“The street” is central to all uprisings, not least the Arab intifadas. A place of gathering and resistance, of presence and contestation, “the street refuses,” “the street demands,” and so on. How do such expressions tie in to the slogan made famous across the Arab world, “al-shaab yureed…” or “the people desire or demand…”? How does “street” relate to “people?” What about streets in the more ordinary sense: what is the relation, material and semiotic, between “the street” as a political mode and actual urban streets? What are the political performatives that transform a street into “the street”, from “riots” to organized interventions, from conventional protest marches to flash mobs, from shouted slogans to toyi-toying, and from tear gas to tasers, and batons to tanks? In short, from immediate disruptions to mass mediated interventions and projections? Is there an identifiable style to “the street”?
Space is constituted also by movements and trajectories cutting across and through it. Yet those trajectories are marked at different speeds, often take different modes, and may be out of synch with one another. Certain populations or groups are (supposed to be) immobilized and fixed. Their movement itself becomes a vital act of resistance. How do different spatial trajectories play a role in the current Arab revolts? How do speed and movement translate into political action or containment? What about the lingering question of immobility for Palestinians—and mobilization, in every sense of the term, as the obvious antidote? What about the proliferation of walls in different sites around the world, that shape movement as much as deny it, and the attendant struggles to undercut or bypass them?
Walking often comes to express—sometimes willingly, sometimes forcibly—a kind of alternative to modernity itself (e.g., occupied Palestinians). Wars likewise make walking a primary mode of transportation, both as a strategy of war and as the effect of wars displacements (e.g., Libya). During the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the distinction between, on the one hand, the kind of intimate knowledge of the land and landscape that only walking makes possible, and, on the other hand, mechanized modes of surveillance and seemingly (but in the end not really) omnipotent power that are utterly inimical to walking, turned out to be one of the pivots of the resistance. Even under more banal circumstances, walking offers a very different form of access to sites and streets, and makes available a very different understanding of landscape and location, than other more mechanized forms of transport. It also produces a different habitation of time and speed. Scales of movement—walking skateboarding, cycling, automobiles, buses, and trains—produce very different experiences of the city which will be examined too.