The public image projected during the G8 summit in July 2001 could not have been more imperial. Thirteen-foot barbed steel fences demarcated two restricted zones within the historic center of Genoa, Italy: Red, for residents and delegates, and Yellow, under police control, for demonstrators. Voided of local activity, the city gained an urbanism of eerie luxury; emptiness blanketed the normally Fiat-filled streets surrounding the Palazzo Ducale. The silence caused some journalists to compare the metropolis to medieval towns hit by the bubonic plague. They were wrong. The minicity that emerged in Genoa belonged entirely to the 21st century. The streets were cannily rezoned, with physical space neatly containing and curtailing speech and action. Organized protest had met the security state's science of crowd control: free speech zoning.

| Armin Linke

Urban zoning originated in 19th-century Europe as a tool for regulating land and building uses. The movement grew out of concerns over the way cities were being transformed by industrialization. In the US, New York's 1916 Zoning Ordinance codified the size and location of skyscrapers to allow light to reach the streets below. But by the time of Genoa 85 years later, regulations had shifted from height and land use to limits on population density and access. From a tool of permanence and planning, zoning became an instrument of transience and politics.

Today, our public sphere – spaces where people can freely exchange opinions, including physical locales like cafés as well as figurative ones like newspapers – appears to be imploding. What we call public is being radically compressed into, at best, mere megabytes. Genoa will forever be remembered as the summit whose carefully calibrated precincts were pierced by the haunting death of 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani. The Red Zone's meetings were far less attractive to cameras than the colorful cacophony surrounding them, and many of the 430 people injured in the Yellow Zone shared media airspace with G8 heads of state.

If Genoa partitioned free speech, subsequent G8 conferences have pushed it even further from the action. The 2002 meeting was held in Kananaskis, Alberta – a region so remote that even delegates had difficulty reaching it. And the 2003 venue of Evian, a French spa town squeezed between a mountain and a lake, explicitly excluded protesters from Evian itself – forcing them onto Web sites, where they plotted a blockade of the town's access roads.

| Armin Linke

Such Web activism has blurred the distinction between organized and spontaneous speech. Web-fueled protests, such as those this spring against the war in Iraq, offer the perfect Alice-in-Wonderland escape hatch from Genoa-like controls. For all its benefits, the Web remains a virtual space. To the extent it enables speech to break free of containment, it is a welcome tool. But it isn't altogether the solution. Our Free Speech Zone needs a new shape, one with less mapping and more latitude. If it's dull nostalgia to dream of café politics, it's deliberate neglect to stand by while dialog and debate are zoned out of our democracies.