Found this article on a German town that’s radically improved it’s flow of traffic and it’s safety by eliminating all it’s street signs and radically simplifying the rules of the road.  Check it out:

Because Bohmte’s main street is a state highway, the town cannot forbid truck traffic. Mayor Klaus Goedejohann knew that the heavy traffic spoilt the town’s atmosphere, but that it also provided the town’s livelihood. “How do we manage to meet the interest of all the traffic participants without excluding anybody?” he recalls thinking.

Then Mr. Goedejohann heard of a radical traffic-management philosophy called “shared space.” Pioneered by a Dutch engineer who thought towns were safer with fewer rules, it envisioned open surfaces on which motorists and pedestrians could “negotiate” with one another by eye contact, other signals, and a greater consideration for one another.

Segregating cars and pedestrians was wrong, argued Hans Monderman, whose death this winter rekindled people’s interest in his ideas. Portrayed as a dangerous maverick decades ago, Mr. Monderman put in place more than 100 shared-space schemes in the Netherlands. When the European Union launched a research project on shared space, Bohmte decided to try it, along with six other towns, including Ostend in Belgium and Ipswich in England.

…

Goedejohann, Bohmte’s mayor, is confident. His town averaged 50 accidents last year. Since the shared space concept was enacted, there haven’t been any, he says.

And other city governments are reacting. In Hamburg a new coalition of green and conservative politicians have pledged to design shared space streets in every neighborhood.

“My theory,” Monderman said last fall at a new urbanism summit in London, “was if you want to make people behave in a village, maybe you have to make it feel like a village.”

from “Are towns really safer without traffic lights?”

Pretty cool.

Posted: September 14th, 2008 under community.
Comments: none

I just found this great article on mutual aid, new orleans, hurrican katrina, and random other related topics that I wanted to post up and share with ya’ll. it’s by Anya Kamenetz and you can find it on Reality sandwich. enjoy!

http://realitysandwich.com/node/482 

Posted: November 26th, 2007 under community, culture war.
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here’s something scary, a new study from Harvard’s poli sci department shows a direct linkage between ethnic diversity and lack of engagement in the community. The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted and - if we accept it at face value - would seem to show that

Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

the findings are definitely not politically correct and seem to have upset the people behind the study as much as anyone else. The authors of the study spent a lot of time trying to explain their findings away.

the most important question (to me at least) is are these findings true? and if they are true, what does this mean for anarchists and others who are trying to build up the strength of community-based organizations and use them to supplant and replace the State. After all, it’s hard to have a society based on mutual aid and free association when the very ethnic makeup of that society undermines people’s natural inclination to help each other and makes them reluctant to associate with one another. And yet, we can’t possibly advocate against diversity, can we? to tell people that they should all either assimilate into a monoculture or segregate themselves along ethnic lines would be to betray our commitment to individual liberty and opposition to national and State borders that artificially seperate people. This is a problem.

On one level it just seems like common sense, of course people are going to trust members of their own tribes more then members of other, potentially rival, tribes. At the same time, however, how much of that is chicken and how much egg? how much of the way we divide ourselves along ethnic and racial lines is the cause of lack of engagement in a common community and how much is the result of the lack of a common community? Anyone who knows american histoy knows that capitalists have worked very hard to encourage and inflame divisions between working class people along ethnic and racial lines, is this survey merely showing the results of those efforts or is it helping to explain why ruling elites have found it so easy to do so?

more questions I don’t have the answers for. what do ya’ll think?

Posted: August 7th, 2007 under community, race & racism, science and history.
Comments: none

I was thinking tonight about white privilege, more specifically, I was thinking about events that transpired some years back at an Art In Action camp I attended. It was intended as sort of a summer camp for radicals and the attendees were pretty diverse in age, class, ethnicity, and race; and for the most part people were getting along and bridging gaps until towards the end of the week when the facilitators pulled out their “anti-racist” trainings and suddenly things got very, very polarized. It bothered me then and it still bothers me because I see the same thing happening all the time in radical circles - discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and privilege seem to consistently have the effect of balkanizing the movement and emphasizing divisions between people, not helping them bridge those gaps and work together. To me, that points towards a major weakness in the way we approach these things - the goal of exploring these issues in a diverse setting should be to help us understand them and find was to extend meaningful solidarity to each other to support each others struggles - not to make people feel unwelcome. Read more »

Posted: July 23rd, 2007 under community, gender & feminism, politrix, race & racism.
Comments: none

for everyone who is nder the delusion that race simply ceased to be an issue in america with the civil rights movement, here’s a little wake-up call: Read more »

Posted: July 17th, 2007 under community, politrix, race & racism.
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