Reclaim the Streets

Abstract

Reclaim the Streets (RTS) enacts the holy grail of anarchism: unity between means and ends. In reclaiming space from an avalanche of capitalist encroachments, it creates a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (TAZ) and a politics of ‘pleasure’ that celebrates identity, creativity and autonomy. Its radical ecology roots influenced its original conception as an anti-roads and anti-car movement, but it was to become much more than this. One of its prime challenges was to the dominance of cars in urban streets. But the car culture it opposed was emblematic of how capitalism colonized public space by corralling its use and curtailing its function. RTS wanted to return the public spaces consumed by the car culture back to the communities it rightly belonged to. Employing Situationist ideas and strategies, it sought to ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ by counterposing starkly oppositional activities — dancing and partying — to those of the sombre car and business culture. In this way it resisted and challenged a globalization that imposed a monocultural blueprint of the ‘good life’. In liberating public space from not only cars but also from the encroachment of a hollow materialism into all reaches of life, RTS represents a modern-day anti-enclosure movement.