Not cutting roads, but stitching urban tissue!

Today #Amsterdam starts a transition experiment of 6 weeks that reclaims a car dominated street as public space. There are already some important lessons about the importance of language.

The Weesperstraat has been seen as important link for car traffic to get in and out central Amsterdam for four decades. Businesses fear for their accessibility & refer to the street as 'an artery'. Invoking the classic metaphor of cities as bodies, car traffic as blood (read about the metaphors of traffic engineering).

This blinds us to why and how cities have always functioned as places for human interaction. Instead of continuous pumping, a good city street constantly entices you to slow down, stop and linger to enjoy the public life around you. This is what cities like Barcelona, Paris and Groningen are quickly relearning.

Choosing to use the solidified language of traffic engineering to launch this experiment excludes many people and a diversity of important societal challenges: autonomy of children, rights of elderly, climate adaptation or loneliness. Instead, we hear and see the status quo in all local media.

All status quo parties refer to the experiment as a 'cut' of the urban mobility system (alderman Melanie van der Horst here on 'temporary closure' and senior program manager David Gelauff here on 'shutting down the corridor') . But then we forget that the actual 'cut' was made in the 1970s. Before activists stopped it, planners demolished the Jewish neighbourhood (Weesperbuurt) for the Modern City.

Instead of 'cutting' the mobility system, they are facing the wounds that were made 50 years ago. They are slowly mending, repairing the painful damage that they have done to our 'urban tissue'. The time for bandage is over. They are not CUTTING roads, they are STITCHING neighbourhoods.

This is what the #Weesperstraat once looked like, before the Jewish Neighbourhoods was levelled to make room for cars (and the metro)!

Academic studies show a clear and consistent outcome of these kinds of interventions. Unlike model projections and unlike the limited imagination of the status quo, 'traffic hell' does not materialize. Instead, traffic evaporates (See meta study).

Traffic is not like blood that flows through our arteries. It is not like WATER that flows through our pipelines. Instead, car traffic behaves much more like a GAS! It will occupy all the space you give it.

And think of all the improved air quality, noise reduction, stress relieve, safety effects, children's freedom, green space effects, social cohesion improvements that will benefit the silent majority!

So, when will we learn to escape the limits of the language that created the problems? Road not CLOSED,...

On day 2, the stitching takes shape in the form of a 'pocket park' of 40 meter in the middle of the road bed. ??????

And on Day 3, we see that citizens are slowly reclaiming the newly found public space and cleaner air. The local Athletics Club organises their evening training on the Weesperstraat. ??????