There were streets long before cars. Shawn William Miller's The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro explores how the invasion of cars changed the street's meaning. Streets once were the manifestation of culture, a three-dimensional space to do, be, exist, work, play, and more. They were a public good for all (p. 8). Through an examination of the evolution of popular streets in twentieth-century Rio's downtown center, Miller argues that the automobile reduced the multifunctional street to a two-dimensional, segregated, modern space simply dedicated to transporting bodies and goods via cars (p. 15).
One has to first understand what the street was to understand what it has become. Chapters 1 and 2 use one of Rio's most popular common streets in the nineteenth century, Rua do Ouvidor, and Rio's first avenue, Avenida Central, to illustrate the complexity of the street...
