Planetary Square. Conflict, Circulation, and the Fate of the Square in the Planetary Metropolis

The square has historically functioned as both a concrete urban space and a symbolic figure through which political life, conflict, and collective appearance have been articulated. Under conditions of planetary urbanization, logistical capitalism, and digital infrastructures, however, this figure has been profoundly transformed. Rather than disappearing, the square has become unstable, displaced, and multiplied across heterogeneous sites. To conceptualize this shift, the article introduces the notion of the planetary square. The planetary square does not denote the global scaling or nostalgic survival of the traditional piazza. Instead, it names a political-spatial function specific to the planetary metropolis: a distributed, intermittent, and mobile spatialization of conflict that emerges where flows of value, people, and information are interrupted. Drawing on debates on planetary urbanization and on the metropolis as a social relation produced through class struggle, the article situates contemporary conflicts beyond the bounded city form. Through an analysis of global protest cycles since 2011—from Tahrir and Occupy to the revolts of 2018–2020—the article shows how political action increasingly targets infrastructures of circulation rather than symbolic civic centers. Roads, logistics hubs, transport systems, and digital platforms become key sites where the planetary square temporarily takes shape, revealing both the connective power and the deep asymmetries of the planetary metropolis. The planetary square thus appears as a problem-space rather than an ideal form: a fragile and conflictual threshold where political subjectivities are composed through action rather than identity. It provides a framework for rethinking urban politics beyond nostalgia for the city and beyond purely descriptive accounts of global urbanization, foregrounding conflict as constitutive of planetary space.