Framing the street

This chapter summarises the debates on the street in history and social theory. It provides a concise overview of the most important conceptual challenges in research on streets, as well as how research into street life has changed over time. The chapter focuses on the most important schools and trends in the study of street life in past and present with the aim to provide the reader with a frame of reference to further explore. Iconic early influences on the thinking about cities, city life and the role of the street in urban experience are scholars working in two of Europe’s burgeoning metropoles in first half of twentieth century. The variety of definitions of the social component of streets brings us back to the impact of local specificity in a manner similar to our attempts to define the material nature of the street. The chapter concludes by considering the state of the art in the history of the pre-industrial street.