On the road again. Le strade come luoghi della protesta e della trasformazione

Abstract

In many people’s opinion, when you are in an open public place (street) you can hold meetings, and experience freedom and unexpected events. This is only true for a section of our society, though. In this article, I plan to show the features of an open public place that facilitates social change. Using the Paris Commune, the women’s movement ‘Reclaim the night’ and ‘Occupy Wall Street’ as reference, I propose that an open public place (street) is suitable for the development of a democratic process if it is built on the basis of the three concepts of space, is created by urban planners who are organic intellectuals such as Gramsci, urban movements can express their views, and the lower classes participate in the planning.