Parking, often treated as a mundane logistical concern, is an important site of contestation in urban life. At its core, it reflects the struggle over public space in cities, where demand routinely exceeds supply.
Although debates about cars usually focus on externalities like emissions or their dominance over other modes of urban mobility, vehicles need to be stored, and drivers who use their vehicles in a city expect space to be available. Yet such spaces are typically scarce and therefore valuable. Municipalities attempt to impose order (and generate revenue) through ordinances, signage, enforcement, and fines, which reflect broader priorities about whose mobility matters.
Parking regulation, then, is more than bureaucratic management; it is an exercise of state power that structures everyday mobility and privileges certain users (e.g., residents, commuters, or commercial actors) over others in certain spaces, during particular times.
But urban order does not flow only from law. Informal norms shape behavior: whether a departing driver “owes” a space to someone waiting, how long it is acceptable to double-park, or whether putting a chair in a snow-cleared space is legitimate. Such practices reveal how everyday interactions generate micro-negotiations (and aggressions) of entitlement and authority. They demonstrate that order is continually produced and contested at the street level, not simply imposed from above.
Conflicts over towing, double-parking, or “space-saving” further highlight how residents and drivers attempt to assert claims over scarce resources, sometimes in defiance of official rules. These disputes expose tensions between formal regulation and lived practice, linking the politics of parking to broader questions of urban justice, governance, and the “right to the city.” The questions over who gets access to public space, what types of space, under what conditions, and under what terms are dominant in this exercise.
Ultimately, parking is not a mundane logistical issue but a microcosm of broader urban struggles over the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, and the contestation of urban space itself.
Photo credit:
Title: Improptu Parking Sign Washington, D.C.
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_5130-scaled.jpg19202560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-09-14 12:22:062025-09-14 12:43:38Parking as a Microcosm of Broader Urban Struggles
A little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.
The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.
But this framing misses a handful of important things.
Protest or Drunken Outburst?
At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.
Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.
However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.
The Criminalization of Trivial Acts
Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.
But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.
More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.
Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief
Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.
Why It Matters
We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.
It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.
The Real Question
So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?
Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.
And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).
Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.
Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.
Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2025-08-30-at-8.32.59-AM.png458978Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-31 12:40:572025-10-19 17:44:44Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident
We commute, run errands, scroll our phones, and mentally prepare for the next task. It’s functional. But in the process, we miss more than the visual landscape of the city. We miss its soul.
The streets aren’t just spaces we pass through. They are living classrooms, stages, and laboratories. Every sidewalk interaction, graffiti tag, or street vendor’s setup is a signal, a small lesson in how people inhabit and adapt to urban life.
The Street as a Living Text
As Henri Lefebvre argued in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, urban life has a rhythm that reveals itself when we slow down and pay attention. These moments are not background noise; they’re signs, signals, and signification (i.e., semiotics).
Appreciating and understanding what is happening in these contexts helps build one’s street literacy: a skill in reading the city beyond maps or guides, but through the unspoken codes, impromptu interactions, and creative uses of space that define urban life. What happens when we treat street culture (a dominant element of urban life) not just as a style or a commodity but as a way of knowing?
Street Culture as Knowledge
From Sigmund Freud’s analysis of unconscious motivation to Michel de Certeau’s insights on how we navigate cities and bend the rules of modern life without even realizing it, scholars have studied “everyday life.” They’ve examined how media and pop culture shape our habits, values, and identities.
But most of these thinkers miss one crucial thing: the complex interactions among people who live, work, or access the street.
Street culture isn’t just graffiti, street art, fashion, or slang. It’s an entire ecosystem of informal rules, spatial tactics, survival strategies, and creative expression. From local kids skateboarding down alleys to unhoused people arranging sleeping spots, these actors navigate the city with an intelligence rooted in real experience.
Every interaction on the street, from the way a mural signals a neighborhood’s history to how a sticker or tag marks territory or ideas, is part of this living knowledge. Understanding it is like learning a language: once you notice the rhythms, cues, and codes, the city speaks to you differently.
Why This Matters Now
Understanding street culture isn’t just interesting, it’s increasingly important.
Post-pandemic cities (especially large global ones) are changing fast. Public spaces are being reshaped at lightning speed. Surveillance has expanded. Informal economies are under pressure. And gentrification is pushing out the very people who give neighborhoods (and the streets) their character and edge.
If we ignore street culture, we not only lose vital knowledge, but we also lose the chance to see the city from the ground up.
For most of my scholarly career, I’ve examined street culture (in one shape or form), but now is a time to develop a more thoughtful framework. I’m exploring how people create meaning in urban spaces, not just through organizations, institutions, or technologies, but through movement, adaptation, and shared, often unspoken codes. I argue that paying closer attention to the streets can deepen our connection to our cities and each other.
Because when we stop sleepwalking through the city, we start seeing it for what it is: a stage, a classroom, a home.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Bego2good1
Title: The Hub – East 149th Street & 3rd Avenue in Mott Haven / Melrose, The Bronx
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/The_Hub_-_East_149th_Street_The_Bronx.jpg12801920Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-24 13:11:172025-09-01 20:55:06Why Paying Attention to the Streets Can Change How You See the City
Parking as a Microcosm of Broader Urban Struggles
/by Jeffrey Ian RossParking, often treated as a mundane logistical concern, is an important site of contestation in urban life. At its core, it reflects the struggle over public space in cities, where demand routinely exceeds supply.
Although debates about cars usually focus on externalities like emissions or their dominance over other modes of urban mobility, vehicles need to be stored, and drivers who use their vehicles in a city expect space to be available. Yet such spaces are typically scarce and therefore valuable. Municipalities attempt to impose order (and generate revenue) through ordinances, signage, enforcement, and fines, which reflect broader priorities about whose mobility matters.
Parking regulation, then, is more than bureaucratic management; it is an exercise of state power that structures everyday mobility and privileges certain users (e.g., residents, commuters, or commercial actors) over others in certain spaces, during particular times.
But urban order does not flow only from law. Informal norms shape behavior: whether a departing driver “owes” a space to someone waiting, how long it is acceptable to double-park, or whether putting a chair in a snow-cleared space is legitimate. Such practices reveal how everyday interactions generate micro-negotiations (and aggressions) of entitlement and authority. They demonstrate that order is continually produced and contested at the street level, not simply imposed from above.
Conflicts over towing, double-parking, or “space-saving” further highlight how residents and drivers attempt to assert claims over scarce resources, sometimes in defiance of official rules. These disputes expose tensions between formal regulation and lived practice, linking the politics of parking to broader questions of urban justice, governance, and the “right to the city.” The questions over who gets access to public space, what types of space, under what conditions, and under what terms are dominant in this exercise.
Ultimately, parking is not a mundane logistical issue but a microcosm of broader urban struggles over the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, and the contestation of urban space itself.
Photo credit:
Title: Improptu Parking Sign Washington, D.C.
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident
/by Jeffrey Ian RossA little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.
The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.
But this framing misses a handful of important things.
Protest or Drunken Outburst?
At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.
Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.
However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.
The Criminalization of Trivial Acts
Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.
But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.
More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.
Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief
Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.
Why It Matters
We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.
It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.
The Real Question
So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?
Although it prompted some protesters to construct placards emblazoned with pithy slogans, and others to create and sell novelty t-shirts, we’ve yet to see a barrage of anti-ICE protesters arming themselves with subway sandwiches.
Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.
And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).
Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.
Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.
Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.
Why Paying Attention to the Streets Can Change How You See the City
/by Jeffrey Ian RossMost of us move through cities on autopilot.
We commute, run errands, scroll our phones, and mentally prepare for the next task. It’s functional. But in the process, we miss more than the visual landscape of the city. We miss its soul.
The streets aren’t just spaces we pass through. They are living classrooms, stages, and laboratories. Every sidewalk interaction, graffiti tag, or street vendor’s setup is a signal, a small lesson in how people inhabit and adapt to urban life.
The Street as a Living Text
As Henri Lefebvre argued in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, urban life has a rhythm that reveals itself when we slow down and pay attention. These moments are not background noise; they’re signs, signals, and signification (i.e., semiotics).
Appreciating and understanding what is happening in these contexts helps build one’s street literacy: a skill in reading the city beyond maps or guides, but through the unspoken codes, impromptu interactions, and creative uses of space that define urban life. What happens when we treat street culture (a dominant element of urban life) not just as a style or a commodity but as a way of knowing?
Street Culture as Knowledge
From Sigmund Freud’s analysis of unconscious motivation to Michel de Certeau’s insights on how we navigate cities and bend the rules of modern life without even realizing it, scholars have studied “everyday life.” They’ve examined how media and pop culture shape our habits, values, and identities.
But most of these thinkers miss one crucial thing: the complex interactions among people who live, work, or access the street.
Street culture isn’t just graffiti, street art, fashion, or slang. It’s an entire ecosystem of informal rules, spatial tactics, survival strategies, and creative expression. From local kids skateboarding down alleys to unhoused people arranging sleeping spots, these actors navigate the city with an intelligence rooted in real experience.
Every interaction on the street, from the way a mural signals a neighborhood’s history to how a sticker or tag marks territory or ideas, is part of this living knowledge. Understanding it is like learning a language: once you notice the rhythms, cues, and codes, the city speaks to you differently.
Why This Matters Now
Understanding street culture isn’t just interesting, it’s increasingly important.
Post-pandemic cities (especially large global ones) are changing fast. Public spaces are being reshaped at lightning speed. Surveillance has expanded. Informal economies are under pressure. And gentrification is pushing out the very people who give neighborhoods (and the streets) their character and edge.
If we ignore street culture, we not only lose vital knowledge, but we also lose the chance to see the city from the ground up.
For most of my scholarly career, I’ve examined street culture (in one shape or form), but now is a time to develop a more thoughtful framework. I’m exploring how people create meaning in urban spaces, not just through organizations, institutions, or technologies, but through movement, adaptation, and shared, often unspoken codes. I argue that paying closer attention to the streets can deepen our connection to our cities and each other.
Because when we stop sleepwalking through the city, we start seeing it for what it is: a stage, a classroom, a home.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Bego2good1
Title: The Hub – East 149th Street & 3rd Avenue in Mott Haven / Melrose, The Bronx