The car-free cities site is a project of Social Change which is a small non-profit based in South Wales, currently consisting of me. No, not a giant multi-national think tank, or a mega-climate NGO, but just about the smallest non-profit it’s possible to be.
Really, I’d love to inspire more community groups to tackle the issue of cars, and that was the main reason why I produced this site. I have a vision of grassroots activity taking place up and down the country and all over the world to reclaim our spaces and our lives and our planet from the ravages of the car industry.
I want to see communities take back their power and fight for their own futures, and not just vote once every 4 years for these gameshow host politicians who lack any integrity. It seems very clear to me and to a lot of people that the big organisations out there, such as government, councils, corporate businesses, and even the big environmental organisations, have long fallen to rapacious influences and do not serve the common good. So what I hope this site offers is options for people who want to take action themselves. I’ve run lots of community projects around the issues of sustainable transport, and the best of those ideas are distilled in the campaigns page, which is the main part of the site directed at those who are interested in organising within their community.
But I have also intentionally lived my whole life without ever owning a car or even learning to drive (I’m 51 now), and I have a passion for car-free culture, and so at the same time I just wanted to do a site that celebrated car-free culture but that wasn’t solely about worshipping bicycles. There is a culture, an ethos, a system of values, a vibe, a mojo, to car-free culture that is more than just bicycles, but rather represents a quality of life, a shared vision of human community, of hope for humanity and for life on earth, of wanting to live within the bounds of our planet and ecosystems, of social justice, of love, of freedom and of struggle. It is my hope this website will act as a kind of natural spring and provide some of that energy to others.
Warm regards,
Mohsin Khan
Spring equinox, 2023.
