In the mid-1900s, Dutch citizens of Delft were sick of cars driving too fast down their narrow residential streets. The city was slow to respond, so residents took matters into their own hands. Groups of neighbors came together and tore up sections of pavement, then put up planters and other partial obstructions, often overnight to avoid traffic or official resistance. Their traffic-calming urban interventions were simply designed to slow down cars and reclaim streets. The government initially turned a blind eye to this illegal activism and eventually came to embrace new “woonerf” (or: living street) configurations. The Dutch Parliament  even enshrined woonerven strategies in national law as part of shift toward making the nation less car-centric.

The Netherlands in particular is well-known for being friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, but around the world there is a growing resistance to the dominance of motorized vehicle culture. Car critics note that personal cars not only add to pollution and street dangers but they also take up a lot of road and parking space, which, among other things, makes real estate more expensive for everyone. In a world largely designed around cars, pedestrians can at least can hope for sidewalks in some places but bikes often have to share the road, for better or worse.

A lot of workarounds for cyclists have been developed over the years, like “sharrows” to remind drivers to be aware of two-wheeled vehicles sharing the streets. There are tricks like the “Dutch Reach,” a car door-opening approach parked drivers are encouraged to use to avoid hitting cyclists; basically, it involves using the hand furthest from the door, resulting in an overreach that forces the driver to look backward briefly. For their part, some cyclists strap things like pool noodles to the backs of their bikes, a visible reminder of how much clearance they are entitled to while riding in lanes or along shoulders. Activists have taken things further, too, installing guerrilla bike lanes with whatever is at hand, from official-looking posts and traffic cones to toilet plungers. The idea here is to spur cities into action, using temporary measures to encourage permanent changes.

In many places, car-curbing efforts have begun to gain traction on a larger scale, driven in part by this kind of citizen activism. Cities like Paris have proclaimed car-free days so people can walk, bike and play in the streets. There are also some longer-term official plans to oust private vehicles from major metropolitan areas and there have even been proposals to create entirely new car-free cities from scratch.

A number of ambitious projects aim not just grow walking and cycling routes but also to better connect these across cities — prominent examples include a 60-mile “bike autobahn” across Germany, an adaptation of America’s famously Route 66 for cyclists and an extensive elevated bicycle path in China. One particularly bold proposal would create a raised cycling route running over 100 miles around London. Holland, as usually, as ahead of the curve, home to the world’s largest bike parking garage as well as the first raised roundabout for cyclists.

While some of these plans call for vast overhauls and dramatically reworking existing infrastructure, conversion approaches like those advocated by the rails-to-trails movement take advantage of lower-hanging fruit, transforming unused train lines and other abandoned routes into functioning pathways. New Yorks’ High Line helped spark the elevated greenway trend in particular, but the idea has since spread to cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Singapore and more. In some cases, where elevated routes are still in use by cars or trains, new trails have been introduced underneath trains and highways instead.

Some futurists think self-driving cars will solve a lot of traffic problems and collision concerns for pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers alike. Optimistic estimates suggest autonomous vehicles will reduce emissions dramatically while freeing up space currently used for parking, all while making streets safer from distracted human drivers. Other experts, though, warn that as cars become more comfortable places to lounge, more people will end up using them more often and over longer distances, further clogging up city streets and highways.

For now, full automation is still more science fiction than urban fact. In the meantime, there is evidence to suggest that simplicity may be the best way forward — that getting rid of signals, signs and barriers might actually make streets a lot safer. While some cities have attempted to confuse drivers into slowing down, other towns all over Europe are starting to experiment with streets on which cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians can all travel more freely. This type of “shared space” approach eliminates distractions while also encouraging drivers to focus on their surroundings more closely. Sometimes, less really is more.

The whole world is watching Hong Kong, where a battle is playing out in the streets between authorities and citizens protesting China’s encroachment on their independence. It started in June in response to a proposed amendment of an extradition bill that would make it easier for Hong Kong citizens to be sent to mainland China, and has escalated as authorities refuse to make concessions. Now, police in riot gear are marching into crowds of masked protestors with tear gas and water cannons.

Protesters escaping PolyU by rope from a footbridge to nearby volunteer motorcyclists
by inHongKong

In an effort to retain control of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (and the rest of the city), the protesters began crafting gear of their own: improvised catapults, slingshots and barricades. They’re also using encrypted messaging apps to coordinate daring escapes from police, like descending by rope from a footbridge to be picked up by riders on motorcycles below.

On r/HongKong, Redditors are posting some of these inventions alongside updates from within the semi-autonomous city. Many of them are incredibly simple yet effective, like gluing bricks to the streets or driving nails through sections of garden hose.

Students from the University of Hong Kong building brick walls to defend themselves from the police.
byu/DustineTetris inHongKong

Who will win?
byu/sadandwant2die inHongKong

In some cases, bamboo poles are zip-tied to the bricks to create barriers that could damage the undersides of vehicles that attempt to drive over them. It would appear that the police used armored trucks to break through the barricades, clearing the path for other vehicles, but it seems like it could be an effective way to shut down traffic in other protest scenarios.

A Hong Kong style barricade set up in Central today.
byu/EDoric inHongKong

Using little more than bamboo poles and helmets, some protesters set up homemade catapults:

The students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong successfully created a giant slingshot using only bamboo sticks and helmets. The campus has been under siege by the police for 3 days by now.
byu/DustineTetris inHongKong

Citizens in the streets are also demonstrating novel ways to fight tear gas with thermoses and leaf blowers.

The new way of Hong Kong protesters deal with the tear gas
byu/OWStep inHongKong

Man used a blower to deal with tear gas in Mongkok tonight
byu/Orhac inHongKong

Observers are also reporting the use of drones to deliver supplies to those trapped inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Thus far, thousands of people have been arrested, some being transported by train to unknown destinations (which some fear to be mainland China.)

The protesters are also leaving messages to each other and the world using graffiti:

We are not rioters. We are gamblers, gambling our futures for a better Hong Kong.
byu/thpkht524 inHongKong

Don’t know if this has already been posted here but this shows the extremity of things.
byu/ThatisWild inHongKong

Check out more of the Hong Kong protesters’ creations at Interesting Engineering.

Top image via u/VaelinAISo

The board of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District recently voted unanimously to approve a $76 million funding plan for installation of steel-cable nets 20 feet beneath the east and west edges of the bridge that are intended to deter people from leaping to their deaths or catch them if they do.

The net, suspended from posts, will have a slightly upward slope, and will collapse a bit if someone lands in it, making it difficult for the jumper to climb out. The bridge district will deploy a retrieval device to pluck jumpers from the net. But this will not be the first net to span beneath the Golden Gate, which, when it was constructed, was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

When building the Golden Gate Bridge, the lead structural engineer insisted on the installation of a safety net even though its $130,000 cost was deemed exorbitant. Over the four years of its construction, the net saved 19 men, who named themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

The safety measure, however, was not entirely successful — in one case, a catwalk collapsed and a dozen men were plunged into the water, becoming entangled in the net along the way. A few survived, rescued by a crab boat, but ten men died. Today, there’s a plaque on the south western side of the bridge at the entrance to the west sidewalk dedicated to the workers who died that day.

Located in Kyoto, Japan, the Ukiyoe Small Museum has extremely flexible hours, at least for its owner/operator, artist Ichimura Mamoru, whose sign explains: “When I’ve had enough the store is closed.”

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In big black block letters on a white placard, the message contrasts with the historic facade and is hard to mess. For years, the signage was only in Japanese, but a kind tourist translated it for him into English, at least roughly, so foreign visitors could also get with his unusual program.

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Inside one will find woodblock prints in the traditional ukiyo-e style, which dates back to the 17th Century. These “pictures of the floating world” capture everyday scenes with recognizable perspectives.

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Though less popular now, Mamoru and others like him still make work along the same lines — he learned from his grandfather, and is one of the last few dozen artists of his kind in Japan.

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Those who manage to catch him during his hours of operation can tour the museum, shop and his workshop as well to see how the artwork gets made.

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Removed from their context, the strange concrete monuments dotting the landscape of the former Yugoslavia can seem abstract, inscrutable, even “alien.” Called “Spomeniks” after the Serbo-Croatian word for “monument,” the massive sculptures were virtually unknown to the rest of the world before photographer Jan Kempenaers documented them with these striking photographs between 2006 – 2009.

With renewed interest came the spread of misinformation, as some claimed the monuments were Communist propaganda. But in truth, they weren’t displays of patriotic nationalism; they each commemorated specific local events, often antifascist uprisings by local citizens. Though many of them were built by and for the victims of fascist regimes, they’re often seen online alongside Nazi monuments with no references to their true meaning.

Now, artists and activists from the countries that formerly made up Yugoslavia are fighting to clear up those misconceptions, and it’s important that we listen, says author Owen Hatherly at the Calvert Journal in a piece called “Concrete Clickbait.” 

In many cases, the monuments were commissioned, funded and chosen locally, and their aesthetic reflects a shift in Yugoslavia towards an interest in modernism. In an age of rising international neofascism, these monuments have much to tell us, argues Hatherly, and “deserve better than to be glimpsed for a few seconds on Tumblr.”

“For Tihana Pupovac, a major problem is also the depoliticized framing of the monuments. Left without any indication of what they commemorate, or even of who designed them, the results are ‘deliberately oblivious’ to the anti-fascist struggle that they commemorate, or to why the artists and communities thought they were appropriate – which, once, they evidently did. ‘If we want to revive whatever we think can be found of politics in the aesthetic of these monuments, we have to go past nostalgia and past the sheer fascination.”

“Because, again, these monuments in themselves are not that unique, what was unique was the lived historical experience of socialism. And I think this is what lacks crucially from Kempenaers’ work. You can see this in the way he presents his work in former Yugoslavia and his total oblivion of the problem of anticommunism. And this makes him incapable of grasping the situation with these monuments today’, which in Croatia, is currently acute, not only with many of the monuments crumbling, but with a right-wing administration openly nostalgic towards the Ustaše and intent on burying whatever anti-fascist legacy might remain today.”

Erasing the context of the monuments also erases the scale of the atrocities that occurred in Yugoslavia, activists argue.

“’Yugoslavia was the fourth highest country in Europe in terms of civilian casualties’ during the Second World War [says Pupovac], and was also, along with Greece, the only country with a resistance movement – the multi-ethnic, Communist-dominated Partisans – that was large and strong enough to liberate the country almost without help from the Allies. The federal Yugoslavia that came out of this broke with Stalin and the USSR in 1948, and instituted a ‘self-management socialism’ of extreme complexity and decentralization.”

“This is what disappears in the Spomenik photos – as she puts it, ‘our lived historical experience of a revolution becomes only a cultural artefact’. [Architect and writer Dubravka] Sekulic argues that ‘a better way to engage with these monuments would be to use them as a tool to re-connect to the near past in which, as a society, we did not see space only as a commodity.’”

Read more about the meaning and history behind specific monuments at The Calvert Journal.

Top: Spomenik #1 (Podgarić); all images by Jan Kempenaers