Wolfgang Zuckermann - Zuckermann As Activist

Zuckermann As Activist

In 1969, Zuckermann, in despair over US involvement in Vietnam, left New York to live first in England, and later in France. He played an active part in creating small local collaborative projects that cut away from the values and patterns of the dominant consumer society. While living in London, he noted the five hundred mews (former stable blocks) in that city as, contrary to professional planning views at the time, a viable city environment, and proceeded to write with co-author Barbara Rosen The Mews of London: A Guide to the Hidden Byways of London's Past(Webb & Bower, London, 1982, ISBN 0-03-062419-3)

In 1987 Zuckermann began his collaboration with The Commons, an independent non-profit policy research group based in Paris. Through 1994 he was a Senior Associate, writer and editor of a program called the New Mobility Agenda which looks at ways in which we could arrange our transportation (and our lives) so that people could obtain better access to the places they live and work. The project eventually led to a search for ideas, suggestions, and possible solutions from people and places around the world. Zuckermann's significant experience as a 'kit builder' on a large international scale has also been one of the important driving forces behind the program and its various spin-offs and demonstration projects.

End of the Road (ISBN 0-930031-46-6, Chelsea Green Pub Co, Post Mils, Vermont, November, 1991) was written as an attempt to pull together all the rich body of information and ideas being generated by the New Mobility project, in an easily readable form, addressed to the general public, and put into jargon-free and vivid language not generally found in the transportation literature. Zuckermann has followed this up with a number of other EcoPlan projects such as co-author of a children's book, Family Mouse Behind the Wheel, James Clarke & Co Ltd, London UK, September 30, 1992, ISBN 0-7188-2834-8, as well as taking a leading role in The Commons Car Free Days program. His book, Alice in Underland, The Olive Press (January 10, 2000), ISBN 2-9514588-0-0, looks at today's technology and society matters (and manners) from a perspective somewhat different from that usually encountered in the literature.

In 1994 Zuckermann got together with Eric Britton to create an interactive program under The Commons for something they called "Consumer Holiday – The one day a year we turn off the economy and think about it". Shortly however they became aware of a well financed Canadian program with many of the same objectives, Buy Nothing Day, and then decided to convert their collaborative project international an international support site that looked at a rather broader range of problems, ideas, paths and solutions, which would help to amplify and compete the Canadian project. Thus the International Buy Nothing Day program was born and continues to this day.

Zuckermann currently continues his research, writing, and editing activities with The Commons and is in parallel founder and owner-manager of Shakespeare, a bookstore and arts center in Avignon which resolutely refuses the separation of "culture" from the issues of technology, society and personal responsibility.