The S.U.V. model of citizenship: floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the “purely atomic” individual

Recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning protest outside health clinics that provide abortions, coupled with a new wave of “aggressive panhandling” ordinances being adopted by American cities, indicate that Courts and lawmakers are creating a new model of citizenship. This model is marked by a radical individualism and extreme libertarianism based on transformed property relations. Courts are finding that individuals have an innate “right to be left alone” in public space – a strong departure from early jurisprudence which restricted that right to be left alone to private property. These recent decisions and laws suggest the development of a model of citizenship quite at odds with the cosmopolitan, associational citizenship theorized and promoted by many political theorists.