Dear patient World Car-Free Days Friends,

 

We have over these last many months been tied up hands and feet with the Kyoto World Cities Challenge Initiative for which you can find full details at http://kyotocities.org.  For those of you who are familiar with our approach, you will see that there are many areas of common interest.  During this period we have not been updating World Car-Free Days site, but shortly we will be getting back to this, and in the meantime you may find some interest in our New Mobility Agenda at http://newmobility.org which is the overall ‘gateway’ for our programs and actions in the area of transport in cities.

 

I write you today with a view to seeing if we might share our thoughts on the following. If you have spent any time with this site, you will helpfully have noted that we are proponents of individual responsibility and initiative, diversity and local action -- and one of the reason why we decided more than a decade ago to call this whole business World Car-Free Days in the plural, is because it is our believe that any day of the year is a good one to have a lot fewer cars on the road and more sustainable mobility in our cities.  So whatever day you want to propose we want to make sure that we are there to help and encourage you to the bets of our means.

 

One idea that has always been especially close to my heart (see extract below from the original 1994 Car/Free Day call) is that of the self-organizing, non-bureaucratic, community-based Car-Free Day.  And as a result of a conversation with my friend and colleague Carlos Pardo who lives and works in both Bogota and Bangkok (you figure) this morning, we got to talking about the possibility of using SMS or some other organizing device for a citizen Car-Free Day.

 

This in turn brought us to the possibility of considering the possibility of harnessing some of the tools or the experience of Virtual Flash Mobs for knitting together a volunteer citizen Day – and it is in this context that I would like to share a few references with you (below) and at the same time to hear what you think about this. Have you tried it in your city? Would you be interested to give it a try? Would you like us to see how we might help?

 

Here to get the juices flowing is a first draft of a task list:

 

1. We want to get in touch with a large number of people in our city and let them know that XX is going to be a Car-Free Day
2. We need to be able to point them to where to go for more information on how it works and how they can participate or support it.
3. Ideally they will let us know (a) who they are, maybe (b) something about their “category”, and hopefully (c) how they intend to act, perform in support of the Car-Free Day
4. If there are any special events these need to be made known.  (For example an end of the day concert, dance and schmooze to meet each other and celebrate the fact that we like people more than we like cars.)
5. And after it is all over, it would be great to have their feedback, views, and ideas for the next Car-Free Day

 

You will surely be able to do a lot better on this that that, but perhaps it will give you a starting point for your own thoughts and recommendations.  In addition you have just below a few first references to get you going on this, and if it strikes any chord, it will be great to hear from you on this.  (And in the meantime have a look at Kyoto Challenge; it may be that this can be useful for your city as well.)

 

With all good wishes,

 

Eric Britton

Chair, Kyoto World Cities Challenge: 2005-2007

 

 

The Kyoto World Cities Challenge is at http://kyotocities.org 

The Commons Open Agenda is at http://www.ecoplan.org

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Extract from p. 18 of  “Thursday - A Breakthrough Strategy for Reducing Car Dependence in Cities”, The Commons, Toledo, Oct. 1994

What Can You Do if You Don't Happen to Be a City?

Agreeable as the idea may be, there will be many who will find themselves in situations where their city or neighborhood is simply not yet prepared to make the leap and try a Thursday project. How for example can even the most willing citizen hope to participate in such an experiment if you happen to live in the middle of Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo or any other of tens of thousands of cities where responsible intelligent people will tell you that "it is just not possible here"? (And that will, incidentally, be the first reaction in most places.)

As luck would have it you have a choice. Anyone who wishes can go out and organize their own Thursday project on their own terms. You don't have to be a city or even a small town. Thus, for example, if you are president of a company, you can get together with those who work there and ask them if they are interested in giving it a try. Or a school or a gym or a hospital. Perhaps you will decide with the members of your bridge club, church or karate group that you are all going to try to see what happens if each of you decides to spend just one day without getting into a car by yourselves alone. Or maybe just the people in your family. Or possibly just yourself -- one person alone who has decided that she or he is willing to take a fling to see what it might be like.

There will of course be no one best way to do it. Each person, group, and place is going to have to figure out the rules on their own. In some cases, car pooling and shared taxis may be considered acceptable, in others only non-motorized or public transport. Each grouping will decide its own rules and live its own experience. But the point that I wish to stress is that this can be an individual decision and does not have to be something that comes out of some government agency or very large collections of institutions and interests. This is, quite blatantly, not the sort of approach that will appeal to docile, fatalistic or passive citizens. These are concepts that are gong to be picked up only by more thoughtful, individualistic, self-confident individuals and groups. And it is my belief that there are in our societies many more of these kinds of people than most might think.

 

What is a flash mob:

(Source: http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid40_gci916705,00.html)

 

A flash mob is a group of strangers organized by electronic media, who gather together in a public place, behave in a pre-determined (and often silly) manner for a pre-determined amount of time, and quickly disperse. A successful flash mob event depends on the element of surprise. Participants, called mobsters, share news about the time and place for an upcoming event through postings on blogs, chain e-mail messages, and SMS text messages, but no one knows exactly what they will be expected to do until they show up and are given a "script". Flash mobs can arguably be called public performance art, although participants say it's fun just to "freak people out" and shake up the status quo without breaking the law. Flash mob events have gotten media attention in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Glasgow, and London. Various scripts have called for participants to act like robots, improvise barnyard sounds, or impersonate a group of tourists from Maryland.

One of the first flash mobs to get press coverage occurred in Manhattan in July 2003, where more than 250 strangers quickly changed their plans to meet at Grand Central Station (because news of the planned event leaked out and spoiled the element of surprise) and met instead at the Hyatt Hotel. At a pre-determined time, the mobsters gathered on the balcony overlooking the hotel's lobby. On cue, they burst into 15 seconds of loud, unexplained applause and left. Without the instantaneous nature of the communications tools used to organize the crowd, participants speculated that this particular flash mob event most likely would have been cancelled instead of moved to a new location. According to Howard Rheingold, author of "The Virtual Community" and "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," flash mobs are not just a passing fad during the summer of 2003, but are a demonstration of the "ability for groups of people to organize collective action in the face-to-face world, in ways that they were unable to do before the combination of the Internet and mobile telephones made it possible."

>> Find white papers, products and vendors related to flash mob.

Read more about it:
>>	The BBC has an article "Technology meets the mob."
>>	Michele Norris talks to Mike Epstein, a software engineer who runs a personal photo log on the Web, about the "Mob Project."
>>	Howard Rheingold calls smart mobs "the next social revolution."