Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life

Abstract

This paper asserts urban transportation’s centrality to debates on ‘the public,’ the ‘right to the city’ and political mobilisation in cities. The paper begins with a re-reading of Marx and Engels’ oft-cited line in the Communist Manifesto on the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Drawing on the work of Hal Draper, who has argued that Marx and Engels used the term ‘idiocy’ as a synonym for ‘privatised isolation’, this paper pulls from two empirical studies on urban transportation to define what I conversely call ‘the idiocy of urban life’. The first case study looks at two transportation programs in Syracuse New York aimed at helping to get welfare recipients to work. The paper argues that such programs not only marked a sharp departure from the public alternative, but that they were programs that enforced the very idiocy and privatised isolation that so worried Marx and Engels. The second case study looks at the East Bay’s transportation justice movement. The paper argues that one of the organising principles of this movement is a rejection of ‘the idiocy of urban life’. The paper concludes by linking debates over ‘the public’, and struggles against urban idiocy to ongoing debates around the right to the city.