On the other side is the most beautiful street in the most beautiful neighborhood in the city — the one street in Norfolk that successfully depaved thirty years ago. Street trees in Norfolk — some so massive they take over the sidewalk — are being gradually replaced by more easily maintained species like crepe myrtle. The willow oaks line it on both sides. Quercus phellos, a single species with long, narrow leaves that turn amber in the fall. The night herons nest in them every spring. The intersection backs up to a wetland where, if you arrive at the right moment, you can see every heron species in the Hampton Roads region in the same place at the same time. There's a canal just beyond with two broods of goslings this year and one of ducklings that just fledged. We see friends there regularly. A half-hour walk can, on a good day, take several hours. Last year we saw muskrats for the first time.
Three years later, in a different city. A fish market had just closed. The vendors were still cleaning up — hosing down the stalls, boxing what was left, the smell of the sea fading slowly from the pavement. It was early evening in the Gothic quarter.
Not a performance — a class, or something between a class and a party, the boundary dissolving quickly. People of all ages. Couples, groups of friends, laughter, a few people alone at the edges bobbing along, already getting drawn in. The permanent covered stalls along the street sold something cold and sweet. The street, which an hour earlier had been about fish, was now about dancing, and nobody had organized this except in the loosest possible sense — someone had brought a bike and a sound system and an idea, and the city had made the rest possible. Music made the street a commons — evoked it, not organized it: the oldest magic, felt before it is understood.
Barcelona has been transforming its intersections for years. Taking back space that was given to cars in the 1960s and 1970s, returning it to the people who live on the streets that those cars cut through. The city calls them superilles — clusters of streets deprioritized for through traffic, freed up for walking, cycling, planting, sitting, dancing. Rupture, at municipal scale — the car's code broken on the street, the street turned toward the commons. The policy was controversial when it started.
The infrastructure had been changed, the space had been returned, and what people did with it was exactly what you would expect people to do when given a street and an evening: they made something together that none of them could have made alone. Tuesday-night practice: the new world danced as if it had always been here.
There is a street in Barcelona — there are dozens of them now — where the pavement has been removed.
Not cracked, not potholed, not worn away. Deliberately removed. The asphalt taken up, the ground beneath it returned to something closer to earth: trees, benches, planters, space for people to sit and talk and let their children run. What was a car lane is now a plaza. What was through-traffic is now a neighborhood.
The city calls them superblocks. But on the streets themselves, something happened that the planners had predicted and still found surprising: the moment the cars were slowed, the moment the pavement was lifted and something was planted, the neighborhood changed. People stopped. People talked. The street became a commons before anyone had finished debating whether it should be.
This is what the means-are-the-ends insight looks like in concrete and soil. You don't build the commons after you've settled the political question. You build it, and the building settles the question — in the bodies and habits and common sense of the people who start using it, who start governing it, who start defending it when someone proposes to take it back.
The garden is political. The street is political. The decision about whether to pave the intersection or plant it is a decision about what kind of community this is and whose needs it serves.
In one of those depaved Barcelona intersections, children are playing where cars were moving. The woman who lives on the corner knows the name of the man three floors above her. Neither of them would have known it when the street was organized around the car's passage. The knowledge is in the soil now. The changed assumption is in the body of everyone who has sat in that plaza on a Tuesday evening and felt what a street can be.
This was also Debord's détournement at its largest scale: the financial district's own public plaza repurposed as a commons. The master's space, turned. And the speaking circle, enacted as the people's mic — the form that already knew how to receive the singular, discovered again, in a park in lower Manhattan, by people who had never sat in a circle that worked this way before. And Alexander's pattern language appearing spontaneously in the camp: the kitchen in one place, the library in another, the medical tent at the edge — the community generating its own pattern language because pattern languages always emerge when the conditions are right. And Jacobs's sidewalk ballet, in a plaza instead of a street, for as long as the conditions held.