Sorkin evoked the fundamental idea in urban planning that there must be a balance achieved in between “consensus and accident” [1]. He emphasizes that “public spaces are preeminently places of circulation and exchange…the idea of which is under siege due to economic and social privatization, identity politics and communitarianism” [1]. There is one detail he mentions in “Traffic in Democracy” which seems to delineate a path that modern society is taking that I do not think many people actively take notice of: that “public space has become abstract due to decorporealization” [1]. Somehow, the presence of pedestrians and free wills exerted over New York City crosswalks characterizes the city as a place of normalized chaos. To give the hierarchy over to cars by eliminating the crosswalks on 50th Street, however, is to yield to those who embody the modern transportation mentality: that cars are a symbol, vessel and incubator for self-empowered spatial and temporal “liberation”. It seems that motion sickness has developed into an anxiety due to lack of motion, and that there is a generation of restless urban nomads being created. Their sense of place, stability and home is changing as more of their experiences are dissociated from the reality on the sidewalk. For this reason, pedestrians deserve to maintain their rights of way, and the drivers should have infrastructural renovations conducive to flow.
Pathway infrastructure must be planned to enhance the flow of movement and decongest the city’s traffic, but at the same time express the fact that the “potential for conflict is vital” [1] to urban democracy. I see the city as a great big experimental work in progress, exciting because it is where cultural evolution is so accelerated, where all individuals are the actors. The enabling of flow must be intersected with choice, because exciting paths are never straight. Flow is not just movement but also direction and change, and that requires us to occasionally pause. Streets require nodes to intercept the flow, to guide those who need to get somewhere and to create spaces for wanderers in search of new paths. Abdul Maliq Simone said that “intersections defer calcification” [2], more so referring to the sort of thriving chaos in the city than vehicular traffic. Because with traffic, the drivers have choice in their paths. He also implies that there is an exchange people should be willing to make: Endure traffic and preserve the dynamism of the city, or let the busy roads rise to the top of the movement hierarchy and carve the streets into deep canyons.
[1] Michael Sorkin, “Traffic in Democracy,” in The People and Space Reader, ed. Jen Jack Gieseking, et al (New York: Routledge), 2014, 411-415.
[2] Abdul Maliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” in People and Space Reader, ed. Jen Jack Gieseking, et al (New York: Routledge), 2014 (2004), 241-246.