[Community_garden] Grace Lee Boggs Links Transportation w. Community Building/Edible Cities

[James Godsil]

 "A quality city is not one that has great roads but one where a child can
safely go anywhere on a bicycle. If we can build a successful city for
children, we will have a successful city for all people."

LIVING FOR CHANGE
A (NEARLY)  CARFREE SOCIETY IS POSSIBLE
By  Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, June 22-28, 2008

A lot of people are angry these days about the high price of gas.  But one
hundred years from now our posterity may bless  this period when  soaring
gas prices finally forced Americans to bike or take public transportation to
work and to start dreaming of neighborhood stores within walking distance.

An interview with Enrique Penalosa by Deborah Solomon in the June 6 New York
Times
Magazine inspired this thought.   My eye  was caught by his statement
that  "The
20th century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat.
 We were building much more for cars' mobility than for children's
happiness."

Never having heard of Penalosa, I  googled him and discovered that he was a
journalist  born and educated in the United States.   Elected  Mayor of
Bogota,  Colombia,  on his third try in 1998, he  served until  2001 when he
was forced out by term limits.  Since then he has become a senior fellow at
the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and is advising
other world cities on transportation.

Penalosa  believes that "We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need
to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And
most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of
equality."

To  make Bogota a city that could be enjoyed by the carless majority, he
 closed 120 kilometers of roads to motor vehicles for seven hours  every
Sunday.  This enabled  a  million and a half people of all ages and incomes
to come out and ride bicycles, jog, and simply gather with others in the
 community.

Penalosa views  children as  a kind of "indicator species."  "A quality city
is not one that has great roads but one where a child can safely go anywhere
on a bicycle. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a
successful city for all people."

"When we tell a three-year-old child anywhere in the world, 'Watch out -- a
car'  the child will jump in fright -- and with good reason because more
than 200,000 children are killed by cars every year….In any month today
there are more children killed by cars than were eaten by wolves all through
the Middle Ages. But we have come to think that that's totally normal. As
soon as our children come out of their houses, we are afraid they might get
killed. After 5,000 years of cities, is that where we are?"

Penalosa learned from Jaime Lerner, who was the maverick mayor of  Curitiba,
 Brazil, for 3 four year terms  between 1971 and 1992.

The three keys to a livable city, according to Lerner, are Mobility,
Sustainability and  Diversity.

Believing  that a livable city begins with children respecting the city,
Lerner
gave   Curitiba  children the responsibility for separating and rccycling
 garbage. He gave the Curitiba homeless a stake in a clean city by offering
them a bag of food in exchange for a bag of litter. He speeded up the buses
by building stations where riders could pay fares before boarding.

You don't need a lot of money to come up with measures like these  What you
need is the courage to think outside the box of "economic development"  or
trying to catch up with the cities of the Global North which are in deep
trouble.

After the splitting of the atom, Einstein warned that we were drifting
towards catastrophe because we had changed everything but the way we
think. Imagination,
he said, is more important than knowledge.

Penalosa quotes a Danish urbanist, Jan Gehl, who says that a good city is
like a good party – people don't want to leave. It is a city where people
want to be out of their houses. The good city is the one where people want
any pretext to be in the parks, on the sidewalks, in the cafes.

We have a choice:  between a city that is friendlier to cars or a city that
is friendlier to people, especially children.

More Grace Lee Boggs essays at...

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/GraceLeeBoggs/HomePage
 <http://conversationsthatyouwillneverfinish.wordpress.com/>
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