Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

s p o n t a n e i t y
London. For several years, Twyford Down was a war zone and a
radical cause célèbre. Ironically, antiroad mobilizations and RTS
activism grew in the face of Tory legislation explicitly engineered
to stamp it out: the 1994 Criminal Justice Act (CJA), which tried to
outlaw any public gathering or street “disorder” involving twenty
or more people. In simple terms, anything that didn’t figure on
then prime minister John Major’s “democratic” agenda, like genuine
free speech and collective protest, could henceforth be rendered
illegal. (The CJA still persists in Blair’s Britain.) After its
inception, the CJA duly fanned the flames of its “other,” being
increasingly imposed on increasing numbers of public gatherings
condemning the CJA.
RTS/London emerged within this adversarial atmosphere,
staging its first “street party” at busy Camden High Street in north
London in 1997. The following year, just down the street, it sealed
off an even busier artery adjacent to King’s Cross Station: dancers
motioned to drumbeats, and hoards of different sorts of people
hung out and reclaimed for pedestrians a big stretch of Britain’s
capital. By that time, the RTS concept had a distinctive West Coast
drawl, touching down in Berkeley, where RTS/Bay Area liberated
Telegraph Avenue for a while. Then, responding to Giuliani street
cleanup vendettas, RTS/New York came of age in the Big Apple,
begetting “great feasts of public space.” Suddenly, protest became
imaginative and fun again, veritable be-ins and “carnivals of
freaks,” contesting zero tolerance policing, privatization, and sanitization
of city life and appealing instead for real human rights,
for real public space. Central to RTS’s modus operandi is play and
festival, as it is for a lot of the antiglobalization movement.
Such prankster politics enacts lampoon, pulls tongues and
raises the finger, and voices satire at a rather sober and stern enemy.
Turning people on has often meant turning them off party-political
smokescreens. They know the revolution will never be televised.
Meanwhile, protagonists have recognized a common fate and
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