The built environment matters for democracy: some forms of political action can only be performed in physical spaces; different configurations of spaces allow people to come together or keep them apart; decisions about designing spaces, as has long been recognized, are eminently political (Parkinson, 2012). Specific spaces have received much more attention than others, though. Not least in light of the various ‘movements of the squares’ (sometimes even referred to as ‘peoples of the squares’) during the past decade, squares have been the focus of theorists seeking to revalidate the importance of the assembly of bodies in physical space (Butler, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2017). Streets have been discussed less, even though streets have played an extraordinary role in the modern political imagination: sometimes as sources of democratic hope; much more frequently triggering anxieties about public disorder.

Streets are unavoidable in the way squares are not; as Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic account of city life as it actually unfolds (as opposed to what planners might dream about), ‘streets and their sidewalks, the main public spaces of a city, are its most vital organs’ (Jacobs, 1992, p. 29). Yet Walter Benjamin’s observation that the built environment is perceived by collectives in a state of distraction applies to streets also much more than squares and other prominent public places (Benjamin, 1991). The latter seek, and usually receive, attention; we might hurry across a square, but still recognize it as something distinctive; also, squares tend to offer a focal point, be it a monument, a fountain, or, for that matter, a tree, as with the oldest Greek plateia (Zask, 2022).Footnote 1 Streets are of course no less a matter of design than squares, but, contrary to a cliché of squares as prime sites for assembled masses (potentially dangerously populist, according to a long tradition of anti-democratic thought and feeling), the street might be of more concern to the authorities: for the street can be harder to control.

This article seeks to reassess the meaning of streets for democracy. It does not outright reject, but considerably relativizes, two conventional readings: according to well-established views, streets are sites for encountering the demos in its diversity and also for informal community-building, which forms part of a larger democratic way of life. I argue that the first is empirically often implausible in light of widespread (and in many ways legitimate) norms of ‘street conduct’. The second depends on a kind of projection of village life into cities, which is not in itself problematic, but might come with some of the well-known oppressive aspects of communitarian understandings of politics. The article proceeds to make the case for two different aspects of street life (in cities): the positive dimension of privacy in public, a particular form of anonymity which allows for self-invention and re-invention (promises in fact long associated with the modern city as a site for the realization of autonomy); and the street as a unique site for protest and other forms of collective action (an affordance that has particularly fed the cliche of streets as sites of irrational crowd behavior); I further suggest that it is specifically as sites of protest that streets really can live up to expectations of spontaneous encounters with others (for during protests, strangers will be in each other’s faces) and community-building (for the actual performance of protest, ideally, strengthens the ties that bind protestors and draws new recruits to a cause).

I then discuss two particular threats to democratic street life today. On the one hand, streets increasingly provide access to our selves—that is to say: some of our most intimate information—via ever-proliferating sensors and electronic eyes. Potentially, this kind of surveillance also has a chilling effect on protest, in addition to—this is the second threat—ever tighter restrictions on the right to assembly (including ones that do not outlaw protest as such, but displace it or manage it such that the force of protest—and the capacity of protestors to be in the face of other citizens—are severely reduced). ‘Take back the streets’ is thus acquiring new political meanings: we need to take streets back from surveillance and make it available for diverse groups of people to engage in political conduct, especially, but not only, unpredictable forms of protest.

Where the races meet?

Precisely because the street is unavoidable, or so it is often claimed, the street must be a space in which the diversity of the demos is most likely to be experienced. The streets, Leonard Cohen sang in his acerbic ‘Democracy’ in the early 1990s, are the ‘holy places where the races meet’. Streets, it is often said, enable the unexpected encounter; they allow us to experience difference. A similar logic might hold for certain forms of public transportation or even state offices and, in some countries, hospitals—people who do not usually interact find themselves (involuntarily) in the same space. As Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar puts it, in a statement that encapsulates much of laudatory political thought on streets: ‘The street is where people mingle; where they seize one another up; where mutual display occurs; where common horizons, however fleetingly, are established’ (Gaonkar, 2022, p. 206).

Note how such views depend on a number of assumptions, though: the street needs to be a space not just for fleeting encounters, but for some form of engagement (‘mingling’). People must pay at least some attention to each other (‘mutual display’). And somehow, from mutual engagement some sense of a shared world (‘common horizons’), though of course not necessarily shared world views, is generated. One question is whether mingling must involve explicit mutual address; or whether seeing each other (‘mutual display’) is sufficient to have the effects proponents of a democratic politics of the streets generally desire. If seeing is enough, how does seeing difference translate into, let’s say, acceptance or perhaps even affirmation of diversity? One answer might be a variation of the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954): what (or who) was thought of as threatening before becomes somehow not only familiar but is revealed as non-threatening. An alternative is the idea that diversity in and of itself generates a form of aesthetic pleasure, that pluralism might be seen as enriching, an effect that can hold in situations where there were prejudices to start with, but also in ones where citizens were broadly free of preconceived notions as to who and what constitutes a peril. In any case, in this instance of what has more broadly been called ‘the politics of sight’, seeing is simply assumed to be politically transforming (English & Zacka, 2022).

However, it should be clear that these are somewhat contingent outcomes. Seeing someone is evidently not the same as accepting someone; other (felicitous) conditions have to be in place for one to turn into the other. Among other things, that’s a way of saying that the contexts of the streets themselves matter: what is perceived as a threatening street environment is not conducive to seeing strangers as non-threatening. In fact, here it is not inappropriate to say that the streets themselves have what has been called ‘architectural agency’ (Paga, 2021): not in the strong sense of leaving us no choice but to move in this direction rather than another [in the way walls or deep ditches might do (Schindler, 2015)]; but in the weaker sense of cuing us, putting us in a certain frame of mind. The spatial arrangement itself does not necessarily do this (though it can: think of the stereotypical example of the long dark alley); more likely, it is facades, or what in Gottfried Semper’s canonical theory, Bekleidungstheorie, would have been called the ‘clothing’ of buildings (Semper, 1860)—which of course implies that there can be ‘ragged’ or ‘torn’ or simply in some sense unattractive clothing. Both the shape of spaces and the scenography of streets matter in setting the stage for encounters; and the stage can be more or less conducive to such encounters having, broadly speaking, positive civic effects.

So there is no simple line, no completely straightforward psychological mechanism, connecting street life and what one might construe as a set of democratic attitudes. The same is true of accounts that view street life as essential for something more ambitious, moving beyond attitudes to practices: streets as a privileged site for democratic community-building. Again, the notion that one gets familiar with particular others plays a role here, but so does the notion that proximity will lead one to identify common problems (not least if one falls into casual conversation; here ‘mingling’ really means talking, and talking beyond trivialities in particular).

Most prominently, John Dewey advanced the notion that neighborhoods are units for democratic community-building. He claimed that ‘there is no substitute for the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment... Democracy begins at home, and its home is the neighborly community’ (Dewey, 1954, p. 213). In other words, community is impossible without communication, and the street is a space in which informal communication, from rumors to common complaints, can happen without barriers that might put citizens off (barriers often associated with official sites of decision-making: complicated meeting rules; a degree of formality; the need to speak to large audiences; the requirement to employ correct, perhaps even technically and legally precise language, etc.).

From this perspective, lingering and loitering—which prima facie serve no purpose—are in fact supremely useful politically. What Jacobs famously called ‘little public sidewalk contacts’ has positive moral and epistemic effects, in conjunction with the encounter (and acceptance) of difference and the stream of gossip and practical information about a particular locale (Jacobs, 1992, p. 56). In short, this is the classic argument for the street as a space of increasing trust (which is what Jacob’s ‘sidewalk contacts’ were said to build gradually), but also of informal opinion-formation. And from minimal levels of trust (without too much familiarity) and opinion-formation, so this line of reasoning further suggests, can follow coordinated activity. Simply helping each other out, or just repeatedly providing basic information, and trusting one another as a result—these are relatively undemanding ways to weave what Jacobs called ‘a public web of respect and trust’ (p. 56) and to increase the potential for more ambitious forms of political action at a future point. As Jacobs emphasized, ‘formal public organizations in cities require an informal public life underlying them, mediating between them and the privacy of the people of the city’ (p. 57).

These practices will not all be literally on the street: focal points like particular stoops, or the corner shop, or an institution like the traditional Greek kafenio or the Turkish kahvehane (which are inside spaces, for the most part), or, for that matter, all kinds of ‘third places’ like libraries (Oldenburg, 1989; Klinenberg, 2019) might be the most likely contenders for sites of continuous, as opposed to a quick one-off, but still relatively superficial engagement. It matters that such places are ones where different people are, so to speak, streaming through; they are public and fluid, but they also contain spaces for privacy (allowing individuals to decide for themselves how much they seek to engage others and possibly reveal information about themselves, while also offering possibilities simply to retreat into broadly non-communicative behavior without seeming odd). Unlike the workplace or, let’s say, supermarkets, they do not have clearly designated singular functions; they are coded as public, but with wide latitude for conduct (in the way the welfare office is not); hence they generally do not cue uniquely applicable norms of behavior—unless, as in traditional Greek and Turkish coffee houses, they are heavily gendered spaces (not a trivial aspect, of course, but also not inevitable).

However, note how a number of preconditions need to be present for Deweyan visions to become plausible here: people must perceive themselves as members of the same relevant group; they must feel comfortable enough to talk to strangers in the first place (Allen, 2004), and they must have at least minimum confidence in their own political efficacy: as is well-known from accounts like Saul Alinsky’s, the first two conditions might not be that difficult to meet, but the third does not necessarily follow and can be very hard to generate (hence the need for community-organizers in the first place) (Alinsky, 1971): as such, talk can reinforce collective resignation as easily as motivate for collective action, absent other factors.

Note also how the first condition—the sense that one shares a certain political space and hence, in principle, has standing, or, for that matter, might have good reasons to work together towards shared goals—is related to the argument for the epistemic-cum-moral benefits of exposing oneself to street life; it is assumed that going out makes it more likely that one eventually comes out in favor some form of collective action with people one has only seen several times but eventually perceives as part of a shared world.

Obviously, one justification for street festivals, ‘block parties’, etc., is that they facilitate both the initial experience of difference and then the willingness for community action. The logic goes back at least to Rousseau’s ideas about the political effects of festivals: the Swiss philosopher held that citizens should not passively consume spectacles (while being isolated, as in the theater), but participate and, in a sense, become the spectacle themselves: rather than focusing attention on a king, let’s say, or a play, people would watch each other and see each other being committed to a shared project; here ‘mutual display’ (of commitment or even enthusiasm) really does seem the right concept (Rousseau, 1997), one that can also apply to sports events, concerts, and other occasions where a supposed audience also becomes an actor (and might end up celebrating itself, with people becoming ever more enthusiastic about their own enthusiasm).

Evidently, in order for people to organize a festival, some form of community organization must have happened already: an isolated call for festivals presumes what it seeks to produce. The state might intervene to ‘kick-start’ community organizing by initiating festivals, but this in turn presumes that the state is viewed as a legitimate actor, and, more specifically, that it can come up with ideas for activities that do amount to more than a consumerist spectacle.

A final observation related to how festivals can increase familiarity and a sense of belonging: the street might end up providing a non-private and yet intimate and highly personal sense of being at home in the world; this is one reason Benjamin called the street the apartment of the collective or also ‘the furnished interieur of the masses’ (Benjamin, 1983, pp. 1051, 1052). From this perspective, everyday objects might be seen as the furniture of the streets: as Benjamin put it, ads become what oil paintings are for the bourgeoisie in their homes; walls with the notice Defense d’Affiche turn into a writing desk for the people who resolutely ignore the prohibition to write on the walls, and the café table is like the corner window from which the property-owner looks out over their house. Such ‘living arrangements’ can also be created consciously: sometimes people do put sofas on the streets; graffiti, whether intentionally or not, becomes a focal point for encounters (and a starting point for conversations); people build informal free libraries.

To sum up the arguments considered so far: streets can increase familiarity and also security (the famous insight by Jacobs about ‘eyes on the streets’, about which more shortly); they enable serendipitous encounters; they facilitate democratic community-building through conversations allowing people to discover common problems (and eventually identify common goods); and—at least according to one quasi-phenomenological reading—they provide a sense of being at home in the world.

These benefits have been recognized by those who sought to replicate street life as conventionally understood in different contexts: in post-war Britain, for instance, architects and urban designers, increasingly aware of the social disadvantages of modernist tower blocks, advocated ‘streets-in-the-sky’ and ‘deck access’ to individual housing units with reference to Jacobs-style arguments about familiarity, security, and community. Peter and Alison Smithson in particular, chief protagonists of Brutalism, saw streets in the sky as a way to get the best of both worlds: the benefits of clean and efficient social housing (or, in British parlance, ‘council housing’) and some of the traditional advantages of the dense working-class neighborhoods which were being eliminated in the name of ‘slum clearance’ and ‘urban renewal’ (it is an open question whether the prominent failures of Manchester’s Hulme Crescent or the Smithsons’ own Robin Hood Gardens in London—both of which were eventually demolished—was due to some structural flaw in the ideas of streets-in-the-sky and deck access, or whether, as with other supposed modernist disasters, the actual causes came down to under-financing).

There are other examples, from the other end of the class spectrum: A Silicon Valley company once tried to capture, or rather, engineer, a number of these effects when it built an ‘internal street’ in its company headquarters. Of course, it wasn’t accessible to just anyone (plus, it remained subject to constant surveillance). In the end, the experiment was declared a failure (Sudjic, 2016, p. 199); it did not lead to anything like spontaneous sharing of ideas or community-building among employees (never mind that too much community-building by employees or workers is not always seen as positive by employers to begin with).

The benefits of street life were also intended to materialize on the ‘campus’ of the pharmaceutical company Novartis in Basel; the vast, privately owned area right next to the Rhine—dotted with edifices by starchitects, most prominently Frank Gehry—features (private) streets, cafes, and plenty of moveable chairs on open squares; that space is partially and at certain hours open to the public. Whether that particular design had the intended epistemic effects of sparking ideas through unplanned encounters or even more ambitious ones of corporate community-building is anyone’s guess; what does seem visible though, is a clear difference between tourists and workers, and the relative absence of regular city inhabitants as such.Footnote 2

The uses of mutual indifference

I have argued that streets may well be plausible sites for the experience (as well as acceptance or even celebration) of diversity, for democratic practices that amount to forms of community-building, and for generating a sense of being at home in the world. These all have significant empirical preconditions, however. And—this is crucial—the availability of these preconditions is not the only problem with such strong (critics might say: idealized) normative claims for democratic street life. In this section I want to suggest that an important feature of city life (villages are a different matter) is at the very least in tension with the arguments discussed so far. This is not trivial, because the feature in question has its own moral weight; it is not merely some unfortunate obstacle which we should all work to remove. Hence my overall claim: some conventional arguments for a democratic politics of the street need at least to be relativized.

A major promise of city life is that co-presence does not have to mean encounter and encounter in turn does not have to compel engagement. City streets are actually ones where co-presence is barely acknowledged (we lower our head by about ten degrees as we walk on streets); the art of street-walking is precisely composed of a skill-set that allows us not to bump into other people (as New Yorkers snapping at tourists or suburbanites with a ‘you don’t know how to walk’ confirm) and consciously to avoid anything that could count as meaningful contact. Georg Simmel captured the mentality of the city street user with the term blasé; he also highlighted that people do relate to each other on the street—indifference is not ignorance or, for that matter, total separation—but with a particular quick glance that is based on a distinct norm (to look for too long is to violate the norm); thus, an invisible ‘veil of silence’ separates street users, or is at least supposed to separate them (Simmel, 1995; Sennett, 2018, p. 28).

Being blasé, according to Simmel, was partly a matter of self-protection: the sheer number of stimuli in the large city could otherwise overwhelm individuals (an element of nineteenth-century psychology one might want to discard, of course).Footnote 3 But, in a more plausible sociological vein, Simmel also argued that indifference would create increased space for individuality: precisely because others are not supposed to engage one, self-expression that could give rise to animosity in smaller places can be afforded without fear; a carefully curated self-presentation might draw attention without too much risk, and, given the brevity of street encounters, there is an incentive, at least for some, to make self-presentation ever more extravagant (Simmel also remarked that the division of labor would provide an incentive for role differentiation: the eccentric might be true to their personality, or in fact provide a particular product for rarefied tastes only found in the big city).

The norm of the quick glance—and moving along fast, what Lorca called the ‘furious rhythm’ of the big city—are not just matters of psychological shielding, they are also grounded in a modern imperative to keep busy, and to get somewhere.Footnote 4 At least in the US, the quintessential question about someone’s ‘identity’ remains ‘what do you do?’ and certainly not ‘who are you?’. Getting and spending in a world through which we’re rushing, the often enough brutal indifference to other fates—that all happens primarily in the city.

Yet by the same token, the city promises anonymity, or, more precisely, privacy in public. Virginia Woolf, in her essay on ‘Street Haunting’, captured the exhilaration of leaving a known self behind as one joins what she called ‘that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’; she also observed the liberating dimension of indifference, or even superficiality: ‘The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks’.

Of course, street norms have never applied universally. Whoever is somehow vulnerable, or not considered a full citizen, is even more vulnerable, and taken less seriously, on the streets. Up until the twentieth century, women walking the streets alone were assumed to be servants or prostitutes; today, cat-calling and the casual brush against female bodies (if not worse) remain a wide-spread reality, even if condoning them officially is becoming a taboo (Elkin, 2016; Kern, 2021; Wilson, 1991). That is not even to mention the inequality of attention exhibited by authorities, police in particular: stop-question-and-frisk is experienced as a major form of harassment that reinforces existing social and political hierarchies; less obviously, it also goes against norms of privacy in public: who are the authorities to question someone in Woolf’s republican army of anonymous trampers as to who they are?.Footnote 5

To be sure, the norms associated with the city as a place for being busy (and being instrumental in one’s thinking and conduct) have long provoked counter-norms beyond an uncritical re-affirmation of communitarian village life: the nineteenth-century flaneur removed himself from the imperative of getting and spending; the twentieth-century Situationists followed his example by letting themselves ‘drift’ through the city. Theirs was a specific resistance to the rationally planned city focused on getting from A to B most efficiently. Le Corbusier hated the sidewalk (and sidewalk cafes in particular), as well as winding streets that, as he put it, merely reflected the old, blind paths donkeys had once taken (Corbusier, 1995, p. 23; Sudjic, 2016, p. 69); modern cities built from scratch—most infamously Brasília—did not feature them at all; brutal ‘systematization’ projects as in Communist-ruled Bucharest also ended up creating cities for cars, not for ambling pedestrians (it was this ‘anti-street’ element of modernism that eventually provoked the counter-argument for streets-in-the-sky by the Smithsons and others).

The street becoming more and more like the road meant a systematic shrinking of spaces in which one might encounter others, if one wanted to transcend the norms of acting blasé; above all, it meant fewer of the surprises which the city might hold—and be it just the uncontrollable argument between husband and wife on the street, or actors in street theater seeking a public; or just getting a glance of strangers being exceedingly strange in dress or manners; or just experiencing the street, at a most basic level, as a site of resistance—not in the sense of open rebellion against the powers-that-be, but as a space that is unpredictable, that demands alertness and that might, in a good way, end up distracting us and foiling our (rational and efficient) plans for the day.

Now, to be clear, the subversive drifting of the flaneur and the Situationists do not make good on the idea that the street is a democratic site because that’s where we experience the demos in its diversity, or that it can serve as a starting point for democratic community-building, or that it can be a place for being at home in the world. Flaneurs do not spontaneously encounter others, let alone fall into conversation with them, on streets; without any focal point—be it observing children (one’s own, not others’) in the playground, or lining up in a queue at the bakery—any attempt to ‘meet’ may well be perceived as bizarre, if not an outright threat.

As already briefly suggested, Jacobs extolled ‘eyes on the street’ as one of the major advantages of organically grown city life (Jacobs, 1992). Neighbors and shopkeepers who knew each other (and each other’s kids) would keep streets safe through informal surveillance; what Jacobs called ‘the sidewalk and street peace’ would be kept primarily not by police, but by ‘an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves’ (Jacobs, 1992, p. 320). People would attract people; the street would only be worth watching, if there was a lot going on (attractive shops, bars and restaurants could ensure that); thus, the people not only had to enforce their own safety, but also provide their own entertainment.

This famous portrayal of safety in numbers and through surveillance (with people taking some minimal responsibility for each other in public) would appear to be based on something like a projection of the village, or perhaps suburbia, into the city. Some of neighborly streets’ lauded advantages—encounter with all kinds of different peoples, which I discussed above—would appear at least to be in tension, for the safety results precisely from automatic mistrust of locals vis-à-vis strangers to the neighborhood; what’s more, one of these advantages—systematic surveillance—can well turn out to be a threat to democracy, a point to which I shall return shortly. The places where one can easily separate locals and strangers are the village, the small town, and suburbia.

Yet Jacobs herself was adamant that cities were not just larger towns, let alone versions of suburbia (in fact, according to her, the mistake of modernist city planners was precisely to aim for a suburbanization of the city, placing its inhabitants in large, easily legible spaces like parks, instead of enjoying diverse, busy, sometimes hard-to-figure-out streets). Arguably, she would have conceded that, for her, parts of cities would ideally have village-like characteristics, while holding on to the categorical difference between suburbs and cities; for one of the less-noted features of ‘the streets of successful city neighborhoods’, according to Jacobs, was a ‘clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space’—as opposed to public and private space ‘oozing into each other’, which she regarded as typical for ‘suburban settings’ and, less obviously, what she simply called ‘projects’ (Jacobs, 1992, p. 35).Footnote 6

My main claim here is that anonymity—not being familiar or even just known to anyone—can be a major promise of the street, and that city life’s distinct normatively important feature is well captured by Iris Marion Young’s notions of ‘difference without exclusion’ and ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ (Young, 2012, p. 227). Young defined city life as a ‘being together of strangers’ (p. 237). Privacy is about being in control when it comes to revealing information about ourselves, when it comes to the degrees to which one wants to remain a stranger—and the street is one site for exercising that control (Marmor, 2015). Not being known can be an important precondition for self-invention or re-invention (again, one of the major promises of the city: become something new or different) (Pressley, 2014). Anonymity can co-exist with the diversity of lifestyles and offerings of what one potentially might want to become which are a distinctive feature of city life. For that promise of self-development to become real, lifestyles just have to be visible and comprehensible enough; but to look at someone’s self-fashioning and become inspired by it, I do not necessarily have to have exact (let alone have to extract) data about them, and of course they do not owe me an account of who they are, why they became the particular people they are now, etc. It is not a contradiction to say that one might be very intimately inspired by total strangers.

In the same way, the tension between what Erving Goffmann called civil inattention and studied indifference, on the one hand, and, on the other, democratic community-building, is relative (Goffman, 1972). The advantage of city life is that those with identities unpopular in smaller, less tolerant places can find each other and engage in forms of solidarity, and, indeed, community-building—which is not to say that they must always cease being strangers, let alone live up to Rousseauean ideals of pure co-presence, with participants fully transparent to each other (Young, 2012). Particular streets might eventually become associated with particular minorities, and some of Dewey’s vision can be vindicated in neighborhoods where it is known that streets are safe for unpopular minorities (I hasten to add that the issue here is not whether the unpopularity should somehow be condoned or justified).

This sense of ‘unassimilated otherness’ (to invoke Young, 2012 again) is just about compatible with a weak version of Jacob’s idea of surveillance: people watching over busy streets, but just to make sure nothing obviously dangerous, let alone criminal, is happening; it is not compatible, however, with the stronger version of local shopkeepers or other members of the ‘voluntary network’ Jacobs described actually really knowing people, let alone having very specific standards as to what kind of people either belong in the neighborhood or become automatically suspicious (and hence, in their eyes, make themselves liable for harassment or outright hostility by ‘locals’).

Let me take stock: I have sought to relativize some conventional claims about street life for democracy in light of a contending normative argument for a particular form of privacy in public. That does not mean all arguments for streets as sites of community-building are completely wrong. But—this is the next step of the argument—these arguments are actually strongest when linked to another function of streets beyond the conventional ones concerning encountering diversity: the street as a privileged site of protest. Protests are of course not just about strengthening solidarity and crafting political communities, but they usually have these as side-products. Protests, or acts of civil disobedience, also consciously break with the contract of mutual indifference; they are about wanting to be in the faces of others, bothering them, disrupting their blasé city routines—not least by taking advantage of the fact that the ‘vital organs of the city’ (Jacobs), the streets, cannot be avoided by anyone. Hence the next section will revisit what streets—also, again, in contrast with squares—offer to protestors.

Streaming and blocking

An image of the street at least as powerful as that of a space of encountering a diverse citizenry—and one with a much longer history—is that of the street as effectively unpredictable and, ultimately, uncontrollable for the powers-that-be. As Jacobs observed, ‘if density and diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly’; Cohen also, in the line preceding his take on the races meeting, had sung that democracy, if at all, was ‘coming from the sorrow in the street’.

The anxiety about the street as a source of political sorrow and trouble is an ancient one: Plato compared the masses to a beast and to spoiled children; he also had a sense—wide-spread among critics of the Athenian democracy—of the assemblies becoming like a kind of stream’ (rhoun) through the streets (Gottesman, 2014). L’Enfant, when planning Washington, DC, as a kind of Versailles for a republic, was anxious about a ‘clotting of the streets’ (Sennett, 2018, p. 275) The streets, much more than the theater or even the assembly, constituted a dynamic space; the people—and the opinions it produced—might unpredictably flow this way or that way; recall Woolf’s eye floating ‘us smoothly down a stream’. She also noted that the republican army ‘of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities’.

In ancient Athens, access to the street could not be controlled in the way access to the theater, the assembly, and the agora (when specific political rituals like ostracism were performed) could be regulated. In general, masses on an easily accessible square who have already assembled might be easier to reckon with; often enough, one knows why they are there, who might be responsible for their being there—and that getting them out of the square might be enough to tame a situation politically. ‘Reading the Riot Act’ literally meant reading an assembly into illegality, as a group of people was addressed by an official who declared the assembly to be an (illegal) riot—it’s much harder to read anything to a streaming group of people in different streets (Clover, 2019, p. 8). The (often enough racist) cliché of the ‘Arab Street’ still contains this sense that opinion-formation is unruly (and overly emotional); a notion of an ‘Arab Square’ would already imply some more control and, arguably, predictability.

Whether the street can be more of an ‘echo chamber’ than the square is a contingent matter; what’s almost by definition true is that streets are more clearly bounded in ways that can also be turned into an advantage by those seeking to engage in protest or even political resistance to authorities. The dense university district in northwestern Beijing allowed those bent on organizing a pro-democracy movement in 1989 to use the relatively protected streets to appeal to potential allies in the dorms, agitating in and between the various university complexes without becoming immediately noticeable for the authorities; the appeals put pressure on students to join, and as everyone could see more and more people coming out to take part in the protests, the pressure increased further (Sewell, 2001). In other words, the street, rather than automatically being a space for openness and diversity, can also be a site for conspiracy. Or, to use a less loaded term, forming a closely coordinated (and in a sense precisely not diverse) political will; it can provide shelter from authorities, much more so than the square.

The most obvious instance of this logic is the erection of barricades to block streets. Barricades date back at least to the European wars of religion; they have almost always been a makeshift construction; the very word derives from barriques, or barrels, which peasants spontaneously put together (Hazan, 2019). Barricades hardly ever had a decisive practical effect in confronting authorities; they were associated with mass insurrections and resistance movements much more than with revolutions (whether successful or not). Their strategic logic is close to that of guerilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to win; all that those manning them, in order to prevail, have to do is hold them.

Their more defensive nature made them no less feared by state forces, however: military barracks were put in the middle of cities like Vienna and Budapest in the nineteenth century to have soldiers ready to confront the unruly; after Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire (during the July Revolution alone, in 1830, 4000 barricades had been erected, or so historians estimate). Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon’s III’s prefect of Paris, famously widened streets—or, rather, created boulevards—to make blocking by barricade more difficult; widening also made it easier to move the military around (Costa Meyer, 2022, p. 36). As the arch-reactionary Louis Veuillot observed a propos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire: ‘On one hand, they wanted to favor the circulation of ideas, on the other to ensure the circulation of regiments’ (Costa Meyer, 2022, p. 35).

Already in the nineteenth century, observers questioned whether the barricade still had any practical meaning. As Friedrich Engels (and, later on, Leon Trotsky) argued, its primary meaning was moral rather than military. Barricades signaled bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, a will rather to destroy one’s neighborhood (and one’s possessions) than put up with further oppression; they also served as a temporary retreat in the face of total defeat, as with the Paris Commune. Not only radicals and self-declared revolutionaries viewed things this way, though: Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’; yet, he insisted, some of the ideals behind barricade combat might still inform the workers’ movement (Bernstein, 1905, pp. 13–15).

Bernstein, the reformist social democrat par excellence, was picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialization, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets; the strike, not the food riot, became the paradigmatic form of conflict, as the price of labor, less so the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful (Clover, 2019). Blocking production itself grew more important than blocking the street.Footnote 7

Of course, class conflict was hardly reducible to demands for better wages (and improved working conditions). Alongside of—sometimes instead of—a politics of petition there always existed a politics of prefiguration. Squares might prima facie be more suitable for prefigurative politics: they can allow for the creation of cities within cities, camps, even fortresses that seek to showcase different ways for human beings to relate to each other (Gerbaudo, 2017). Theorists of the barricade have tried to argue that barricades might to some degree accomplish the same: they create spaces where insurrectionists and army might possibly get talking; they could be thought of as so many theaters that impress audiences—on both sides of the barricade—with performances of bravery and sacrifice (Frank, 2021). Not least, they allowed women to play a particularly important role, very visibly disrupting gender conventions: during the Commune, for instance, they built barricades and fired from them, rather than just taking care of the wounded.

Streets are better for dispersed, and purposefully unpredictable, protests; they are not the most plausible spaces for prefigurative politics which seeks to implement practices and geographically bounded patterns of living together that aim to be attractive to others—which also means predictable (one wants to take friends back to a city-within-the-city to show what ‘experiments in living’ might be happening there). A demonstration going through streets—streaming—from point A to point B trades off attention in more places against the permanence of a fixed locale that allows for the continuous showcasing of critical practices such as mutual aid, free libraries, diverse deliberative assemblies, etc. In that sense, continuous-community building might be better accomplished on the square—but something like solidarity generated by continuous joint action is also plausibly realized by people streaming through streets. By streaming, or also blocking, one also encounters citizens who could easily avoid an encampment on a square; instead, protestors can confront them, engage with them, try to win them over to a cause. In short, both streaming and blocking can make good on some of the advantages of the street identified by theorists of democracy—but the most in moments of intense demonstrations and protest.

Today it is again blocking that is prominently associated specifically with street protests. Members of Germany’s Last Generation super-glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency (they have also attached themselves to airport runways and engaged in other spectacular actions, such as sawing off the tip of Berlin’s official Christmas tree) (Stole, 2023). In a sense, the Klima-Kleber form a human barricade; as in the nineteenth century, the meaning of that kind of barricade is moral rather than in any sense military (be it tactical or strategic). Moreover, in line with classic accounts of civil disobedience, the willingness to be arrested and serve prison time (and the willingness to be exposed to the brutality of car drivers who have sometimes tried forcibly, even brutally, to remove those glued to the streets) demonstrates one’s moral seriousness; it also ideally increases the chances of a majority of citizens to see the importance of the cause which civil disobedients are pursuing. For those willing to take the risk of attaching themselves to the street, clearly streaming—in the sense of demonstrations, even very unpredictable ones—is no longer politically sufficient. It draws too little attention and does not compel a reaction; only blocking will do. It is also the latter which makes for direct confrontations, often angry ones. Obviously, there is no guarantee that an angry citizen will join a cause, but being in the face of others gives protestors at last a fighting chance to persuade them. The same holds for scenarios of demonstrations versus counter-demonstrations; as Jacobs had known all along, more people will attract more people, and that makes for at least some increase in potentially receptive audiences in the streets, the city’s vital (and hence inevitable) ‘organs’, to quote Jacobs again.

Note how a practice sometimes seen as a contemporary version of the barricade (2023)—burning cars—is rarely about blocking (Bell, 2023). Like other forms of rioting, this form of destruction might or might not be justified (Pasternak, 2018), but it does not serve tactical or strategic purposes; and it virtually never would appear to have the moral effects associated with the barricade, or the blocking of the streets undertaken by today’s Klima-Kleber (where those gluing themselves can obviously be engaged, and remain answerable, as they—evidently—have to stay in place). Unlike with those volunteering their own possessions to contribute to building a barricade, hardly anyone ever sets fire to their own car. The burning car says something, to be sure, but, unlike streaming and blocking in the way analyzed above, it for sure does not make good on any democratic promises of the street.

Now, in the last section of this article, I turn to two contemporary challenges to democratic street life. One has to do with invasions of privacy; the other concerns restrictions on freedom of assembly and increasingly draconian reactions to blocking in particular (members of Last Generation have been subject to preventive detention, for instance; the organization has also been investigated by the German authorities with a view as to whether it might qualify as a ‘criminal association’).

Two contemporary threats: the other eyes on the street; new blocks to blocking and streaming

Authoritarians distrust streets, or at least small streets, in which people act unobserved and might become harder to find: Mao’s China prevented the publication of detailed street maps (Sudjic, 2016, p. 70); wherever possible, states have sought to replace irregularities with grids and tried to make cities legible from a bird’s eye-view (or an absolute ruler, for that matter) (Scott, 1998). Haussmann disliked arcades not only because they were growing in ways not properly planned, but also because they made for semi-private spaces well-suited to engaging in political conspiracy. Protest movements need safe spaces to meet away from the eyes of the authorities, to plan, and to re-group. These could be private homes, but many homes will not necessarily be, or at least feel, safe.

But if one is planning nothing illegal, and has nothing to hide anyway, why safe spaces and anonymity? In fact, is the latter not fundamentally opposed to democratic intuitions about visibility (and visible democratic community-building), as well as accountability (for which visibility is a precondition)? People seeing each other clearly mattered a great deal for the ancient Athenians; the sun was supposed to shine onto and entirely illuminate the face of speakers in a democracy (be it on the Pnyx, or, later, in the Theatre of Dionysus). But could hiding also be an important affordance of the built environment, and streets in particular, for democracy?

To be sure, democracy as understood today officially provides spaces for secrecy. The voting booth is the most obvious one (Hannah Arendt found it problematic precisely because it allowed citizens to evade the glaring light of publicity). In what the French call isoloir, one has a democratic dialogue at most with oneself, and, above all, one’s political decision does not become visible (other than through forming part of an aggregate); one certainly is not accountable for it.

Even philosophers not hankering after the glaring light of the pnyx have found this arrangement problematic. Open voting, John Stuart Mill argued, would improve democratic decision-making; he declared that ‘when the voter’s own preferences are apt to lead him wrong, but the feeling of responsibility to others may keep him right, not secrecy, but publicity, should be the rule’ (Mill, 1977).

But who are the others to whom one would be ‘responsible’? For one thing, they could be those in a position to penalize us for what they consider the wrong decisions: bosses, the patriarch of the family, friends who object to a radical vote. Whether they would really do so is somewhat besides the point; the very sense of the possibility might alter our choices (Manin, 2015).

There is a good reason the US Supreme Court has affirmed a right to anonymity for those engaged in political activity outside the isoloir, in plain public sight. An elderly lady handing out leaflets about a proposed school tax in Ohio insisted on her right not to reveal her identity; the Ohio Supreme Court initially ruled against her, on the grounds that the state prohibited anonymous political literature. The US Supreme Court, pointing out that the Federalist Papers had appeared under fictious names, ruled in the defendant’s favor. The judges argued that

. . . anonymous pamphleteering . . . [has] an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation and their ideas from suppression at the hand of an intolerant society (McIntyre v. Ohio).

In a well-functioning democracy, one should not have to worry about holding unpopular opinions (and one should have no reason to fear sanctions for planning protests). But, of course, many democracies do not function that well. And even in relatively decent ones, it is forgivable to have worries about being penalized for a political stance.

Where threats really are very unlikely to materialize, protected spaces of solitude and anonymity are nevertheless important because they allow for reflection and for experimentation with arguments and ideas. A space to retreat, the shadows of arcades and the stoa in ancient Athens, for instance (not to speak of the room of one’s own in a home), are a physical precondition for exercising public autonomy in the glaring light of democratic assemblies. Even Arendt conceded that ‘a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 51). That ‘darker ground’ might be the room one commands in one’s own home. But it could also be the streets.

Obviously, streets are not the prime site for ensuring privacy. But streets have become spaces for invasions of privacy which we do not so easily suspect. Seemingly innocuous forms of infrastructure such as LinkNYC—the kiosks that allow people to charge their phones and obtain all kinds of information—are in fact integral parts of surveillance capitalism, to employ Shoshannah Zuboff’s seminal concept (Zuboff, 2019). The supposedly free service exists to monetize the information provided by the person on the street (we think we are getting information; instead, we are gifting it). Not only that, the known and increasingly transparent citizen on the street is likely to be steered by search engines, map applications, etc. in particular ways (Green, 2020). The project by Sidewalk Labs (part of Google) de facto to create its own city on the Toronto waterfront—advertised as an ‘inclusive urban development’—would have taken this logic to an extreme: it would have required users to use Google apps, in particular its mobile payment system; and it would have provided the company with a ‘lab’ constantly to observe (and, eventually, to predict) human behavior.

CCTV cameras, whose effects on street safety are not as evident as their advocates make them out to be, add yet another form of surveillance, not to speak of IMSI-catchers and other technologies of which most citizens are completely unaware (Véliz, 2018). We have our eyes less and less on the streets (and instead on our screens). But the street constantly has its eyes on us.

The seeing street creates novel dilemmas for protestors in a democracy. They have every reason to leave their smartphones at home; but not having a phone also means that they cannot easily coordinate actions on the streets, or, for that matter, film police violence (Véliz, 2018). The technology also changes the moral calculus: putting one’s body at risk at a protest was a sign of serious commitment; today, one might not risk limb and life while sitting at home at a computer, but nevertheless endure levels of exposure (as one is being tracked invisibly) that also demonstrate moral seriousness; the problem is that such demonstrations might not be legible as such for other citizens willing to engage in protest (nor, for that matter, impress the authorities very much). US civil rights movement protestors willing to have the dogs of southern police forces unleashed on them; me being willing to be tracked online—the very attempt at comparison seems ridiculous.

I argued earlier that the notion of the street as a site of surprise and spontaneous encounters has always been somewhat oversold; undersold, by contrast, is the story of the street as a space for solitude in public and, possibly, the creation of political possibilities in the shelter of relative anonymity, that is, Arendt’s dark ground. Trading these features away for small conveniences is a bad decision in any democracy; and we should refuse to grant ever more access to information about us gratuitously.

Invasion of privacy in public is not the only challenge to a democratic street life, the normative promises of which might have the best chance of being realized during times of intense protest. Freedom of assembly is a very old right in the US, but it has often been subsumed under free speech or freedom of association; in other countries, its recognition as a central communicative right in a democracy is more recent (Salát, 2015). Almost everywhere, however, both streaming and blocking have been rendered more difficult in recent years—not necessarily by outright prohibitions, but by comprehensive efforts, in the words of the American legal scholar Timothy Zick, to ‘manage dissent’—for instance diverting it away from symbolically important spaces in the name of minimizing the possible disturbances of other citizens, or depriving participants of objects that could be used for blocking (this is clearest with the new UK’s Public Order Act, aimed at Extinction Rebellion members locking themselves to objects) (Zick, 2023). An analysis of these new restriction is beyond the scope of this article; my point is simply to sensitize us to the need to keep the streets available for protest (both streaming and blocking), because such protests can be the best way to make good on the promises of unexpected encounters and solidarity-building. In particular, invoking public order so as to prevent protestors from being in the face of other citizens betrays those promises.

Conclusion

This article has explored two arguments for the special role of streets for democracy: the recognition of diversity through spontaneous encounter (ideally, the street as a site of pleasant surprises); and the development of cooperation through continuous shared street life (the street as a site of relative familiarity and a site where shared problems can be discovered and discussed). I have suggested that these arguments need to be relativized in light of the modern city’s normatively important promises of ‘unassimilated otherness’ (Young, 2012) and a particular form of privacy-in-public (which, ideally, helps with processes of self-reinvention). I have further noted that street protests can be the most plausible form of making good on encounters-of-diversity and community-building. Finally, I flagged two developments for critical attention: the threat to privacy-in-public posed by surveillance; and the increasing restrictions on streaming and especially blocking put in place by governments intent on displacing or at least heavily taming dissent. Resistance to these developments will primarily be couched in languages of basic rights; but, if my claims have been persuasive, the uses of the street for democracy can also be marshaled.