So if you read my gopherlog you know this isn't the post I'd intended to post next to this space, but it's the easier thing to write than the long post about navigating the line between amorality and scruplosity that I've been trying to work through.
Instead I wanted to write something about my experiences living in a city as a pedestrian and my thoughts about public---or lack there of---space. This might be a little loose and messy because some of these ideas are hard for me to articulate. I'll probably come back to these topics in the future.
So I'm largely a pedestrian. I'm not comfortable enough on the bike to ride around in portland because drivers have gotten *way* more hostile to cyclists lately. That's a thing that I'm working on changing but the reality, for now, is that my two ways of travelling around the city are walking and bussing, with walking being my primary locomotion.
The thing about being a capital-p-Pedestrian is that you live *in* your city. You exist in far more of the space between destinations than, say, a driver who experiences the landscape as an archipelago of one-block-wide islands.
I am intimately familiar with the entire four-mile radius around my apartment that is my pure walking range. There are similar very large swaths of the city that I know in radii around bus stops further out than that. There is no part of the city that I have visited where I do not at least know where the nearest library, coffeeshop, or convenience store is. Where I don't know the good sidewalks to walk and the intersections that are dangerous.
And there's a lot of good that comes from this kind of intimacy with the landscape: I know all the houses with cats that sit lazily in windows, the parks that are full of dogs, where to see backyard chickens, the best trees to stand under during a rainstorm with your love.
But then there's the downside of it: you're also deeply familiar with all the hostility built into your city. I know how far it is to find a drinking fountain, to find a bench to sit or to find shade. I know where safe bathrooms are---or more accurately---where they aren't.
There's a really useful concept called "the urinary leash". I think it was mostly coined to talk about the idea of (cis) women not having access to public toilets in the past, thus only being able to travel as far from their home as their bladders could hold them.
So there's one sense in which it's more trans people than cis women who have to worry about the urinary leash now, especially in places where our continued existence is---y'know---controversial.
But it's broader than that: all pedestrians my city have to deal with the urinary leash. Public urination is a crime you can be arrested for (sometimes it counts as a crime of sexual violence even if no one saw you do it). There are no public toilets except for inside library branches. But even more than that a lot of businesses that used to let you use the restroom, like coffee shops, have started to remove access even to paying customers.
A place where you can't use the bathroom, one of the most basic functions of hygiene and dignity, isn't a place you are welcome. And when your city is structured so that you can find yourself at least a half hour, frequently an hour, of fast walking away from a place to use a bathroom then that city isn't a place you are welcome. And that's the best case scenario, during daylight hours when public buildings like libraries are still even open! At night, you literally have no restrooms you can access.
I'd wondered for a long time how other (housed) people dealt with this before I realized most people just drive. If they need to use the bathroom they can just go home and do that. It's fine. They don't *live* in the city, they visit it.
But once you start noticing how bad the urinary leash is, and what it means for people who don't even have a home to be tethered to, you realize that cities here in the u.s. (and beyond, but I'm speaking of what I know best) aren't *for* living in. They're engines of capital.
That's why there aren't places to sit, to nap, to shower, to change a diaper, to give yourself an injection, to piss and shit, and all the other inconvenient ugly little things we have to do because we have bodies and we exist.
I've noticed that post-2020, and the grand reopening of capitalism after it was closed for renovations for a year, we've been losing even more ground in our cities. In portland, we're fighting to keep "camping" (read: homeless people putting up tents because they have nowhere else to go) from being completely criminalized. Our police conduct intentionally cruel "sweeps" where they don't just disperse encampments but take and destroy the little belongings people have. Very blblical: "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."
And the more you think about this the more you start to notice it. Streets are for cars because cars are both a product of the machine and enable it to work efficiently. People only get little slivers of ground between all the land reserved for cars. You notice how weird it is that if you're walking the length of a city there's no places where you're allowed to just stop for the night without pay. No, really, think about that. You can't legally exist in a city that has "anti-camping" ordinances after dark unless you're in motion.
That's part of what I mean when I say that our cities aren't for living in, they're hostile to living unless you are actively buying or producing. It feels like we have to scuttle between safe-zones like children playing some kind of tag except that we're trying to evade the attention of the state.
And I know this isn't an original observation but part of what I want to get at here is that being a pedestrian is *inherently* against the will of capital and state. To be a pedestrian is to occupy space as a person, not a worker, and you will feel all the ways that's discouraged.
I guess the closest thing I have to a conclusion is that even if you're not like me and use walking as your primary transportation, if you live in a city *try* to walk between errands that are a mile or two apart. Try to do as much as you can only by walking. Find out if your city actually wants you in it. Also, you might meet good cats and trees.