City streets are contested spaces. A given physical design and set of regulations enable some uses and users and hampers others. There is nothing natural about this. History teaches us that what we today might see as a norm, was not always such. This also means that we can always question a norm and advocate a different one. However, for any change to happen, this very possibility needs to be made visible, debatable, and actionable, which is typically not.   

City street experiments are one way in which present designs, regulations and uses of city streets can be questioned and different ones can be explored. They are ‘intentional, temporary changes of the street use, regulation and/or form’ (Bertolini, 2020). Making underlying tensions of current street arrangements visible, street experiments are booming around the world and the pandemic seems to have given them an additional boost. Street experiments are also, and inevitably, contested, as they also pursue certain possibilities at the expense of others. Their key quality, then, lays perhaps not so much in what they strive for, or achieve, but in the very fact that they can open imaginations and stir debates. This is important, as what and whom city streets enable, and hamper reverberates on the functionalities and identities of the whole city. 

In this contribution the potentials and limitations of street experiments to rethink streets and cities will be discussed, with an empirical focus on current initiatives attempting to shift the focus of city streets ‘from cars to people’.