This is a century of the city. There is a clear revival of urbanity with an emphasis on urban form and resurgence of mixed-use places, investment in urban infrastructure and an increasing trend of an urban café culture. As a part of the urban revival, streets are beginning to get the attention they deserve. Numerous streets in cities around the world have been transformed significantly in several ways to make them more pedestrian oriented people places. Miles of streets have been tamed in favor of the peripatetic—local and tourist alike—and the physical environment has been drastically altered. Yet, many of these recent efforts (for example, Complete Streets in the US) result in over-standardization due to their “sacred” and myopic focus on mobility-related “quality of life” goals. I argue that these approaches are inadequate and even deceptive because they disregard other social, political, and economic territorial patterns and flatten the rich ecology of the street. Intentionally or inadvertently, the resultant street becomes a place of limited recognition, the loss of dignity for many, and subtly a space of inequality, disrespect, and injustice.

As the most ubiquitous, pan-cultural and open public space network, the street has the capacity to be the place of diversity and difference that gives the right to visibility, recognition for self-identity, dignity and respect, and a sense of belonging to all. If we look closely, there are urban public spaces that defy or at least resist the common populist trends. Examining urban neighborhood commercial streets in many cultural contexts reveals that even though the contemporary urban street can never be an unregulated place of unconstrained diversity, there are streets that counter the prevalent culture of consumption, and one can find visible signs of spontaneity, diversity and difference. These streets display the many facets of public space: they are open territories of numerous types of exchange — social (passive, fleeting and enduring) economic, and political; they are places where negotiation is an active means of dealing with difference; they are places where different outlooks and backgrounds are recognized; and through all this they provide a space of belonging to many. By supporting a genuine social life these streets serve many roles: a pedestrian sanctuary, a place of social capital, support and community, a neighborly territory, a place for play and learning, a place for survival, an outdoor open space, and a place of cultural memory and history.