Resisting Mad Car Disease In Europe

Bike lanes painted by guerrilla gangs of Warsaw urban environmentalists. Life- sized cardboard cars paraded around and burnt by Dijon eco-anarchists. Eight lanes of Munich traffic crossed diagonally in mid-intersection, by a sole activist defying the car. These are the actions of the European car-free movement.

You've probably heard of Reclaim the Streets in Britain, but maybe not Ecologistas en Accion in Spain. When Madrid's mayor proposed a network of 140 km of underground highways, the Ecologistas presented the city's leaders with a "genetically-modified creature," half-human and half-mole, designed to survive in the new urban habitat. Homo madritensis futuribilis appeared frequently at tunnel inaugurations and peppered the mayor's re-election campaign with shows of "gratitude" for such excavating enthusiasm.

Then there's Maloka in Dijon, not the largest of groups but certainly one of the most creative. They've invented a device that attaches to a bicycle and leaves behind a bike-lane stripe in its wake. They've also driven their cardboard cars Fred Flintstone-like all over town covered with slogans such as, "I pollute, make my driver aggressive, and never will let you live until 2012."

In Russia, members of the group Atshy have been arrested for holding banners in front of the government halls without a permit. Three weeks later, the police were unsure what to charge them with when a legal funeral procession appeared before the same building. The pall bearers of the Caucasian Biosphere Reserve wore names of the authorities responsible for the planned road which would "bury" the reserve. Meanwhile in Eastern Germany, the A17 Action Camp has been blocking work and holding resistance weekends with music, theater, cinema and action. On International Transport Action Day, passersby were confronted by quotes from poet Goëthe scrawled on 15-foot square picture frames, which captured the threatened landscape.

It's clear. A movement has formed to liberate cities across Europe from the car, a growing movement making itself heard louder and louder across national boundaries and language barriers. At a conference called Towards Car-Free Cities in 1997, this international movement came together for a first-time fusion of ideas, experiences and culture-65 activists representing 50 groups from 21 countries. It was there that Car Busters was founded, as a means to maintain the momentum and international exchange that was started there.

Two years later, Car Busters has published five issues of its quarterly magazine and eight issues of its monthly bulletin, set up a clearinghouse of mail-order resources, produced a copyright-free graphics booklet, submitted to peer pressure and set up a web site, established an international staffing program, and raised money for and helped organize the second Towards Car-Free Cities conference, to be held this October in Krakow, Poland to help kick car culture out of the East.

Car Busters attempts to keep the urban environmentalists of Warsaw in touch with the transport campaigners of Budapest, and the eco-anarchists of Dijon in touch with the bike activists and blockaders across the pond. Because there are a lot of inspiring groups and crazy ideas out there which should be contagious.

As someone in the anti-M11 campaign once yelled from the top of a crane: "We are more possible than they can powerfully imagine."

Contributed by CarBusters Magazine
CAR BUSTERS Magazine and Resource Centre,
44 rue Burdeau, 69001 Lyon, France
tel.: +(33) 4 72 00 23 57; fax: +(33) 4 78 28 57 78,
Carbusters France http://www.antenna.nl/eyfa/cb

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