Na próxima 6ª feira, 3 de Maio, a MUBi com a ACA-M organiza uma tertúlia com Joel Crawford, o conhecido autor de dois livros de referência sobre cidades livres de automóveis, para assinalar também o inicio da Semana Mundial de Segurança Rodoviária dedicada à segurança pedonal que decorrerá de 6 a 12 de Maio.

A tertúlia é aberta à participação de todos.

Dia/hora: 3 de Maio às 19h
Local: Livraria Ler Devagar, LX Factory, Rua Rodrigues de Faria, 103 (Alcântara, Lisboa)

We are faced today with problems of unprecedented scale and scope. Never before has human society confronted problems that affect our entire planet and threaten the continued existence of civilization itself. In the past, individual societies have declined and even disappeared, but never has all humanity been under threat, and never from so many simultaneous threats of such magnitude. We are living at a time when our actions will dramatically affect all of those who come after us. The responsibility we bear is enormous.

 

I want to talk today about one approach that solves many of our problems while also actually improving the quality of our lives. My vision for sustainable cities of the future is a simple one: it is of streets dedicated to human, not mechanical, uses, to social rather than transport needs, to beauty and health. I believe that the urban form developed in the last half of the 20th century does not serve human needs well and cannot long be sustained. Change must come; the only real question is the form of that change. My vision of future cities looks more like the past than the present. Its roots can be found in the arrangements we used when energy was scarce and expensive, or until about the end of the 19th century.

 

The proposal is simple, even if its implementation is complex. We should start now to remove cars from our cities, with the ultimate goal of completely eliminating them from urban areas. It took a century to build a society based on automobile transport, and it will probably take a century to reverse this. Climate change alone is a sufficient reason to adopt this approach. We should start now.

Joel Crawford