Urban design for lout-litter

Amid scenes reminiscent of Tron Legacy, Barking and Dagenham Council have painted yellow lines on the pavement, which guide where pedestrians should walk in the street.  A council spokesperson explained why: “The lines were painted to provide a marked walkthrough for pedestrians outside the shops.” 

OK, so perhaps I should have used a milder word than ‘explained’.

These BBC news vox pops provide footage of some suitably disbelieving residents (or ‘shoppers’ as they’re described by the reporter).  “Why did they not put money into the hospitals… or schools?”  A boy of about 10 demurely notes, “They could have saved their money, to spend it on something more – constructive.”  (Also – listen to the outstanding three-second snippet at 1:25 of the video.  I dearly hope someone out there will sample this.  If you do Cassette Boy sound-bite mash-ups, please take heed.)

But the interesting thing about the council’s apparent non-explanation is that it makes a certain sort of sense when accompanied by a statement on the rest of the work they’re doing in the same road:  “A number of measures have been brought in to tidy up the shopping parade near the Harrow pub. The pavement has been power washed and the railings painted by the Community Payback Team.”

(Side-note – interesting to see that the slave labour, ritual humiliation, and brutish vengeance implicit in the deployment of the ‘Community payback team’ is not so much criticised, but used to justify this project, and is presented as prudent financial management in austere times.)

So, as the Londonist notes, the programme to ‘tidy up’ the area, also “Appears to also include tidying up the people using it”.

An extensive body of town planning literature describes how to design streets so as to ‘script’ the actions of those using them -  to subtly suggest behaviours to the public that are deemed to be desirable by the authorities.  (See especially ‘Secured by Design’.)

But it must be rare for a local authority to issue a public statement that explicitly equates pedestrians with litter. 

Debord spoke of the way that the modern city is organised to bureaucratise and alienate its inhabitants, whilst streamlining their movements and interactions to better facilitate the circulation of consumption.  But even in his sinister conception, this shaping of territory was seen as necessary to prevent a potentially dangerous working class from mobilising, and challenging the status quo.

These days, we aren’t even given the credit of being oppressed to deter an uprising – or even viewed as human at all.  We’re literally seen as street litter, and are swept up accordingly, making room for more efficient navigation and consumption of the city, in just the same way that one might try to carve out a trench to facilitate the orderly departure of a swarm of mice.