Right to the Road

Cyclists’ demands for a safe place to ride are unambiguously a sub-set of Henri Lefebvre’s call for citizens to have a right to the city. ¹ And Lefebvre in turn is a latter-day advocate for the Enlightenment thinking of Thomas Paine who, as a supporter of both the American and the French Revolutions, endorsed the right of people to engage in acts of civil disobedience when rulers violate citizen’s rights. Lefebvre defended the rights of citizens to be participants in the production of city spaces, to make the city a liveable space as well as an economic entity, and to occupy the city when those rights are denied or trampled upon. Lefebvre was writing in 1968 when the soixante-huitards’ protests brought Paris to a halt as they asserted their collective opposition to several proposed modernist projects that would have fundamentally altered the character of the City of Light. Resistance to the ruthless advance of the modernist project welled up at about the same date in Toronto, as its citizens rose with a surprisingly united voice in opposition to a planned expressway running from the northern suburbs into the very heart of the city, and in challenging a proposal to demolish its much-loved beaux-arts Union Station and replace it with a brutalist modern structure. In Baltimore, in Los Angeles, and in many other western cities urban activists voiced their opposition to similar forms of urban development by asserting their right to a say in how their home town develops, and resisting the uncritical acceptance of modernist ideology. ² These actions, which represented a break from the dominant post-war modernist culture, helped to launch the postmodern era. Henceforth things old and inefficient as well as idiosyncratic vestiges from a past age might be preserved as integral parts of the city, or woven into the new in playful ways, or re-invented with new uses; and environment and nature could trump the plans of developers. For instance, with a serendipitous change in port and shipping technologies in the late 1960s that led most port activities to decentralize to new deep-water sites, old ports and waterfronts were reclaimed by citizens as recreational spaces with cycle trails, and by developers as a place for lofting and other waterfront developments. ³ Meanwhile cyclists in many countries began, at first in a muted way, to claim safe access to city streets as an alternative to automobility and dysfunctional urban transit systems. They began a lengthy process of reversing their exclusion from urban transportation planning which had been on-going for much of the twentieth century.