Grassroots Street ‘Closures’ in São Paulo and London: Democracy and equity as experimental and experiential process

Abstract

This paper advances the debates over the democratic representativeness and equity of community-led urbanism by investigating several street closure/opening experiments in London (Play Streets) and São Paulo (ruas abertas). Many have lauded grassroots and DIY urban interventions for offering more just forms of city-making than do conventional means. However, others claim that their ‘private’ nature and spatially small scale may lead to inequitable demographic biases in representation that more formal planning and governance systems avoid. Whereas these claims possess some worthy cautionary considerations for civil interventionists and researchers, the interpretive analysis of fieldwork presented here suggests instead that, beyond the immediate (if transient) benefits these street experiments bring to disadvantaged groups and broader publics, their dynamic, negotiated, and experiential nature may achieve broad and diverse representation that exceeds that of more compromised forms of urban governance and planning. In this way these social infrastructures may augment the spatial and temporal boundaries of formal representative democracy and foreground the importance of embodied experience in informed participatory decision making on mobility infrastructures. The paper also discusses the related proximal/distal tension behind democratic representation and through this confronts the paradox of freedom.