Chris views Chicago’s policy on the public selling of art as a matter of free speech. I won’t make his arguments for him — you can read up on his campaign on his blog. I will say that I find his argument compelling, and that our city would be better if these policies were overturned.

Recently Chris was ticketed for his activity of selling art without a vendor license, within the Loop area. On another occasion he was arrested and charged with a felony for taping his encounter with the police. There is a recent article in the Sun Times with a plethora of comments from supporters of the Free Speech campaign and decrying the misapplication of the eavesdropping law. I urge you to add your comments to the article, and to spread the word on this valiant campaign.

Here’s the comment I posted.

Mr. Drew is undertaking a heroic effort to make our city better – not just for Artists, but for all of us. I want my city to be a vibrant cultural center, with artistic endeavor at every scale. The art he offers for sale is of the most humble and accessible form.

Art indeed is speech, and if Mr. Drew’s account of Supreme Court opinion on Commercial Speech is correct, then it is clear that the city’s peddler law is overly broad and therefore unconstitutional.

If the law were really about public convenience (i.e. for pedestrian traffic, etc.) why would seeking donations rather than a sale exchange make a difference? I’m not up to speed on the legal distinctions or constraints against regulating these other activities, so I’d love to be informed. Perhaps the Sun Times could do a bigger story, exploring the irony of the eavesdropping charge, along with the contrasts of civil rights and free speech pertaining to different classes of behavior and different public spaces.

This of course brings to mind the absurdity of specially designated “Free Speech Zones” established during large scale events. That’s something else that needs to be challenged.

I do hope that local media will take up the broader issues, and do us a public service informing us on this important topic. Spread the word, for Free Speech, whether you agree with Chris or not, this deserves public consideration.

Is there anything new here? The ring of “public-private” partnership or cooperation is flat…

Chicago should have started wiring (and unwiring) itself 10 years ago. What happened to the promise of CivicNet? Promises, promises, and more platitudes?

This is not to impugn Mr. Bhatt – it’s just that we’ve been singing this song for a long time and we still don’t have the communications infrastructure we need in Chicago (or nationally). I’ve written extensively on how this language obscures the process of addressing civic needs, I won’t belabor the point here.

As far as not expecting a bailout for infrastructure – true – we ought not be holding our breath – but the need for general infrastructure investment is pressing, and lack of action disadvantages our economic well being and quality of life as we compete in global markets. This applies not just to communications infrastructure but to transport and especially public transport. If we want to jump start the economy, this is where we need to make investments – where we’ll create jobs doing the work we need. The “markets” will take care of themselves. Isn’t that what we’d been told all along? I don’t believe the markets take care of everything nor that they take care of things according to our national (or local) values.

What would you do with $700 Billion?

We need bold civic leadership. Bailing out the financiers won’t help any of us in the short run nor over the long haul.

Green investments in energy, transit, and communications infrastructure coupled with decisions that are grounded in meeting the needs of the community with mechanisms for community planning, oversight and accountability are the best way out of our current mess. Indeed, they are the best way forward in any weather.

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/

I’m thinking ahead for a moment. Knowledge workers could more readily work from home with reliable high speed communications networks, allowing audio/video, shared desktops, multimedia conference calling… and any number of undeveloped applications. None of this is new. What would be new would be commitment to network capacity and workforce policies that encouraged this. Instead we’re looking at the networks as a consumption driven amenity, and even there the public doesn’t get much bandwidth bang (or reliability) for the buck.

Think also what we’d be doing for neighborhood economies if more people worked locally?

(The video was only just released.)

Is that blunt enough?

Some problems require a collective response, but too often we accept those problems as intractable, because as individuals the issue is overwhelming in scale. How do we get ourselves to the point where we can even begin to explore the collective option?

Traffic and Transit

We’ve privileged the unsustainable. We have refused to invest in a truly public infrastructure. If we consider all the costs involved with traffic how would that compare with a reconstruction of public transit worthy of the public? That is, a system that is well-interconnected, efficient, (sufficiently frequent in service), reliable, comfortable and clean?

We can begin with the cost of traffic. This is not intended to be exhaustive. This is just to get us started on the critical path. Leaving the Chicago Green Festival this was brought home to me … Lake Shore Drive looked like a parking lot. Many urban thoroughfares look like that twice a day. With cars backed up as far as the eye can see you have to wonder at the fuel consumed and the value of our time as we sit waiting to get through the traffic and on to our destination. This does not even begin to address the cost of road maintenance (or construction), nor those of pollution.

What are the aggregate costs on these and other measures we may come up with, for traffic and transit, for any city on any given day?

We choose traffic over transit because transit doesn’t satisfactorily meet our needs, and we have each adjusted to the situation from an individualized frame of reference. We believe the extent of our impact on the situation is limited to that frame. We’ve bought in to consumerism as opposed to collectivism. This is not a question of a free-market versus a communistic system, but it is a question of how we can better live together. We need to be able to explore the characteristics of network and public aggregated solutions without having to defend against such simplistic rhetoric. This applies to questions of transit, as much as other public services and utilities, including communications networks such as broadband or citywide wireless. Each of these is a matter of infrastructure and capacity and demands public discourse and deliberation.

Urban myths of impossibility vs. Amenities in historical context

Our practices and attitudes towards the possible in the several sectors of urban socio-economic life reveal fundamental contradictions. Some behaviors are accepted as the domain of a natural monopoly (or duopoly for an illusion of market), some are left to individual patterns of consumption and behavior and others are the domain of government, governance and patronage. Looking at how the work and life of a city functions on a day to day basis we find no explanation for organizing the different infrastructures as we do other than the historical context of the interests that fought for the current state of affairs. Tracing the history of these domains of our economic life we also see considerable variety – oscillations between private interests, markets, collective responses, monopoly-utility and government driven approaches. There is also plenty of blending and interaction across these categories. In principle we should not allow rhetoric or ideology to foreclose options in our collective response, especially the option of a collective response.