Reclaim the Streets is a decentralised direct action movement which uses street parties to take back public space - the street - from cars, corporations and the police state, and to return it to the public for socializing, bicycling, art, food, dancing, music, dissent, dialogue, community and creativity. Stepping off the sidewalks -- into the streets -- brings us
together, and allows us to challenge the
dehumanization of our lives and the sterile world that accompanies it. A street party is a liberated zone, where we can practice life as we'd like it to be- full of color, community, pleasure and mutual aid.

Streets and sidewalks are more than just ways to get where you are going, they are gathering points and destinations. Life used to be lived in the streets, not just in cars, living rooms, and cubicles. And car culture sucks. Cars are destroying our lives and the planet. They generate traffic, congestion, and pollution, they suck up our money, and they cause death and destruction wherever they go.

We do not separate the struggle for car-free space
from the struggle against global capitalism: As London RTS has written: "The streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious. We are about taking back public space from the enclosed private arena. At its simplest this is an attack on cars as a principal agent of enclosure . But we believe in this as a broader principle, taking back those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning them to collective use as a common."

Reclaim the Streets first started in England in 1991 to protest the building of new roads through both urban and rural areas. It was revived in 1995 and has since spread to the U.S., Australia, Europe and South America.