The global street

The Global Street is not a literal street – it can be a square, an empty space, an ambiguous border zone, or a refugee camp. Led by Saskia Sassen, the Global Street is imagined as a public space where those without access to formal instruments of power can make: a politics, a history, publicness, or a public life.

The aim is to open up a larger conceptual field to understand the complex interactions between power and powerlessness as they get shaped in urban space. Cities enable powerlessness to become complex, not simply elementary.

In this complexity lies the possibility of making history and remaking the political. Public space is central to giving the powerless rhetorical and operational openings. Becoming present, visible, to each other can alter the character of powerlessness. But that public space needs to be distinguished from the concept of public space in the European tradition. This leads to the concept of The Global Street.
With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically, “street and square” are marked differently from “boulevard and piazza”: the first signals action and the second, rituals.

We see this potential for the making of the civic across the centuries. The overcoming of urban conflicts has often been the source for an expanded civicness. The cases that have become iconic in western historiography are Augsburg and Moorish Spain. In both, a genuinely enlightened leadership and citizenry worked at constituting a shared civicness. But there are many other both old and new cases. Old Jerusalem’s bazaar was a space of commercial and religious coexistence for long periods of time.

The project began in October 2012 with a conference at Columbia University titled ‘Presence and Absence in the City’, which was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Panels included ‘The State of the Street: Eviction and Displacements’, ‘Technological Space’, ‘The Trade of Ideas and Goods: From Artifacts to Citizenship’ and ‘Theatrical Space’.