Questioning streets. On plural origins, plural uses, and plural futures

• Streets have not always been essential for human movement across space. • Explorations of academic and non-academic literature, music, and interviews with three experts provide insights into the origins, uses and potential futures of streets. • A map of plural street themes must include, at least seven, around Access, Trade, Efficiency, Public Space, Inclusion, Worship, and Imaginaries. • A plural view of streets opens opportunities for shaping spaces with opportunities for deep re-thinking and shaping human futures. Streets occupy a vast amount of the space most people inhabit daily, and yet they often go unnoticed as an explicit object. This article goes into some depth on what streets have been, are, and could be, based on a historical and literature review, three expert interviews, as well as a search through songs and the music scene, and literary quotes. It also includes a linguistic reflection on the term. Based on these various sources, the article then offers a set of seven themes around which streets can be understood, including one about “the as-yet unimagined” and a set of questions that can help guide investigations based on each of these themes. The article thus broadens the view of the multiple roles that streets could have in the future, in terms of mobility and transportation, but also far beyond these aspects. Finally, it makes a larger conceptual provocation: how might plurality be embraced without sacrificing clarity, thus empowering the varied realities of people, and their requirements and wishes, to materialize in their daily lives − without losing touch with questions of sustainability and justice?