Other editorial content: Action Reports, Interviews, Skill Sharing
Last May around 5,000 people on foot, roller blades, skateboards, unicycles and bicycles, streamed past a police roadblock onto the iconic Harbour Bridge in Auckland, New Zealand. They were celebrating the 50th birthday of a structure upon which many people had never before set foot.
The “Bikes not Cars Festival” hit the streets of Amsterdam, The Netherlands this July. With music, tall-bike jousting bike wars, a baksfiets (the typical Dutch cargo-bikes) race and more, the event brought a much needed reality check to a city without a regular Critical Mass, yet with such a large number of bikes.
This year’s Bike to Work Week (BTWW) in Metro Vancouver, Canada, was a huge success with 5,000 cyclists registering and participating during May. Each day of the week, commuter celebration stations were set up along bike routes to offer free food, prizes and mechanical help.
Passeio Livre (Portuguese for Clear Sidewalk) is an organisation that evolved from the growing realisation of how feeble respect towards pedestrian mobility is and from the need to react against the cultural acceptance of abusive car parking, as well as the apathy of policy makers and police authorities to do anything about it. A group of pedestrian advocates based in Lisbon began gathering to organise an adequate response to balance this problem common to all major cities in Portugal.
To celebrate World Environment Day 2009, the Swedish commuter organisation Planka.nu hosted a “Climate Crash” together with Friends of the Earth Sweden and Klimax, a network of groups that uses direct action to raise awareness of the threat that climate change poses. Over 150 people took to the streets of Stockholm on this chilly June evening and closed down Hornsgatan, one of the most polluted roads in Sweden (and in the EU).
Where space is carved up to accommodate for the automobile’s demand for passage, little is left for pedestrians to experience, see, or do. On December 13, a group of M.Sc. students studying sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden sought to tackle this problem by means of direct action – by recreating Prof. Hermann Knoflacher’s [...]
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