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36 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 3 - Putting the Car in Carnival

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 102-148

  • Summary

    The automobile arrives bringing change to the street’s uses and meanings. Among many factors driving car ownership were its capacity to express social status and its power to create exclusive, protected space for motorists on the public commons, lifting them above the common press of the street. The car's strong association with elites and officials created a palpable sense of class conflict between motorists and pedestrians. While pedestrians resisted changes, the elite engaged the machine's insistence for space to help eliminate street behaviors that had long been judged undesirable, including peddling, keeping animals, singing, dancing, and various forms of play and recreation. They even tried to impose rules for walking on the sidewalks now congested with pedestrians forced to the street's margin. Pedestrian reforms said that everyone must keep moving. Stasis became a crime. Above all, the car, with its outsized spatial demands and noise, impinged on the street’s function as a place to build community. And even carnival, the city’s quintessential street celebration, was transformed by wealthy participants who filled the streets with their automobiles.

  • 7 - Traffic Flow versus Free Parking

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 267-307

  • Summary

    Finally, we outline the streets’ descent into vehicular congestion and analyze attempts, both derivative and original, to keep motorists happy with free-flowing streets and ample parking spaces. Officials found in the car the means to enforce the street’s best use,

  • 2 - The Street’s Apotheosis

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 64-101

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the expansion of public spaces in Rio at the expense of private property, focusing on the case of case of Central Avenue, completed in 1906. City officials began to reform and create streets as purposeful spaces, with design features, such as aesthetic paving, vetted facades, and street furniture, created to express the city's modernization and progress. The phrase of the day was "Rio civilizes itself." The stated motives for its construction emphasized orderly circulation and immaculate hygiene, but for those who used the street, its percieved beauty and the expansion of the commons were themes of broad popularity. The elite came to realize that while they had the power to shape civil spaces, largely by aping European aesthetic standards, they still could not eradicate uncivilized, plebiean behavior on those spaces, nor could they impose order. The chapter also outlines the development of the city's public transportation, emphasizing the success of horse trams, which were introduced in the late 1860s, and the conflicts between new modes of transporation, namely electric streetcars, and the handcarters laborers who inisted on sharing the rails.

  • 6 - Buyers and Regrets

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 229-266

  • Summary

    This chapter uncovers minority positions that opposed the automobile’s impacts on public spaces, both those of the artistic elite and the artistic underclasses. There was no organized opposition to the car, but lamentations were common. Brazil’s literary elite, many of them members of Academy of Brazilian letter, found an unusual outlet for expressing their criticisms of the car, which tended to focus mostly on the car’s role in the loss of community and human decency. For non-elite expressions, we look to folk poetry and samba lyrics. Some examples of the first, mostly a pedestrian’s view, decried the street’s extreme violence by describing in the most grisly of terms. Samba songs criticized and lamented the construction of the new sixteen-lane Vargas Avenue in 1944 for paving over Praça Onze, destroying the traditional space of carnival for the city’s African residents. Lyricists accused and plead, but in the end could only lament Praça Onze’s loss. We also turn to the foreign gaze of Stefan Zweig, the German author who, fleeing the Nazi’s in Austria, hoped to make Brazil a home and who found in Rio’s street life particular consolations.

  • 4 - Death by Blunt Instrument

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 149-190

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the scale of automotive accidents, injuries, and death and the role automotive violence played in enforcing change in street utilities, many of which became too dangerous to sustain. Automotive accidents replaced epidemic diseases as the most common cause of death and injury, particularly among the young and children. The car was described as Bacillus automobilis and with its speed, size, shape, and growing numbers, formed a weapon that was referred to in coroner’s reports as a blunt instrument. Velocity replaced gravity as the most common factor in the city’s accidents. Statistics for the catastrophe are scarce and inaccurate, and police and municipal authorities were accused of obfuscate the car’s deadliness, but using various sources, particularly the daily papers, the chapter estimates the scale and scope of the car’s violence and name its victims. Chauffeurs, working-class employees driving the car’s of the elite, took most of the initial blame for the street’s increasing mortalities. However, once owners began to do their own driving, the push to blame pedestrians for their own tragedies, a process begun by Rio’s chauffeurs’ union in the late 1920s, succeeded. By the 1940s, however, blame was increasingly placed on deficient street engineering, insufficient laws, and inconsistent enforcement.

  • Conclusion - Revolutions at the End of the Street

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 308-326

  • Summary

    In conclusion, we compare Rio’s streets with those created in Brasilia to solve, through planning, the automobile’s chaos. Modernism sought to essentially eliminate the traditional, multi-use street, to divide traffic from all the other uses of public space, but with mixed results of its own. We take Rio’s streets up to the present by examining contemporary trends. First, we look at formal and informal cases in which residents have recaptured the city streets, banning automobiles either permanently or periodically, to enjoy the streets again for recreation, celebration, and shopping. Pedestrian districts have expanded, and street carnival is making a pronounced comeback. In a countervailing trend, Brazil’s upper classes have built gated communities, sprawling, walled neighborhoods in which the streets have all been privatized, a final enclosure and end of urban public commons. We ask what lessons history holds for the ongoing conflicts over public spaces and how they might best be used to build contemporary communities.

  • 5 - Law and the Promises of Safety

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 191-228

  • Summary

    Officials promoted the car’s presence on city streets. However, its costs in deaths and injuries could not long be denied. Chapter 5 examines official attempts to solve the problem of the car’s violence. At first, they tried palliatives, such as the world’s first free ambulance and emergency medical services, founded in 1907. But with the posited causes of automotive accidents multiplying, legislators began to pass automotive laws and cities reformed and enlarged their traffic police forces. We examine the particulars of the law, two major phases of codification in 1941 and 1966, motorist resistance and impunity, and the impotence of police, working men on foot patrolling wealthy men in large machines. Penalties for dangerous automotive behavior, such as speeding, declined in severity over time to become almost meaningless in some decades. The city also underinvested in traffic engineering, signalization, driver education. We conclude that much that was implemented served not to solve the problem of the car but rather to consistently appease the city’s residents by promising that a solution was close at hand. City officials promised first-world automotive mortality rates but were unable to concede that such rates, while reportedly lower than Rio’s, were still catastrophic.

  • Introduction - A Common Space to Enjoy

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    The book's major themes emphasize an approach to the street as a space with multiple, competing utilities that have experienced substantial transformations. Briefly, we describe what the street has meant to Rio's urban residents, and what it has become. Streets are conceived as a commons, a unique network of spaces open to all that in a sense replaced the rural commons that were being enclosed and privatized as rural peoples and former slaves migrated toward the city. The street as the definitive urban space is about the only commons in signficant expansion in the 20th century. However, the car, due to its size and permanence on public spaces, forcibly changed physical access to the street and the choices in how residents might use it. We address valid concerns about the place of nostalgia in describing past places, note more recent activism in reclaiming the street from motordom’s near monopoly, and confess an interest in history’s role in informing current policy choices about the possibilities of public spaces.

  • 1 - Systems Circulatory before the Wheel

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 21-63
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  • Summary

    The traditional, pre-automotive street was perceived as a natural commons, available not only to all people but to nearly all uses, within the law. Brazilians did not think of their streets as cultural productions, but rather as a network of nature's remnant crisscrossing the city's architecture. Movement, while an essential element of the street's utility, only supported the street's main functions, which were access and exchange. The street's ecological functions are compared to that of the human bloodstream in all its complexity. Colonial planners used blocks, not streets, as their primary design element. Streets were intentionally left vacant, but they were not constructed. They were unimproved, often unpaved, filled with soil and vegetation. Still, despite their raw nature, they were regulated, although only with great difficulty. Streets played an essential role in community construction, and we outline some of these activities and behaviors, from gossiping to peddling. Noise and sound, including music, were essential building blocks of community, and we emphasize in particular the street’s role as the primary place of gainful employment in the city.

The Street Is Ours
  • Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro
  • Shawn William Miller
  • Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018
  • The streets of Rio de Janeiro have long been characterized as exuberant and exotic places for social commerce, political expression, and the production and dissemination of culture. The Street is Ours examines the changing uses and meanings of Rio de Janeiro's streets and argues that the automobile, by literally occupying much of the street's space and by introducing death and injury on a new scale, significantly transformed the public commons. Once viewed as a natural resource and a place of equitable access, deep meaning, and diverse functions, the street has changed into a space of exclusion that prioritizes automotive movement. Taking an environmental approach, Shawn William Miller surveys the costs and failures of this spatial transformation and demonstrates how Rio's citizens have resisted the automobile's intrusions and, in some cases, even reversed the long trend of closing the street against its potential utilities.

An Environmental History of Latin America
  • Shawn William Miller
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    27 August 2007
  • A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously thought.

  • Introduction: Props and Scenery

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    An Environmental History of Latin America
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    27 August 2007, pp 1-7

  • Summary

    Without contradiction, this land is the best of all for the life of man: the air is exceptionally healthful, and the soil extremely fertile; all that is before you is delightful and pleasing to the human eye to a great degree.

    In 1519, Hernán Cortés advanced on Aztec Mexico to accomplish the foremost event of America's conquest. Launching from Cuba, his armies sailed the coral reefs of Cozumel, marched through rainforests in Vera Cruz, skirted smoking volcanoes in the Sierra Madre, and crossed the reflective lakes of the Valley of Mexico, some of the earth's most stunning and diverse geography. Remarkably, the conquistadors had very little to say about the nature they encountered along their paths to empire. Nature was unacknowledged, taken for granted. The conquest's chroniclers – Cortés, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo – emphasized, rather, the subjugation of an exotic American culture, an antagonist whose story and defeat were worthy of the telling. American nature, it was assumed, had already been conquered by Amerindian cultures. America's human empires might resist for a time, but nature would supinely yield her possessions immediately upon the transfer of imperial title to her new rulers.

    Cortés and his men shared a limited although all too common view of history, one in which men of professed superior culture, technology, and religion succeed one another in an unbroken chain as rulers of civilization.

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