EveryUrban systems few decades, the street returns as an idea to be reconsidered, destroyed, and overcome, or, alternatively, to be rebuilt and recovered. In the 1920s and ‘30s, modern architectureArchitecture placed the street on the doomed list. Such was the case of the Plan Voisin, in which Le Corbusier projected the complete disappearance of the street by converting it into an entity detached from any spatial expression. Some 50 years later, architects such as Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, and Rob Krier claimed the historical dimension of the city, proposing the recovery of its typological components as a foundation of the idea of community and civility. In 1986, The MIT Press published On Streets, a book edited by Stanford Anderson with the contribution of some of the most well-known critics of the moment. Here, the street is vindicated as the fundamental component of the urban structure and as a scene of political struggle. Around the turn of the century, New UrbanismUrbanism recovered the street as the elementary unit of urban composition. In its reconsidered format, the street becomes an agent for recovering the pedestrianPedestrians quality toward creating a denser urban fabric. In these visions, the street emerges as a generic and abstract element, generating a system of grids and an environmentally defined space with particular conditions centered on questions such as perception and appropriation. In the first case, by linking to its structural nature, the street is related to the delimitation of domains of action, the origin of the city, and the relationship between the parts and the whole. In the second case, it is related to urban life, its differentiated characteristics, and associated meanings. Using case studies in the Americas, this chapter aims to explore the tension between these two phases, exploring the notions of the civic and the public, the perceptions of civic dignity, and the behaviors associated with the street.