From car-free to care-free (via flanerie)

Picking up mas's most recent comment on the Connected Communities blog, there are some positive signs that attitudes towards car-free developments are changing at the present time.  In the last few weeks, in fact, the London Car-free Association held its inaugral meeting after two successful launch events in Brixton and Islington.

Picking up mas's most recent comment on the Connected Communities blog, there are some positive signs that attitudes towards car-free developments are changing at the present time.  In the last few weeks, in fact, the London Car-free Association held its inaugral meeting after two successful launch events in Brixton and Islington.

The aim of this Association is to lobby local and regional authorities, as well as developers, to allocate pieces of land in the capital to car-free development.  While such ends may seem utopian, it is worth pointing out that, as is seemingly often the case, cities in continental Europe (e.g. Vauban in Germany and Groningen in The Netherlands) already have urban  quarters designed in this way.

While the environmental sustainability implications of such an approach to urban development are well-researched (e.g. see Steve Melia's work on the Vauban example), from a Connected Communities perspective I am more interested in the more nebulous socio-psychological effects of eliminating motor vehicles from these residential areas.

In particular, since drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin in my previous studies I have been interested in the relationship between traffic-dominated streets in the contemporary city and our capacity to engage in 'flanerie.'  Specifically, in his edited volume on 'the flaneur' (read: urban stroller, loiterer and pseudo-detective), Keith Tester recounts how the rise of the speeding motor car in cities led to a diminishment of the qualities conducive to flanerie.  Specifically, because of the danger that they posed these vehicles meant that people on foot could be less care-free about their approach to wandering the city.  Vehicles engendered a background awareness in urban denizens that, arguably, acted as a distraction to their 'idle' musings on the city and urban life.

In my view, flanerie, most notably in the parallels between it and detective work, is about identifying and tracing the connections between people and things.  In this reading, it has both methodological implications for the analysis of social network analysis and also substantive ones - namely that in more resilient and connected communities our capacity to disengage from previously pressing needs should increase.  The question is, how do we incubate the spatio-temporal conditions for this more critically engaged practice of being in the city to flourish?