Reclaim the streets
Carnivals of protest
Car free streets
London streets
London streets
Parliament protest
Berlin
How to sort a street party: 1 Get together with some like-minded people and work on a plan of action.
Get together with some like-minded people. Possibly your friends. Work on a plan of action. Sort out different roles, jobs and timescales. Imagine. What is possible?
Carnivals of protest
2 Decide on a date. You may need money.
Decide on a date. Give yourselves enough time. Not too much - a deadline is a great motivator - but enough to sort the practicals: materials, construction etc. You may need money.
3 Choose the location. A separate meeting place is good: people like mystery, bureaucrats don’t. Choose the location. Your street, the town centre, a busy road or roundabout, a motorway! A separate meeting place is good: people like a mystery, bureaucrats don't.
4 Publicise! Make sure everyone knows where and when to meet.
Street closure
Word of mouth, leaflets, posters, e-mail, carrier pigeon. Make sure everyone knows where and when to meet. Posters and paste go well on walls, billboards and phone boxes. Leaflet shops, clubs, pubs - everyone, and your mum.
5 Sort out your sound system. A party needs music.
Sort out your sound system. A party needs music - rave, plugged-in, acoustic, yodelling - go for diversity. Invite jugglers and clowns, poets, prophets and performers of all kinds. Ask campaign groups to come along and set up a stall in the middle of the road.
6 Transform the space.
Festival protest
How will you transform the space? Huge banners with a message of your choice, colourful murals, bouncy castle, a ton of sand and a paddling pool for the kids, carpets, armchairs. The materials and money from earlier may come in useful here. Print up an explanation for this "collective daydream" to give to participants and passersby on the day.
7 Open the street.
For opening the street - or rather stopping it being re-closed by the traffic - ribbons and scissors are not enough. A large scaffold tripod structure with a person suspended from the top has been found useful. Practice in your local park. Blocking the road with a car that can then be dismantled is nice. Even the traditional barricade will do.
8 Rescue some young trees from the road.
Rescue some young trees from the road of your local development and have them ready for planting. You may need a pneumatic drill and safety goggles for the last bit.
Festival protest
9 Have a street party!
Have a street party! Enjoy the clean air and colour full surroundings, the conversation and the community Bring out the free food, dance, laugh and set off the fire hydrants. Some boys in blue may get irate. Calm them down with clear instructions.
10 Find a solicitor.
At least a couple of the boys in blue will fail to get the point and nick people - six is generally the minimum to convince their paymasters it was worth all that overtime. Of course you found a solicitor who understands about street protests and distributed a bust card with their number, a phone number to collect details of arrestees, and basic advice - the Release bust card is a good basis in the UK. Make sure someone stays awake, alert and near that phone to take messages, gather names, and organise a defendants’ meeting a week or two later.
Festival protest
Massive meal protest
Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalization, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport. Reclaim the Streets often stage non-violent direct action street reclaiming events such as the invasion of a major road, highway or freeway to stage a party. While this may obstruct the regular users of these spaces such as car drivers and public bus riders, the philosophy of RTS is that it is vehicle traffic, not pedestrians, who are causing the obstruction, and that by occupying the road they are in fact opening up public space. The events are usually spectacular and colourful, with sand pits for children to play in, free food and music.[1] A Temporary Autonomous Zone sometimes results. The style of the parties in many places has been influenced by the rave scene in the UK, with sound systems playing dance music. Reclaim the Streets is also as a term used to denote this type of political action, regardless of its actual relation to the RTS movement. Reclaim the Streets was originally formed by Earth First! in Brixton, London, in Autumn 1991 and was born out of anti-road protest camps at places such as Claremont Road and Twyford Down. The idea of street reclaiming soon spread throughout the United Kingdom. The first actions can be seen as specifically anti-car and proalternative transport, but over the years the members of the core group changed its focus, realising that it was better to go to the root of the problem as they saw it, namely the capitalist system. "Our streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious."Never theless, the actions always followed the principle of non-violent direct action. The earliest written source for the phenomenon "reclaim the streets" can be found in Marshall Berman's. All That is Solid Melts Into Air. In a chapter entitled "Modernity in the Streets" Berman writes: "At the ragged edge of Baudelaire's imagination we glimpsed another potential modernism: revolutionary protest that transforms a multitude of urban solitudes into a people, and reclaims the city streets for human life.. Thesis, a thesis asserted by urban people starting in 1789, all through the nineteenth century, and in the great revolutionary uprisings at the end of World War One: the streets belong to the people.
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