THE STREETS DO NOT HAVE SENSE.
Eduardo Cadaval
Whose street is it? Who makes the street, who uses it, what is it for? Jordi Borja asks himself to answer: «The street only realizes its“ being street ”to the extent that it is used by people. The street is, at the same time, a concrete reality and a metaphor for the city; the city conceived as a public space, a sphere of citizenship, where it expresses itself as a human community. The city is ‘the people in the street’ «.
The streets are the structure of the city, its bone configuration, what weaves and organizes them, but at the same time, its public space par excellence. More than a square or a park, the street is the space that accompanies the daily life of urban life. Its utilitarian condition sometimes makes us forget the importance of its role within the range of coexistence spaces in the city. But just as the square is a destination or a pause on the road, a period or a comma in the urban text, the street is the concatenation of words that gives meaning to the sentences.
It is in the Cardus and the decumanus where the Roman city originates. A corner, the intersection of two axes. It is the origin of the city as we know it today: an accumulation of streets that, when organized in one way or another, generate the patterns that define the identity of entire neighborhoods and sectors, and therefore, the type of life and the activities that can be carried out in them.
What is really incomprehensible is how we got to the current situation. The street, and therefore the city, has been hijacked by the car. The generations that have grown up with the constant presence of the car, we tend to think that it is simply an indispensable part of the urban landscape and it is difficult for us to even imagine a different scenario. The truth is that the disastrous history of the massification of automobile use in the city is brutally recent and represents a small part of the millennial urban history.
What does not seem sustainable under any point of view -social, economic, ecological or quality of life- is to think that the massive use of the car can be a solution for interurban trips in the medium or long term. And therefore, we should begin to assimilate that we will have to rethink how we want to use our streets and what weight we want the car to have on them.
Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city – one of the big car producers, by the way – has announced its intention to ban car use within 20 years. London has been charging a special rate every time a vehicle enters the central part of the city and in Barcelona, as in many other cities, various strategies have been approved to make the use of private cars increasingly restricted.
To think of the streets simply from the perspective of mobility is not only reductionist but also wrong. It is not understanding the structuring role that roads play in the city and underestimating the opportunity to work with them under a more comprehensive lens that assimilates that streets are infrastructure and public space at the same time: codependent systems forced to understand each other and go hand in hand because one and the other are needed. Without mobility there is no life and without life there is no mobility.
Despite what the inertia of custom makes us think, the streets have no sense of movement, it is the cars that do. The impact of the presence of the automobile in the city is such that we are used to thinking that the streets go in one direction or the other, but the streets are actually neutral spaces where we decide what happens. They are scenarios for urban life waiting to be occupied by the different actors of each era.
How to get more livable streets? The medium-term solution is not to completely eliminate the car, but neither to let it roam free. It is a problem of balance, of equalization, and not of making a clean slate, neither in one sense nor in another. During the last 60 years the cities of the world adapted to serve the automobile, now that this has been proven wrong, it is time to make adjustments to face other forms of life in what is called the post-automobile era. Ours.
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