Reclaim the Roads
“This place is finished, as it was. What matters from now on is not the fields, not the mountains, but the road. There’ll be no village, as a place on its own. There’ll just be a name you pass through, houses along the road. And that’s where you’ll be living, mind. On a roadside”
‘Border Country’: 242, cited in David Harvey 1996: 30-31
“The dictatorship of the car –model product of the early period of consumption affluence- is being written on the landscape with the dominance of the national roads, which mangle the old centres and call for a larger dispersion.’
Guy Debord, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’: thesis 174.
Road is a beautiful thing and controversial, brings you people and things and at the same time takes them away. Roads Connect and disconnect; they determine the landscapes. You never know where a road starts and where it finishes and although there is always a mania from diverse authorities to produce them and to control them; uncontrolled situations on the roads are de facto. How many times someone crossed the road when there was no zebra crossing? How many times a driver or pedestrian ignored the orange or red light? A cyclist delays an entire bus? Or a car crash occurs? How many times you met accidentally a friend on a road?
The processes of urbanization and industrialization theorize roads as the absolutely necessary element; and states, or other authoritative entities, seem to like both of them as indicators of their ‘progress’ and ‘civilization level’, hence they take the responsibility to build the roads.
There are two main reasons for the road construction, a practical one and a theoretic one. The practical reason is that the authorities want to ensure the easiest possible movement of capital, commodities, and of labour power (the latter called ‘human beings’ according to other perspectives). The theoretical or ideological reason for the production of the roads is that roads are a very effective way for the state to establish its control into the everyday life of the society. Without state we cannot have road projects; and what will happen to us without roads now that we bought a new car?
If people follow these two legacies of the roads, they embed a blurred idea of their right to freedom of movement through roads; their freedom of movement is taking place within a controlled network, an over mediated space. Actually roads are so much under control that although they were built for movement they cancel the freedom of movement through strict canalization. The roads ensure that people are moving only in ‘appropriate’ ways, determined from above.
You cannot move in the city from roof to roof, or from backyard to backyard, or on a horse, neither to walk in the middle of the London Ring road, if you walk you do it on the pavement, if you drive you do it on the presupposed lane, you stop here and there and you have to obey to traffic police…and if you cycle you probably die…
…Because cycling is for the time-wasters. If you cycle means that probably you do not work -hence you do not produce- and you do not have strict timetables or a lot of deadlines, you do not need to be fast and effective. Secondly: it is almost for free you pay no petrol or oils, no ticket, no tolls, no congestion fees, no engineering service and vehicle property taxes, no insurance. Thirdly and most significantly, you do not register and you have no number plate in order to be written on the records you are moving uncontrolled. In other words the entity -state- which dictates the roads does not like you if you are a deviate, if you do not think in terms of engines.
For some funny reason some intellectuals adopted the perspective of the states regarding roads. For example if one will try to find out what road is goes to dictionaries. Road is ‘a long hard surface built for vehicles to travel along’ (Cambridge Dictionary) hmm… and what is ‘vehicle’ Mr. Dictionary? Vehicle is a ‘machine usually with wheels and an engine, which is used for transporting people or goods on land, particularly on roads’ (ibid). Is this a dictatorship of modernity and utilitarianism or what? Roads are an old thing as old as cities and even older, the very first hunters-gatherers were nomads, namely had ‘roads’ routes that they followed, without cars. Roads exist much before engines and even before the wheel; why you must define the road in reference to wheels and engines? Some people define roads as the thing that they protest on, or as the thing they paint on, as the thing that they walk on in the late night when no car is around, the place where they cycle -provoking a queue of cars behind etc. At the end of the day the etymology of the road is from the Old English ‘rad’ which is associated with riding and you can ride things without engines and even without wheels!
Dominance is being afraid of the roads, that is why is trying to control them as much as possible. Roads are public space; everyone who uses them in any way can identify herself or himself with roads. Hence, consciously or subconsciously to define and determine them in different ways than the presupposed by the road constructor, road is good for semi-radical activity of thinking on space freely…scary for the authorities.
The rules intent to alienate us from our roads, we may not produce them, but we use them, they are a part of us. In addition roads are threatening for authorities because they need them for their functions, and at the same time traffic infrastructure is very vulnerable in political sabotage. If e.g. a protest blocks a road it can seriously stop up a great part of the dominant system. The body metaphor for roads as ‘arteries’ is not accidental; blocking a road is like stopping the way of the blood in an artery.
Hence authoritative mechanisms on the one hand need the roads for establishing control and for their practical utilities, and on the other hand they are scared in the responsibility and the trouble that their dependency on the roads may provoke. They are threatened due to the chaotic ontology of the road and from the fact that they cannot really limit the road in these two above-mentioned functions.
