Amelia Thorpe

Streets are the quintessential sites of democracy: not just marches and assemblies where rights are demanded and disrupted, but also 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. Through activities on public streets, people make material and discursive claims, and those claims contribute to the ongoing constitution (and sometimes reorientation) of the norms, rules and practices through which cities are governed.

For much of the last century, streets in many places have been governed to prioritise travel in private cars, and the need to change is increasingly urgent. Paris has been a leader in the shift to sustainable mobility. Beyond established democratic channels, material engagements with infrastructure – from gilets jaunes to Uber Eats and Vélib'– have been central.

Infrastructure provides a useful lens through which to reflect on this shift and its implications for green democracy in Europe and beyond. What might be necessary to sustain and extend sustainable mobility spatially, within and beyond Paris, and temporally, past the Hidalgo administration? How do engagements with infrastructure influence participants’ understandings of legality, and in turn their practices of civic engagement and democracy? How do social understandings about rights and responsibilities take effect in the world and become ‘real’?