De politiek van de straat. Een stijlvolle kijk op mobiliteit

Abstract

Abstract: Politics on the street. A stylish view on mobility. The article focuses on the design of cycle-friendly infrastructure in the Netherlands. It sets out to identify different styles in the design of the traffic landscape, both on a material (form) and an immaterial level (rules). In the early 1990s, the Design Manual for Cycle Friendly Infrastructure was issued by the Dutch government. Analysing the way the Manual treats one of the basic questions in cycle infrastructure design - do bicycles have to be segregated from or integrated with motorised traffic? - we conclude that the designers' solutions are representative of a technocratic position. They take differences in speed between motorised and non-motorised traffic as a given and present a broad range of possible design solutions that aim at 'fine-tuning' form, function and use of infrastructure in a situation. In doing so, they undervalue the fact that in the design of crossings and road sections the politics of what we call 'passages' are always present, either in the way space, time and risk are distributed on the street level, or in the way the design is implicitly or explicitly the expression of democratic politics. The article concludes by formulating a new normative criterion for innovative design. Because there can be no single optimal solution, even after fine-tuning the details of a situation, a good design should present two or three possible solutions which can be explicitly compared in terms of the way they not only distribute space, time and risk but also create new 'worlds'.