified as being for “good jobs”). Most jobs today are a waste of time at best, if they aren’t actually pernicious. As a social mechanism for allocating tasks that keep us all alive, “the Economy” and its foundation on “jobs” could hardly be less efficient, less fair, or a bigger waste of time and resources. One of the most glaring failures of the so-called free market is the well-paid elevation of patently useless and/or dangerous activities and the unpaid denigration of vital human tasks. Juxtapose bankers and weapons designers to child care workers and nursing home employees, for example. Even within ostensibly useful human work, for example, doctors and nurses, at least half of their work time is spent fulfilling the parasitic, useless demands of insurers and the bureaucracies of business, instead of providing the medical care that so many can no longer afford.

Graphic by JR Swanson, c. 1991, for the Committee for Full Enjoyment.

San Francisco’s current economy is awash in the inflated equity of a housing market unmoored from historic values. This has greatly rewarded the lucky fraction that owns at the expense of the majority of renters. Meanwhile people work in offices, restaurants, stores, and hotels where real wages are stagnant or actually falling. In a city with a dozen major hospitals and tens of thousands of medical workers, at least a quarter of the residents are uninsured and prone to destitution through catastrophic illness or injury. A construction boom fueled by the dot.com frenzy, sustained after the frenzy’s collapse by the spiraling inflation in real estate and long-term infrastructure programs of the city (San Francisco airport, BART, and MUNI expansions, Bay Bridge retrofit, Moscone Convention Center expansion, Transbay Terminal) is also helping to keep economic collapse at bay for the moment.

But all the signs for a major reckoning are before us: Unsustainable debts (government, corporate, and individual); absurd investment in useless office towers and unneeded hotels and shopping centers; stagnant or falling incomes and savings; soaring rates of illness and unmeasured workplace injuries; radically increasing homeless population; food programs serving more meals than ever—the list goes on.

Newspapers regularly report “outsourcing,” the increasing transfer of even high-tech and service sector expertise to India, China, and other low-wage, high-skilled areas. These new boom zones have been knit together precisely by the globalization spearheaded by San Francisco–based multinationals (Standard Oil of California, now Chevron-Texaco, Pacific Bell, now AT&T (again), Southern Pacific Railroad, now merged into Union Pacific, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have all fled, though Bechtel, Levi’s, The Gap, and PG&E are still homegrown, world-spanning engines of economic exploitation and environmental devastation). “Competing” in the twenty-first century means lowering wages and giving tax breaks, creating conditions for the maximum profitability of business. If lower costs and bigger tax “incentives” are offered somewhere else, most jobs these days are pretty easily moved.

Primary education in San Francisco, not to mention the rest of the U.S., is abysmal. The destruction of public education corresponds to a destruction of skilled work and a reduced need for intelligence at work. (To say nothing of the problems created by thoughtful, critical citizens!) Beyond some thousands of programmers and the skilled trades, most jobs are easily learned in a day or two, and most workers are easily replaced—skills are much less important these days than attitude. And even if you have great skills and a Mormonesque enthusiasm for your job, chances are the company will move or restructure or change its focus to increase profitability—leaving you out of work and wondering what to do next. In those increasingly rare examples of stable companies that provide decent, steady wages, and benefits, there’s still a total absence of self-management or worker participation in determining what the company does, what its ecological impact is, how it connects to subcontractors and suppliers and their practices, and so on.

In 1991, former police chief Frank Jordan was elected mayor. As soon as he took office, he began trumpeting the northeast Mission district as a new “industrial zone” (Northeast Mission Industrial Zone, or NEMIZ) for the emerging biotech sector. This chimerical planning never really took hold due to neighborhood objections and an indifferent business community. The NEMIZ eventually filled up with the short-lived “Audio Alley” and other dot.com startups, only to empty out again after the dot.com bubble burst. In this new era of “vaporware” the Mission’s warehouses and garages are again brimming with hi-tech peasants. Meanwhile, a mile eastward a whole “new neighborhood” (anchored by a forty-two-acre parcel for the biomedical campus of the University of California) called Mission Bay was started during Willie Brown’s regime. Again, the assumption is that by investing public money in a fancy new campus and giving incentives to the developer (Catellus Corporation, a spinoff of the former Southern Pacific Railroad real estate division—“owners” of a real estate empire spanning the west, gained through corrupt land grants provided by the federal government in the nineteenth century as an “incentive” to build the railroads!), jobs and housing will be created. For over a decade, San Francisco has been waiting for the biotech ship to come in.

But that ship is just another in a long line of Potemkin-village promises of so-called “good jobs”:

On bad days Toby said he worked as a “pipette bitch.” With no interests other than computers, a few select hormones, and science fiction novels, Toby was perfectly poised to work as a low-level researcher in yet another lab where the muckety-mucks studied genetic tagging. And so that’s where he found himself most days, holding his trusty pipette over a box of clear gel attached to some electrodes . . . Usually he thought about nothing at all. He didn’t achieve a Zen-like state of pipette-mediated calm. There was no enlightenment. He simply immersed his entire consciousness in the tiny movements of his body, the precise measurements and procedures . . . After almost a year of unbroken routine . . . Toby realized he could spend an entire 24-hour period without ever having a single, extended thought . . . he didn’t have the kinds of multilayered or complex ideas he used to have back when he was hacking hormone pathways in graduate school.

Here he was, a hypereducated twentysomething, his whole life before him, and his supposedly professional middle-class job had turned his brain into nothing more than basal ganglia . . . according to all the usual news sources, his job was hot. Supposedly Toby was at the center of an economic revolution in biotech. The most-wanted jobs of the new millennium were in genomics; cities like San Francisco were developing vast office parks full of proto-wet lab spaces and special cold rooms for all the code-crunching clusters . . . Toby [felt] like he worked at McDonald’s: The plastic gloves were practically the same. But more important, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between what he actually did for a living and the hype about it. Reading the papers was like looking at one of those glossy ads suggesting that women kicked off welfare would have great futures if they just took jobs at fast-food restaurants. Look at our shiny kitchens! Full of happy people in hair nets and gloves making toasty burgers and crispy fries! Fast food is at the center of the restaurant economy! Just like biotech. (* Annalee Newitz, “Techsploitation: Pipette Bitch Blues,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2004.)

This pattern of exaggerated expectations attached to what are quickly discovered to be boring, routine, mind-numbing jobs is all too common, and yet rarely reported with such clarity and wit. Another place to find compelling accounts is among the “Tales of Toil” featured from 1981–1994 in San Francisco’s Processed World magazine (full disclosure: I was a participating collective member). From word processing to desktop publishing and web design, jobs in new technologies paid relatively well until the field filled with thousands of people following the false promise of “good jobs,” only to find that high pay rates had disappeared. Irrespective of the pay, the crucial issue of content—of what we do, why, for whom or what, and usually how—is never confronted. And with almost no exceptions, the creative component of any job is what disappears soonest, replaced by management-controlled pacing, productivity demands, routinization, and bureaucratization.

This year’s Mayoral candidates are all promising to create “jobs.”  But if public monies are invested in training citizens to become so skilled and desirable as workers, we would still have to question which world economy we are getting prepared for. And just how this training would make San Francisco workers so well-paid (that is, expensive for their employers) that they could afford to live here! Everything going on in economic development—locally, nationally, or internationally—indicates the key trends continue to be lower wages and higher productivity (that is, longer hours, harder work).

A real alternative is called for. Tens of thousands are occupying public plazas across the U.S. and the world.  While participants have reported frustration at the absence of concrete alternatives, many people around the world are confronting the same problems. And clearly the answers require a break with the dynamics of a world economy that pits city against city, country against country, human against human. The role of government, so diminished as the power of corporations has grown unchecked during the past quarter century, requires revision. Limiting local government to public spending on infrastructure and training for the benefit of private business is clearly self-defeating. Limiting local economics to a system in which private capital employs people as wage-laborers is to guarantee that the logic that imprisons us in a suicidal and degrading system will only grow stronger.

With my tongue only partly in cheek, I propose that San Francisco take the lead in visionary urban transformation. “Jobs” as we know them are an obsolete way of organizing life. I propose a complete rethinking of what municipal government does, no longer “governing” so much as facilitating, allowing us to grow together, to begin building a life outside and against the Economy. If we are nearing a collapse in housing and other asset bubbles fueled by the insane expansion of credit, as it seems we are, then visionary citizens need to start redesigning the role of local government now, while we still have time and resources and before the coming depression and collapse begins. Not entirely seriously, but not altogether frivolously either, I propose the following New Department of Public Commons for a New Municipality, all of which can and should be integrated into our public education system for children and the continuing education of adults. A casual examination will reveal that there is a lot of work to do! But not the kind that generates private profits and sales.

Department of Public Commons

Overall, the city must focus its efforts on an economic strategy that grows the commonwealth and steadily shrinks the private sector. This is a program of decommodification, reframing work as a shared adventure in shaping and extending the quality of our lives.

A.    Division of Public Space In charge of plazas, parks, and common lands, and their expansion, maintenance, and programming, this division would administer public libraries, tool and technology libraries, and public workshops, amply stocked with materials recycled from existing stocks. It would also begin the process of converting many streets into gardens and parklands (see “H” below).

B.    Division of Agriculture With the goal of San Francisco feeding itself as much as possible, it will expand community gardens, urban farming, and aquaculture projects, working with the Division of Public Space to reappropriate the vast acreage dedicated to moving and parking cars. Relationships will be cultivated between existing slow-food restaurants, local farmers, and local markets to create an unprecedented abundance of outstanding, healthy, tasty food, eliminating hunger and radically reducing dependence on fast-food outlets.

C.    Division of Aquifer and Liquefaction Management (and Deconstruction) Irresponsible building patterns on historic mudflats and landfill should be removed before the next big quake; plans will be made for how to manage collapsing streets and buildings and how to reuse areas prone to liquefaction. Expanded use of existing aquifer will promote local self-reliance and reduce current dependence on quake-vulnerable aqueducts.

D.    Division of Creeks and Wetlands Working with the three previous divisions to open streets to make creeks visible, restore wetlands, and establish areas for aquaculture, farming, fishing, and recreation.

E.    Division of Highest-Ever Tides and Seawall Construction Preparation is needed for rising sea levels and catastrophic high tides from global warming. Technologies to protect the city from inevitable flooding should be explored now. Also, San Francisco’s strong technology-savvy population can take the lead in developing techniques for adapting existing transportation and structures to widespread flooding.

F.    Division of Work Reduction Most work done in this culture is a waste of time, if it’s not actually dangerous and counterproductive. This division will facilitate the creative reappropriation of our time and talents, redirecting our work (which is inherently social after all) toward socially determined needs and desires (see “I” below).

G.    Division of Co-ops and Collectives Businesses will be encouraged to convert themselves from private ownership to worker-owned and -run co-ops and collectives. As much as possible, such enterprises should be encouraged to contribute to the commonwealth without measurement or pay . . . from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs and desires.

H.    Division of Recycling and Reuse This important division will be responsible for innovation in more than just recycling garbage, but also in spawning whole industries to rehabilitate and reuse the discarded junk of the twentieth century. Long-term goal: Stop importing new junk!

I.    Division of Crackpot Realism Thousands of techies, artists, and tinkerers live in San Francisco. Already this city has served as world HQ for rapacious exploitation of huge swaths of the planet. It’s time to make it up. Technology transfer of global-warming-reducing technologies: energy efficient transit, shelter, appliances, and communications. Reengineering technologies to last at least twenty-five years with minimum maintenance and energy use (see “J” following). (Bechtel engineers, for example, should be encouraged to direct their own time and creativity towards projects of social importance—something useful for a change!)

J.    Division of No Home Is a Castle Housing is one of the most intractable problems facing any social transformation toward equality. A focused effort will be made to raise everyone’s dwellings to a shared standard of space, safety, comfort, and beauty. Land trusts will be established to remove all land from the market, and housing will be owned and controlled by those who live in it. Reengineering every dwelling to be as self-sufficient as possible in water, power, and waste management (fertilizer manufacturing for “B” above).

K.    Division of Free Mobility
•    First on the agenda will be the creation of a Bicycle Library with a fleet of 5,000 yellow bicycles. A municipal contest will be held annually for bike design and local manufacture with local materials.
•    To support the Bike Library—a network of 100 bike huts and repair shacks will maintain the publicly owned fleet of bikes.
•    The Panhandle will be expanded and extended on converted streets in dozens of directions to crisscross the city with greenways. The DFM, with the Division of Creeks and Wetlands and the Division of Public Space, will build green corridors along the natural terrain of creeks and shorelines, with meandering bike and multiuse paths.
•    Public transit will be free, with radical expansion of routes for full city coverage. Rapid development and adoption of new transit technologies based on wind, solar, biofuels, and magnetic, “frictionless” tracks will revolutionize energy use.

L.    Division of Public Memory
•    Publicly owned and produced media will be expanded, and multiple daily newssheets and Web sites advanced, with independent editorial boards elected by districts.
•    There will be oral history collection booths, and the Living Archive of San Francisco history will be available online and at a new city museum. Satellite museums in every neighborhood, where techniques of oral history collection and digitizing of archival materials is shared and learned, will reduce social amnesia.
•    Public history forums will be held regularly throughout the city, debating various points of view on how life has changed over the years in San Francisco.

M.    The James Brown Memorial Division of Feeling (Good)
•    Everyone will have free comprehensive health care—state-of-the-art preventive care covering medical, dental and mental for all. San Francisco is a town overrun with care practitioners of widely differing quality and philosophy. A clearinghouse and licensing system will help residents get what they need.
•    We will encourage the public declaration of desires, whatever they may be.
•    Fear abatement will get top priority with programs to help people overcome fear of others, fear of disapproval, fear of speaking out, fear of not owning enough, fear of losing possessions.
•    There will be a vigorous program of shame and guilt reduction.

N.    Division of Public Art This division will involve itself in all urban projects, ensuring a high level of artistic participation in urban design, food preparation, historical presentation, and transportation design. Sculptures, paintings, multimedia installations, soundscapes, and new art experiments will fill the city, eliminating the visual blight of advertising in favor of art.

Photo taken in New York by Evan O'Brien

Corporations ARE the problem as the common institutional form of late capitalism, the social system that is the real root of poverty and inequality. Corporations are (temporarily) immortal, often unaccountable to national laws, brazenly criminal, murderous, and have only one purpose: to accumulate capital. They are not, and cannot be, moral actors in society. Even if the most pious, ascetic monks were put in charge of large corporations, the fiduciary responsibility of corporate leaders is to ensure the growth of profits and wealth for the stockholders or private owners. Corporations are not formed to do anything useful or beneficial to humans (except as an accidental byproduct), nor other species, nor the planet as a whole, unless (and only if) the activity produces profits. Corporate leaders can be personally very greedy or completely indifferent to personal wealth. It does not matter. If they don’t show steadily increasing “growth” (accumulating capital) they will be replaced by the next interchangeable “captain of industry.”

Occupy Wall Street and related demonstrations around the country are a welcome breath of fresh contestation. The space opened up in the occupations is prefigurative of new ways of doing politics, and has an incalculable value in radically reconfiguring popular imagination. We should all be grateful to the hardy souls who embarked on this quixotic effort, and do what we can to support them.

Demonstrating in downtown San Francisco, September 29, 2011.

Of course there is an gaping ethics deficit in our culture. But this open-ended, exciting political moment will slip away quickly if we frame it in terms of populist moralism. This is not about good and evil. To blame executives or the Frankenstein monster we call corporations for their supposed “greed” is to reduce a systemic critique into easy political demands that confirm the basic rules of the game. Clamoring for corporations to pay a “fair share” concedes far too much from the beginning. Why should corporations and their owners be allowed to control such an overwhelming share of the wealth we’ve all produced together over generations? Their very existence is the problem. And let’s not forget that their power at home and across the planet is enforced at gunpoint whenever “necessary.” Protests focused on banks and bankers overlook the vast wealth spent on the U.S. military empire. Our new movement should keep its sights on ending the wars, withdrawing U.S. troops from the 120-odd countries where they are garrisoned, and dramatically reducing the military and secret police budgets to 10% or less of their current levels, too.

If the Occupy Wall Street movements embody something more than the most tepid liberal demands for mean people to be nice, and untrammeled power to “play fair,” we’ll have to keep our focus on the deeper logic we’re up against. We 99% could get up tomorrow and decide to make a very different daily life than the impoverished mess we’re living now. In fact, OUR cooperation is the key to THEIR power. We work and shop in this society, the basic activities by which we reproduce THIS daily life together. Instead of democratically shaping our shared lives, deciding together how best to produce and make available a good life for EVERYONE, we are like old-fashioned cart-pulling horses, lashed by the 1% to pull who knows what, to who knows where, and who knows why? Clamoring for “jobs” leaves us weakly agreeing in advance to do what the 1% (those with capital) tell us to do.

Make Banks Pay demo, San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2011.

Lots of original art appears in these marches.

Why shouldn’t the 99% democratically decide what work we do and how we do it? Let’s evaluate publicly and transparently how our work affects planetary ecology. And finally, let’s abolish the system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How shall we share the fruits of all our work? The most hopeful outcome of the prefigurative democracy finding its voice in the occupations is a revolutionary transformation of how we make life together everyday. Why accept anything less?

This sign was originally made in the 1980s... still useful after all these years!

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...

Flourishing greens growing at the Alemany Farm in San Francisco.

Food is all the rage these days. Whether it’s an “Underground Market” full of local jams, candies, and homemade sauces, or a new restaurant featuring locally acquired organic food on its menu, a benefit “Feast” featuring a famous vegan chef, or even a political discussion about the food industry, there’s a huge public hunger for it.

…everything old is new again. The resurgent interest in local foods and home-scale preservation—from canning, jamming, freezing, brewing, fermenting, and otherwise experimenting with food—is happening coast to coast. Taking up the pot and the pan, the cheesecloth and strainer, the canning jar and the wine bottle, homesteaders are beginning to reweave the web of culture lost in the toxic downdrift of the industrial food supply. Food preservation is hooked into all the values of homesteading—self-sufficiency, community resilience, DIY for fun and pleasure—a reminder that food is not something that’s done for us, but something that we do with one another. Remaking our relationship to food is one of the central homesteading pleasures and practices, a radical act that can go a long way toward growing into our role as producers rather than consumers. —From “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living” by Rachel Kaplan with K. Ruby Blume, Skyhorse Publishing, New York: 2011

Artichokes soaking up the sun in the Potrero Hill Community Garden, with Mt. Tamalpais and the Golden Gate Bridge visible across San Francisco in the background.

Just yesterday I received by email newsletters from the Slow Food organization (“Slow Food vs. Fast Food” plus news items about this year’s stunted corn crop, the rise of urban farms, food safety in China, and the Farmers’ Market explosion) and Food Democracy Now (soliciting opinions on Obama’s Farm policy, a piece about GMOs and Organics—Coexistence or Contamination?, antitrust and fair market livestock rules, Food Stamp usage increase). On any given day one can find dozens of articles on food politics, agricultural ecology, food and climate change, food and energy, as well as the usual coverage of new restaurants, markets, and products. What seemed fresh and lively a mere five or six years ago is today’s tidal wave, drowning critical engagement in a wide river of noise and marketing. It’s almost as though our obsession with food is marching in lockstep with our expanding waist-lines, as we engorge ourselves with more than we can digest.

The Street Food Festival, August 20, from my window overlooking Folsom Street.

We just had a huge “Street Food Festival” outside the front of our house that filled Folsom from 22^nd to 26^th Street, sponsored by La Cocina, a neighboring nonprofit dedicated to incubating small food entrepreneurs into full-fledged businesses. (One of their better known success stories is Chac Mool, a food truck selling excellent Mayan dishes that has the only permit to park and sell food in Dolores Park.) It seems that all the efforts that have been germinating for the past few years to bring food to the front of our consciousness have been both successful and are at the same time notably failing too.

Street Food Festival, Folsom Street between 24th and 23rd looking north.

That’s because most of the food obsession is entirely compatible with the trendy, fad-driven marketplace, which has latched onto local, organic, heirloom, exotic, hand-made, et al as the most desirable acquisitions at this particular moment. So the Street Food Festival was a big hit, tens of thousands of attendees and all the food vendors doing huge business from morning to night last Saturday, August 20.

That doesn’t make it a bad thing. I like it when thousands of people occupy the streets, even if it is a eating-and-shopping festival. There’s a lot of milling about, hanging with friends talking and tasting, and a wonderful mixing of peoples. Adriana and other neighbors seemed a bit put off by the whole thing in the days leading up to it, but I have to say that it didn’t feel like a “yuppie invasion” to me. Lots of people 35 and under, but far from a super affluent-feeling scene.

Yum! Everyone's eating!

Eaters oblivious to the image of Cesar Chavez on the school's wall behind them... Chavez's United Farmworkers led the fight to ban DDT in the late 1960s, and made it a central issue for their grape boycott. Organizers speaking about it in parking lots of major supermarkets helped sensitize working-class and middle-class Americans to the problems of chemically-soaked food, in some ways setting the stage for the boom in organics that happened in the following years.

The Slow Food movement that started in Rome about twenty years ago as a repudiation of the McDonalds that had opened at the foot of the Spanish Steps has become a global phenomenon too, with a biannual gathering in Italy that draws over 30,000 farmers and artisan producers from around the world. To promote their goals of sustainable, traditional agricultural practices (and saving heirloom species) Slow Food embraced (and helped bring forth) today’s boutique food marketplace, recognizing before a lot of us that if you want farmers to keep various heirloom species and practices going (in this capitalist world), they have to be able to sell the products at a profit. Many people conflate this logic with an older “personal is political” idea that has floated down to us from feminism in the late 1960s-early 1970s, to conclude that by buying fancy, expensive foods we are “voting with our wallets” to help sustainable, local agriculture. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think this is all they need to do to contribute to social change!

In their beautiful new book “Urban Homesteading” my pals Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume address this drama in their chapter “Food is a Verb”:

…[The Slow Food and locavore] movements have been rightly criticized for their class politics, for advancing a laudable goal that is unattainable by many who might choose it if they could, and for consumption excesses that they justify as being local and “slow.” Their essential message, however, that food is an intimate reflection of our lives and culture, is not a class-based assertion but a human one. The appropriate class critique lies in the fact that not everyone can afford a Slow Food meal or the labyrinthine lifestyle of the locavore, but the drive towards localizing our food sources and reimagining our relationship with food can be shared with everyone. Generating local food sources in order to provide food security for everyone is part of the bigger story of the urban food revival currently underway.

Permaculture garden at 18th and Rhode Island on Potrero Hill in San Francisco.

Hayes Valley Farm, established on the old freeway on and off ramps at Hayes, Oak, and Fell Streets.

The Free Farm at Eddy and Gough, City Hall in the distance... the farmers here give all their produce away to locals and at the Free Farm Stand on 23rd an Treat every Sunday.

I’ve been excited about a new food politics for more than a decade, having been turned on to the Slow Food movement first in Switzerland and Italy by Mona Caron, and then uncovering the fascinating history of food politics as part of the ongoing Shaping San Francisco investigations into local history. In our “Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78” we have a great essay by Pam Peirce (author of local gardening bible “Golden Gate Gardening”) called “A Personal History of the People’s Food System.” She describes how hard it was to find an organic vegetable when they started in the early 1970s, and that today’s burgeoning Farmers’ Markets, Whole Foods, and other organic markets all can be traced back to those early efforts 40 years ago.

Vegetables and orchard at Alemany Farm south of Bernal Heights.

I wrote about a lot of that history in Nowtopia, and I’m happy and proud to acknowledge that George McKay, whose excellent DIY Culture I quoted a few times in the book, has given me the honor of quoting Nowtopia in his newest book “Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden” (By George McKay, Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, London: 2011). Radical Gardening is a fantastic, in-depth treatment of urban gardening and farming through time, with a particular focus on the UK where McKay is from. In England community gardens are referred to as allotments, dating back centuries and being a genuine artifact of social demands for land to grow food. George McKay dissects the history and practice of community gardens to show the subversive kernel still buried in the plots.

“Its anti-capitalism is most clear in two fundamental features of the allotment: firstly, the astonishingly low rents charged for plots by local authorities, which is a powerfully consistent rejection of spiraling urban land market values; secondly, the legislative fact that, by and large produce grown by allotmenteers cannot be sold commercially for profit. The standard treatment of a surplus or seasonal glut is to give it away: the allotment is predicated on a social and economic practice defined by, in David Crouch and Colin Ward’s term, ‘the gift relationship.’ In their view, an anarchistic ‘combination of self-help and mutual aid… characterizes the allotment world.’ Furthermore, it is a nationwide public socio-horticultural experiment that has endured and transformed itself for over a century, it is on the allotment, among the bean frames and sheds, the DIY glasshouses and the patchwork of dirty labour, that we should look for a quiet seasonal extremism… As Thomas Jellis puts it, today, for many allotmenteers, their earthy work-leisure

has come to express a tactical, grounded resistance to global capital and its negative environmental impact. Allotments and local foods can be seen as broader movements to re-localise and are often imagined as being in opposition to the conventional food system… Allotments are now also much more open, allowing women to sign-up and accepting people regardless of their nationality or background. This cultural multiplicity grants allotments resilience and durability, allowing them to adapt to change and disturbance.

The community garden phenomenon in the U.S. has also been a site of what I like to see as working-class recomposition in this era of fragmentation and isolation. Immigrants and families from rural backgrounds find common ground to plant food and share skills across cultures and time. Urbanites long cut off from practical agricultural skills get their hands dirty, begin to reconnect to cycles of sun and water and season, and learn over time what grows and what doesn’t in their particular microclimate. For many gardeners, the politics is not front and center, and often barely present at all. Still, McKay aptly underlines the deeper meaning that emerges whether or not one is inclined to pursue it:

The degree of radicalism of guerrilla gardening as practiced in western cities may in the end be questionable, or easily qualifiable—its non-threatening nature going some way to explaining its popularity in our apparently post-ideological world. Yet we should recognize that today’s guerrilla gardening, whether drawing on its mary-meadowing tradition or anti-capitalist rhetoric, is one of those apparently single-issue movements which can actually touch a multitude of contemporary questions: land ownership and access, food production and consumption, biotechnology, the environment, sustainability, slowness and modernity, grassroots politics and empowerment… p. 192

I loved how Radical Gardening, a $20 paperback, takes advantage of new printing technology to include color images throughout the book. It’s a gorgeous, highly readable, and very provocative contribution to the emergent political opposition to 21^st century global capitalism. As he concludes, “This book has aimed to be a small corrective to the parochial or suburban or landed versions of garden understanding, to trace strands of idealism, rebellion, political action and social criticism in the garden historically and presently.”

Much more of a how-to book is Rachel and Ruby’s “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living”. It’s a big trade paperback, nearly a coffee table book in its elegant design and ample color photographs throughout. As Peter Bane writing in the latest issue of Permaculture Activist (“Hidden Connections in the Garden” is the theme of issue 81, their latest, highly recommended) describes it in his review:

“Scattered among the eye candy of seed collections, farmers markets, and romanesco broccoli is a series of Get-Going sidebars, call them to-do lists for a new society: How to Start a Community Garden in 12 easy steps, How to Get to Zero Waste in 60 months… These contain many good ideas, as much advocacy as action… In fact, there are so many side-tracks in this book that it could be argued the main stream has disappeared into an estuary of rich detail.”

Bane also points out usefully that since they have grounded their book in the examples that abound here in the Bay Area, “the world portrayed here knows nothing of winter and little of North American summers. Talk of conserving 90% of electrical energy won’t go far with people living in less privileged regions.” I would prefer he use the term ‘lucky’ rather than ‘privileged’ since the latter implies someone has been given something that they shouldn’t have (or taken it at others’ expense perhaps). But his point is well-taken, that all too much of our experiments and postulations for a post-capitalist and post-fossil fuel life don’t face up to the gnarly industrial problems that complex societies will face. Sustaining anything close to the comfort and convenience of our current world is not going to be possible unless we apply the whole systems, regenerative thinking that is so well applied to urban homesteading in this volume, to larger industrial systems too. Not that Rachel and Ruby are at fault for not doing so, since that is clearly beyond the scope of their excellent book, which already DOES include an incredible range of practical information and intelligent politics.

From the beginning, they embrace the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture that George McKay wrote about in his book about 1990s Britain, and I integrated into all my case studies in Nowtopia too.

DIY is an alternative culture strategy that helps us thrive outside the confines of the capitalist machine. It is an ethic of curiosity, exploration, and empowerment that can be applied to many aspects of our lies—growing food, sewing clothes, creating homegrown entertainment, writing books, fermenting vegetables, educating children. It feels good to do it yourself. This is a sane way to reorient our living toward a more just and equitable distribution of limited natural resources, and it supports the goal of sustainability through a maximum reduction in consumption and an expansion of creativity, and personal and community empowerment. (p. 14-15)

Mainstream culture in the U.S. has recently woken up to the demise of practical skills. The Soul of Shopcraft is a recent bestselling book about a hi-tech professional abandoning his career to rediscover the joys of working slowly and with his hands. Ruby is one of the most practical-skilled people I know, having built the huge puppets that came to decorate so many political demonstrations over the past 20 years, to more recently founding the Institute of Urban Homesteading out of her Oakland home. She renovated the place largely herself, doing everything from carpentry to plumbing. Now she has a thriving kitchen garden, keeps bees, makes cheese, jams, mead, and raises and slaughters rabbits, all while running her institute that provides over 60 classes per season in the same skills. Here she and Rachel make their pitch for the new homesteading:

It is important for each of us to have a physical skill that is satisfying as well as sustaining—knitting, or sewing or blacksmithing or canning or gardening. A “can do” attitude about all the activities people mastered as a matter of course in the past is required… Many of the solutions in this book are simple, affordable, transportable, and good to do with others. Homesteading practices are not about austerity or apocalypse; they’re about living a simpler, more joyful, more effective life. Homesteading is not a replay of a Depression-era mentality. It is a series of skills and practices that lift us out of a culture of inaction and cynicism and into a culture of abundance, care, and possibility.

I don’t have a garden. When I was offered a plot two years ago at a community garden about 12 blocks away, I declined, realizing that I would not be disciplined enough to keep it up. I think I’d like to garden in my backyard, but we don’t have access to it. So for now, I’m a cook, an avid Farmers’ Market shopper, and an enthusiastic proponent of community gardens. I might try canning and pickling soon. It’s always a time issue—do I pass on reading that book or magazine in favor of several hours in the kitchen? Do I forego that walk or bike ride to prepare food? Urban Homesteading and the Permaculture Activist both give me all I need to take the plunge. One of these days I will!…

P.S. Forgot to plug this important article called “Who Will Feed the People?” by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume over at Counterpunch. The author is a farmer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and partners with two others to work seven acres, but used to be a veteran of urban farming in Portland. He raises a number of vitally important issues confronting the positivity that prevails among urban gardeners and new farming advocates, which are fully fleshed out in his piece, but the list is

1. Not enough farmers

2. Lack of equipment for small scale farming

3. Lack of knowledge about small scale farming

4. Lack of financial resources

5. Lack of market

6. The wasteland left behind by conventional farming

7. Extreme weather

8. Social challenges:

“Sometimes when I’m out there in the field doing repetitive and arduous by hand because there’s no other way to do it (sometimes because that’s just how it’s done and always has been done), I find myself wondering, “How do people think we are going to switch from conventional to ‘sustainable’ agriculture?” The on-the-ground facts paint a picture of mind-boggling challenges, tangled (by nature) logistics, steep learning curves, tremendous labor, and radical lifestyle change for which no one seems ready.”

I think the arguments of the permaculturists and urban homesteaders DO answer some of his important criticisms, but we’d all do well to read this and think hard about the huge challenges we face together.