Critical Exchange Parks and refs: Community, solidarity, and public space Contemporary Political Theory (2016) 15, 446–452. doi:10.1057/s41296-016-0014-x; published online 10 August 2016 For years, the Mission Playground, located in a predominantly working-class Latino neighborhood in San Francisco, was the site of informal pick-up soccer games. Locals knew the rules: seven on seven, first to score, and the winning team got to stay on and play against other rivals. In 2012, the run-down park underwent a $7.5 million renovation, and concrete was replaced with artificial turf and new lighting. As part of a citywide initiative to recover costs through new user-fees, the Parks Department introduced a reservation system and rented out some prime time evening slots for $27. By providing a credit card, young urban professionals who had moved to the area to work in the booming tech industry were able to jump the queue. The stage was set for a showdown, which was captured on a video, and viewed online by over 600,000 people. During the summer of 2014, local kids and teens were regularly asked to vacate the field to make way for exclusive games organized by adult permit holders. The kids had nowhere else to play. They decided to disobey the new rules and film the resulting confrontation. Their informal spokesperson was a college student who said his family had been displaced from the neighborhood. He did not think local kids who could not afford permits should be excluded from public space (Wong, 2014). Some of the permit holders were wearing ‘‘Dropbox’’ T-shirts, which helped turn a quotidian dispute over turf into synecdochal conflict. A synecdochal conflict is one in which the part stands for the whole. It is both literal and emblematic, because the particular dispute over a soccer field is a dimension of a broader conflict over the right to the city and the commonwealth. The temporary privatization of a sought after piece of public space exposed a number of broader fault lines: gentrification, income inequality, and different views about how to allocate public goods. Comments on the video were divided. Some people described the mostly white tech-guys as ‘‘douchebags,’’ and others called the neighborhood teens ‘‘thugs.’’ The two sides also drew on different principles to explain their positions. I describe these principles as the sovereigntist and populist conceptions of public space (see Ó 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 15, 4, 446–452 www.palgrave.com/journals