Preindustrial city streets hosted politics wherever elite rule was incomplete

Evidence

Wherever the rule of the elites was less than absolute, the city’s streets and plazas and marketplaces were also the scenes of political meetings and discussions. Athens in the fifth century B.c. is perhaps the most well-known exemplar of this tendency, but it is by no means the only one (Bowr~ 1952:12-13; G. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 205