The Square Belongs to Us: Public Space, Artificial Intelligence, and Democracy
Public space has never been politically neutral. The street, the park, the plaza, the schoolyard are not merely the backdrop of democratic life. They are its medium. They are where citizens go to become visible to one another and to those in power, to practice the difficult and necessary art of existing together, even in disagreement. A democracy that controls its public spaces controls its own opposition. And a government that makes ordinary people afraid to be in public has already won something it was never supposed to have.
This is the thread that connects a bridge in Selma in 1965 to a park in lower Manhattan in 2011 to the streets of Minneapolis in the winter of 2026. It is a thread worth tracing because the stakes at each point were the same, even if the tools of control have changed almost beyond recognition.
On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. State troopers were waiting at the other end. What followed was broadcast into living rooms across America and changed the political calculus of the country within weeks. What the marchers understood, and what their opponents understood with equal clarity, was that the physical act of moving through public space together was itself a claim — to belonging, to citizenship, to the right to be seen. A federal court later affirmed that the state does not have unlimited authority to manage public space into compliance. It should not have required a court to say so. But it did then, and it does now.
In the spring of 1989, students filled Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the largest pro-democracy demonstration in the history of the People's Republic of China. At the center of the square they erected a statue they called the Goddess of Democracy. When the government sent the People's Liberation Army to clear the square on the night of June 3rd, its first symbolic act was to destroy the statue. The message was precise: this square does not belong to you, and neither does what it represents. The massacre that followed was not only an act of violence. It was the annihilation of public space as a site of political possibility — a reminder, written in the most extreme terms available to the state, of what it looks like when the square is taken away entirely.
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street chose Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for reasons that turned out to be more revealing than its organizers may have intended. Zuccotti is what urban planners call a Privately Owned Public Space maintained by a private corporation in exchange for zoning concessions, technically open to all but governed by an entity whose interests are not necessarily democratic ones. When the Bloomberg administration cleared the park in November 2011, citing sanitation, the eviction made the point Occupy had been trying to make: the boundaries of public space are negotiated, and the people doing the negotiating are not always the public. The proliferation of such spaces across American cities is a map of how democratic space has been quietly privatized, transferred from the commons to the corporation, one zoning concession at a time.
In Philadelphia, where I work on public space investment, this tension is not theoretical. It is the difference between a park that serves a neighborhood and one that serves the development around it. It is a negotiation that is never quite finished, and whose outcome is never quite fair.
The Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 were the largest protest movement in American history. They were also among the most surveilled. Facial recognition software, aerial surveillance, and cell-site simulators that swept up the data of everyone in the vicinity were deployed across cities to track demonstrators exercising a constitutional right. What AI changes is not the impulse to surveil, which is as old as the state itself, but the scope and the permanence. A networked system that can identify thousands of faces within hours and build longitudinal records of people's movements and associations does not observe a moment. It accumulates a history that can be used in ways that have nothing to do with the public safety that justified the infrastructure in the first place.
Legal scholars call the consequence the chilling effect: the measurable phenomenon by which surveillance causes people to modify or abandon civic participation. People do not simply decide to protest or not to protest. They make smaller calculations about whether to carry a sign, whether to stand near a speaker, whether a cause is worth what might follow. Multiplied across millions of people, those calculations produce the kind of enforced silence that authoritarianism has always preferred.
Today, in Minneapolis, federal immigration enforcement has colonized the most ordinary public spaces: parks, street corners, school drop-off lines, transforming them from sites of community into sites of fear. Residents have stopped going out. Neighborhoods have gone quiet. This is what the erosion of public space looks like in practice: not a dramatic act of destruction, as in Tiananmen, but a slow withdrawal, citizens calculating that the cost of being in public has become too high.
The policy responses are not hard to name: bans on facial recognition, community oversight of surveillance infrastructure, legal limits on enforcement activity near schools and parks. The European Union has moved further than any comparable democracy in codifying these protections. The United States has no such framework.
But the deeper question is not really about policy. It is about what we believe public space is for. If it exists for the orderly management of approved behaviors, then surveillance is simply the most efficient tool available. If it exists for the practice of democracy in all its inconvenient, unpredictable fullness, then the transformation of the square into a monitored enclosure is not a security upgrade. It is a forfeiture.
The students in Tiananmen built a Goddess of Democracy in the center of the square because they understood that claiming space was itself an act of freedom. The marchers in Selma understood the same thing. So did the protesters in Minneapolis, assembling in subzero temperatures to say that the street still belongs to the people who live on it.
The square belongs to us. The question is what we are willing to do to keep it.
