CityLab Daily: A Mime’s Battle for Safer Streets
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What We’re Following
Not all heroes wear capes: Sure, bike lanes and crosswalks make for safer streets—but have you tried getting a traffic mime? In Guadalajara, Mexico, an activist named Jonadab Martinez began appearing in busy intersections to silently direct traffic in full mime makeup. He became a minor local celebrity, El Mimo, creating more visibility about street safety and organizing rallies. After five years of work as a street activist, Martinez, who retired his mime makeup two years ago, has won a seat as one of Mexico’s 500 Federal Deputies and he’s fighting to pass first-of-its-kind national street safety legislation.
Martinez isn’t the country’s only street-safety hero: There’s also a masked wrestler, Peatónito, or the Little Pedestrian, who fights cars with lucha libre moves. “The cars are the emperors of the streets, a dictatorship of motorists. They always have the right of way,” says the caped traffic-safety crusader. As humorous as these antics may be, they highlight a serious crisis for the country: Roughly 40 people die in traffic each day in Mexico, and road fatalities are the leading cause of death for Mexicans ages 5 to 29. Now, after the death of a prominent bike activist last November, the calls for calmer roads have been reignited. Today on CityLab: The Street Theater Behind Mexico's Landmark Road Safety Law
More on CityLab
Green New Field
I don’t know when the myth of landscape architects as climate saviors began, but I know it’s time to kill it.
In an essay in Places Journal, Billy Fleming, the director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, argues there’s a gap between landscape architecture’s rhetoric and reality as the profession considers its place in shaping the Green New Deal. With mega-projects making the profession much more apolitical than when Frederick Law Olmsted first set the template for planning, designing, or managing built and natural environments, Fleming writes we should remember Olmsted’s “eagerness to enter the political arena and challenge the status quo.”
CityLab context: Read about Olmsted in CityLab University: Who’s Who of Urbanism
What We’re Reading
How Trump’s border crisis is driven by climate change (Washington Post)
The Japanese town that outlawed sprawl (The Guardian)
Is Brooklyn’s gun court getting weapons off the street—or just locking up more young black men? (Slate)
Why is Bill de Blasio’s presidential dream a sad joke? (The New Republic)
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