The Square and the Crowd

What a winter of assembly revealed about the cities that host it - and the people who would not go home.

It began, as these things tend to, with a question nobody in charge wanted asked aloud - and then asked everywhere at once.

The view from the ground

The people closest to it described a slower story than the headlines allowed: not a rupture but an accumulation, the kind that only looks sudden from a distance.

A crowd is not a mob until someone with a podium needs it to be.

What happens next depends less on any decision than on whether enough people decide it is theirs to make. That, in the end, is the only deadline that matters.