{"id":459,"date":"2011-08-19T06:51:39","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T12:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=459"},"modified":"2011-08-19T06:51:39","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T12:51:39","slug":"scenes-from-a-ciclovia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=459","title":{"rendered":"Scenes from a Ciclov\u00eda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday (August 14) Denver held its first ciclov\u00eda<\/a>, known locally as \u201cViva Streets<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0A two mile stretch of East 23rd<\/sup> Avenue in my neighborhood of\u00a0Park Hill<\/a> was closed to motor vehicles. For four hours bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, joggers,<\/p>\n

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Denver Viva Streets Map, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

pedestrians and\u00a0assorted others filled the street to\u00a0celebrate, according to the event\u2019s organizers, \u201can active lifestyle<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 There\u00a0was music, fun-and-games<\/a>\u00a0(including ping-pong), and the Denver Nuggets Dancers<\/a>.\u00a0 Grilled food was available on the sidewalk at Dexter and 23rd<\/sup>, the neighborhood’s heart.<\/p>\n

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Downtown Park Hill<\/p><\/div>\n

Celebrating an active lifestyle is an easy sell in these parts, mostly because we do it just about every day.\u00a0 Denver routinely shows up in the middle of America\u2019s \u201cTop 10 Fittest Cities<\/a>\u201d lists. \u00a0Alternatively, other cities have used ciclov\u00edas to encourage social interaction, civic pride, and community building across diverse groups of urban dwellers. I\u2019m not sure how much of that was accomplished at the Denver event, covering as it did only two miles of cityscape.\u00a0 More would almost certainly be gained by using our ciclov\u00edas to link multiple neighborhoods across a broader swath of city. \u00a0Bogota, Columbia<\/a>\u2014where the idea of ciclov\u00eda was originally conceived, and where the event is now valued less for its promotion of a healthy lifestyle and more for the opportunity it presents for social integration\u2014opens a 70 mile route each Sunday.<\/p>\n

New York City closed almost 7 miles of roadway for ciclov\u00eda Saturdays in 2008 and 2009.\u00a0Splitting the difference between 7 miles and 70 might be a good target for future ciclov\u00edas in Denver, perhaps along a stretch running from East Colfax to West Highland via Capitol Hill<\/a> and Five Points<\/a>.\u00a0 That would obviously take more planning and incur greater expense, but it would aim a little higher by making social mixing just as important a goal as outdoor recreating.<\/p>\n

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23rd Avenue, Looking East<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday (August 14) Denver held its first ciclov\u00eda, known locally as \u201cViva Streets.\u201d \u00a0A two mile stretch of East 23rd Avenue in my neighborhood of\u00a0Park Hill was closed to motor vehicles. For four hours bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, joggers, pedestrians […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-denver-urbanism","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-7p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}