Last week Shamez and Michael J attended the Towards Carfree Cities Conference in Portland Oregon. The conference was hosted by the World Carfree Network based in Prague and featured activists and urban planners predominantly from the western hemisphere all working towards building cities of the future around people instead of cars.
First, Portland is amazing, great transit, bike lanes everywhere, great cycling community. June is their Bike month. It’s called Pedalpalooza and features something like 240 amazing rides, parties and events–
http://www.shift2bikes.org/cal/viewpp2008.php
.
Everyday after hours of sessions at Portland State University we’d head off to another fun ride or party.
Here’s a quick list of groups we met worth looking into:
Depave.org – They hosted a party where we busted up an ugly parking lot to be made into a food garden. This is related to a great Portland group called City Repair www.cityrepair.org.
We shared our presentation slot with Micah and Jeff from a Santa Cruz,
California group called People Power. www.peoplepowersc.org Much like us
they are creative, fun, and like to take matters into their own hands.
We went on a great bike ride and had some late-night, riverside fun with
stencil artist/clown Tiago deJerk. http://www.dejerk.com and
http://clownhouse.org/info.html
We also had great fun on a ride with all-girl bike dance troupes the
Sprockettes from Portland and the B.C.Clettes from Vancouver.
http://sprockettes.org www.bcclettes.ca
The B.C. Clettes do a big dance number to Street Fighter by The New
Kings, and Michael J got up and sang the song with them.
Note: Toronto needs a dance troupe like this. Very fun at parties.
Very amusing during rides like Critical Mass.
There’s an interesting group from NYC called the Liveable Streets Network.
They are media types who are putting together some great resources: streetsblog, streetfilms and streetswiki. www.liveablestreets.com
The presentations were good, but most of the inspiration came in getting
to know each other while sampling the great microbrews of Oregon. We
became great friends with Tiago from Apocalipse Motorizado in Sao Paolo,
Brazil http://apocalipsemotorizado.net/2008/07/09/festa-na-prefeitura/
and got to have dinner with Chris Carlsson from San Fransisco.
He is one of the founders of Critical Mass and has a great new book called
Nowtopia. (We are hoping to get him to Toronto in September.)
After our presentation, (Wednesday morning at 9am. Imagine Michael J and Shamez at 9am.) someone suggested they’d like to do a direct action with us before the week was out. That day we met for an hour at lunch and came up with an idea. this little film was made by people from Toronto, Ithica NY, Santa Cruz CA, Mexico City, Tulsa Oklahoma, Honalulu, Washington DC and Portland. Shot in an hour, edited in two. you can see it here.
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/pdx-park-or-nap/1857898815?icid=acvsv1
For more on the conference visit carfreeportland.org There will be video of our presentation available soon.
Peace,
MLJ
PS, special thanks to Pam and Rob for giving lending us bikes and giving Shamez a place to sleep for three hours a night.