Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Regardless of how disruptive you plan your event to be for business as usual, it should take place at a location where people naturally congregate, at a time when they vidll be most likely to stick around to see what's happening. Thus, if you've chosen a business district, the end of the Friday workday might be perfect, while a Saturday afternoon would be better for a downtown square. At their best, Reclaim the Streets actions are not invitation-only festivals of interference for an insider elite, but surprise parties with the public at large as the guests of honor. Think throughout the planning about how you wUl make strangers feel welcome participating in your event?if you do your work well, they wUl find themselves joining in before they've stopped to think about it.

When it comes to promotion and publicity, a Reclaim the Streets action, like any unpermitted action, presents something of a double bind in that it needs to slip under the radar of the authorities while being conspicuous to everyone else. Even if you're planning an event in a public park, you'll find that the rules surrounding the use of both private property and public space are rigged to prevent people from getting together outside the circuitry of commerce and consumption. Applying for a permit will most likely only incur more official attention and consequent attempts to prevent your event from happening at all, unless you're really ready to go that route the whole way and have the requisite legal counsel, financial resources, free time, and privilege to be respected by the authorities. This means that the right to organize public events is reserved for those that most resemble corporations and government agencies, so it can be worth doing things without a permit just for the sake of setting a precedent in favor of free speech.

If you work without a permit, you had better have the advantage of surprise, so the police won't be ready to shut your event down immediately. If you only publicize your event through channels that won't reach the ears of the authorities, this can secure you that advantage, but it will also limit participation to an invite-only crowd plus passersby Alternatively, you can keep the location of the event a secret until the moment it begins, or somehow attract so many more people or display so much more energy and cleverness than anyone expected that the police won't be prepared to stop you.

According to your plan, you will either need to advertise your event selectively and securely or as widely as possible. One way to combine the two approaches is to advertise the event with a slew of different posters?"open drum circle to welcome spring," "join the radical drum corps," "art bike rally"?while spreading the word to everyone you trust that these events will all fuse into a Reclaim the Streets.

If you must keep your target area a secret, but you want to promote the event widely, advertise a meeting point alone. Everyone can gather there, then proceed to the secret

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destination. If necessary, have the mass that assembles break up into many small groups, each led by someone in the know, so the police will be hard-pressed to keep up with them all; the groups can all converge suddenly at the same location and time, and the party begin. A bicycle parade (see Bicycle Parades, pg. 100) can also take place, to scout the area, keep police befuddled, and add to the festive atmosphere.