What Makes an Inclusive Public Square?

A Space With the Right Infrastructure Can Support, Welcome, and Empower Everyone

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

For this fourth installment, our contributors think about how we …

Where Local People Build Local Change

2023 Book Prize Winner Michelle Wilde Anderson Says Strong Communities Need New Narratives, New Networks—And Investments in the People Who Already Live There

Four of the poorest, most maligned places in America have become beacons of hope—and burgeoning centers of trust, in people and local government—since going broke in the Great Recession. How …

Will Online Courses Make Education a Human Right?

The Overwhelming Majority of Today's MOOC Students Are Western, White, and Well-Off. Recent Experiments Suggest How That Could Change.

Just the first word in the name—massive open online course—poses the question. Just how big can MOOCs be?

MOOCs combine filmed lectures, readings, course material, and online interactions among professors and …