Solarpunk Urbanism

(5) To deviate from our defined spaces on the street is to become a “jaywalker.” “Jaywalking” was an invention by automobile capitalists to shift blame on accidents from cars and drivers to pedestrians. After all, the jaywalker shouldn’t have been on the road if they didn’t want to be run over!

(6) The creation of “jaywalking” then becomes part-and-parcel of the enclosure of the street reserved for automobile use.

(7) That is to say: to create a jaywalker, one must create jaywalking. Ursula Le Guin says it best: “‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’”—from The Dispossessed. (Le Guin, 1974).

(8) Thus, the enclosure of the streets needs no physical barriers (though these may still be used). The enclosure is ideological—its manifestation is the invention of jaywalking. This criminalization of jaywalkers is in turn enshrined through ordinances and enforced by the police.

(9) Yet the police are not actually necessary to enforce this enclosure. Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon reminds us that we do not have to be watched at all times to ensure that we police our own behavior. The very regime of enclosure, its ordinances, and its police has accustomed us to obey its delimitations, even if we are not actively policed. That, and of course, the very threat of death by automobile.

(10) Yet the invention of jaywalking itself is part of a larger logic of organizing our cities according to the logic of automobiles—an automobile urbanism (if it may be called that).

I believe our cities should belong to us. They should be cooperative, co-creative, ecological, and egalitarian spaces, by and for the people. We have so much untapped urban potential just waiting to be explored. Join me as we determine how to build a solarpunk city.

The ‘right to the city’, as a slogan, a demand, and a body of intellectual work, calls for a radically democratic city. It comes from the work of Henri Lefebvre – French philosopher, Marxist, sociologist, flamboyant revolutionary – from a short piece that came out in 1968, that canonical year in left wing mythology. The right to the city is an appealing idea, because it promises to unite disparate urban struggles on a whole range of issues – from anti-gentrification activism to reclaim the streets marches, community gardens to housing co-ops, anti-police violence campaigns to the fight for better public transport, and so on – into some kind of radical whole; a vision that coalesces around the demand for a city that is more substantially controlled by those who live in it.

Well, mods have enabled walkable cities for some years, but it didn't work well. Recently, the modders of SimCity 4 invented a new way of building walkable cities. And I have to say, it's pretty fun.

SimCity 4 is a game that has well-internalized the automobile-centered urbanism of the United States. But despite these faults, community interventions through game modification can allow players to design entirely new urbanisms in the game that breaks with car-centrism.

In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.

This book is about that.