Reclaiming the streets? Possibilities for post-pandemic public space

Public streets are the quintessential site of politics: not just marches and assemblies where rights are demanded and disrupted, but the everyday expression of collective decisions about how we live together, about who gets access to which space and for what purposes, about the role of the state and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Those collective decisions are often highly contested, so that the relative rights and responsibilities of citizens and their cities remain the subject of ongoing negotiation. The rules that regulate streets are always uneven. The ways those rules are interpreted--and sometimes amended--are influenced to a significant degree by popular understandings about the kinds of use (and users) that are and are not legitimate in public space. Those understandings, and in turn behaviors and rules, can shift.