The streets are ours!
Psychogeography, capitalist encroachment, and how to build a city that'll subjugate the commonfolk.
This is part of an ongoing series called “Wondrous Creatures,” exploring the ideas and philosophy of Alan Moore. Read the rest of them here.
Have you ever walked down the middle of city street? Maybe it was late at night and you had a few drinks in you. You saw that the road was empty — nothing moving anywhere — and you got the sudden, irresistible urge to walk right down the center of the road, smoke a cigarette, and mutter rad shit to yourself like, “This city is afraid of me. I’ve seen it’s true face.”
There’s something exhilarating about being in the middle of a city road. It makes the city feel like it’s yours somehow. Like you actually belong here, like the city is for people and not just cars.
There’s a reason you don’t get to do that very often, and the reason, predictably, is capitalism. Before cars, streets were for everyone. Sure, there were horse drawn carriages and streetcars, but those were comparatively slow, and were just a part of the traffic. But then cars showed up, and their owners wanted to really open them up, let them go their full speed. And naturally, this meant that the car owners — who early on, had to be at least somewhat well-off to own a car — killed a lot of carless pedestrians.
The backlash against car-related deaths almost led to bans in some city, but the growing automotive industry, in partnership with local automobile clubs struck back with a propaganda campaign. The problem, they said, was not the rich thrill-seekers mowing down pedestrians, but the pedestrian who got killed by irresponsibly clogging up the road. Only a hick would do that, they said, so that’s what they called them. In Kansas City, the most popular contemporary synonym for “hick” was “jay,” and thus, the pedestrians became “jaywalkers.”
Now, the city is the domain of the car, not the human. A terrible development, thanks, once again, to capitalism.
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