The Street Is Ours

There were streets long before cars. Shawn William Miller's The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro explores how the invasion of cars changed the street's meaning. Streets once were the manifestation of culture, a three-dimensional space to do, be, exist, work, play, and more. They were a public good for all (p. 8). Through an examination of the evolution of popular streets in twentieth-century Rio's downtown center, Miller argues that the automobile reduced the multifunctional street to a two-dimensional, segregated, modern space simply dedicated to transporting bodies and goods via cars (p. 15).One has to first understand what the street was to understand what it has become. Chapters 1 and 2 use one of Rio's most popular common streets in the nineteenth century, Rua do Ouvidor, and Rio's first avenue, Avenida Central, to illustrate the complexity of the street before the car arrived. The street was a “natural resource, not unlike forests or fisheries,” of the urban environment separate from the civilized house that simultaneously allowed the movement of people and social, economic, cultural, and religious activities (p. 30). By 1906, the arrival of modern avenues, with their wider, open designs, created more public space for all the street's various uses (pp. 64–69).Cars finally make their disruptive, violent arrival in Rio between the 1910s and 1940s. Chapter 3 shows how as car consumption slowly increased, these loud, bulky machines allowed the rich to dominate public space and segregate themselves from the masses (p. 109). As chapter 4 illustrates, auto-pedestrian accidents then transformed Rio streets into deadly spaces that killed more people than any medical disease (p. 153). Using political cartoons and newspaper reports, Miller shows how public outrage deferred to general acceptance of the car and of its victims as “a heavy tribute” of modernity (p. 154). By 1973, “Brazil's death rate per car was higher than in any other country that reported statistics” (p. 189).Responses to the cars' onslaught on public space were reactionary. Chapter 5 examines how insufficient driving regulation perpetuated this violence. By the early 1920s, the authorities mostly accepted traffic deaths as “acts of God” (p. 206). When officials finally introduced federal automotive legislation in 1941, the penalties on drivers for violent, negligent accidents were minimal. Reforms in 1966 actually removed speed limits (pp. 209, 223). Traffic deaths mounted as cars consumed the street. No public space was sacred. In chapter 6, Miller uses popular songs and poetry about cultural spaces lost to the new 16-lane avenue, Avenida Vargas, to illustrate the reactions to these changes (pp. 235, 239–42).Rio also had to physically transform to accommodate growing numbers of cars. Chapter 7 examines how cars remade the public street into a place for free private parking. Drivers initially stored automobiles in garages like carriages before them, but by the 1930s the majority parked on the street for free (p. 284). Rio's traffic became a nightmare. More cars needed more streets to move and park (p. 278). Government officials cut down hills and tore through mountains to build parking lots, tunnels, and highways for car-owning residents in the beachfront suburbs from Copacabana to Gávea during the 1960s (pp. 269–70, 275). Drivers parked everywhere, from the street to city squares and the sidewalk, with little retribution (pp. 286–87). Cars mostly won the fight for space, but Miller highlights some of the ways that the public resisted. One cheers for the Rio transit directors who fought to regulate parking and reclaim sidewalks for pedestrians (pp. 293–304).As a scholar of Brazilian fuels and automobiles, I sometimes questioned Miller's predominant comparisons to the United States. Undoubtedly, the leading car country influenced Brazil policy (pp. 295–96). However, unlike residents of Rio, Americans moved out of cities to accommodate the car's necessary spatial expansion. Further comparison to countries whose populations remained densely concentrated in urban cities even as car consumption grew, like Britain and France, might better serve Miller's point. Similarly, discussion of other Latin American nations with persistently dangerous driving cultures might bolster Miller's truly innovative introspection on the nature of cars and space in the twentieth century.The Street Is Ours is a unique urban environmental history that makes one see that cities, not just the countryside, were once more than they are today. Community requires space; modernity, via the car, stripped that away. The book helps explain parts of Rio culture today, like the closure of certain highways on weekends in an effort to recapture the street's multidimensionality (p. 323). Miller successfully creates a tangible history of something that one might otherwise only feel. Here is a history I did not think that I needed, and that is precisely the point

Archaeology · Architectural engineering · Consumption (sociology) · Downtown · Geography · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Miller · Public space · Social science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Engineering · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Urban and sociocultural dynamics · Urban Development and Societal Issues