Nowtopian

“¿Calles de quién?” (Whose Streets? en Español)

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.

Continue reading “¿Calles de quién?” (Whose Streets? en Español)

Thinking About (Growing) Food

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. Continue reading Thinking About (Growing) Food

Fraud and Corruption: The DNA of Business

Many of us watched the financial meltdown that happened in 2008 and continues its repercussions to the present idiotic debate on deficits and debt (as though it were all the public workers and poor people of the country who had massively looted the public treasury, rather than Halliburton and Goldman Sachs!) with various reactions from amusement, horror, schadenfreude, to excited anticipation. The future stretching ahead of us bodes ill, though, and while we should work towards a revolt that challenges/rejects the austerity agenda, until such a rebellion starts, life is going to keep getting harder for more and more people. Unemployment is soaring (which would be fine if it didn’t mean an abject lack of resources as a result) and the frontal assault by the ultra-rich on the social safety net is going strong. Tepid Democratic defenses that involve pre-emptively agreeing to entirely wrong-headed frames of reference only accelerate social disintegration.

I have been reading a lot lately, finally finding time to finish a few books that have been beckoning me. I read David McNally’s brilliant “Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance”, a book that I can’t recommend highly enough. I also managed to plow through all 517 pages of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” by Richard White, also a fantastic history that I highly recommend. Taken together they reinforce each other across time and space. Both look at periods of about a quarter century in which capitalism radically reorganized economies and enclosed vast geographies and human cultures into new market relations simultaneously—one in the latter part of the 19th century, the other about a century later.

Railroaded covers the rise of the railroads from what I’d like to say is a “Processed World” perspective. That is to say, rather than the triumphalist, Darwinist narrative of the rise of the corporation as a victory of efficiency and intelligence, and the railroads as the most compelling example of the corporate form in the 19th century, Richard White looks at the venality, stupidity, and corruption that were the deep foundation of the expansion of railroads across North America (including Mexico and Canada, which as he shows, was driven by the same logic and even many of the same men and investment syndicates). Rather than presenting the Union Pacific or Southern Pacific as these all-powerful organizations that earned the nickname “Octopus” (in SP’s case) these were inefficient, badly built, poorly maintained, largely unnecessary, and extremely destructive industrial companies. White unmasks the internal workings of these railroad corporations in all their glorious ineptitude, showing how the owners were back-biting, small-minded men (including especially Leland Stanford, the namesake of White’s university employer!) who knew nothing about railroads, and probably even less about managing businesses, but in many cases (Collis Huntington, Jay Gould, William Villard) were extremely good at buying and bullying the politicians they needed to get the public monies their grand schemes required.

The railroads were laughably unprofitable for the thousands of British and German and New England investors who were fleeced again and again by the slick salesmen of western railroads, who pointed to the federal guarantees and long-term bonds they issued as proof of their solvency. But the owners of railroads made their fortunes by building elaborate interlocking corporate structures, full of holding companies, junk bonds, insecure securities, and the whole panoply of chimerical financial instruments we’ve come to know so well in the last decade of derivatives, collateralized debt swaps, etc. When their business empires began to totter, they’d run to their bought-and-paid-for senators and congressman in Washington D.C. to get new appropriations, rollovers of old debts, new authorizations for long-term bonds guaranteed by the U.S. government, and for a time, they’d continue the shell game that made them personally rich while bankrupting dozens of railroads by the early 1890s. As White puts it, “Railroads caromed across the continent, creating systems that in toto made no rational sense but that could yield vast personal fortunes through construction, speculation, and financial manipulation.”

Continue reading Fraud and Corruption: The DNA of Business