This art project investigates the fluidity of public space ownership and user collaboration through a push-pull interdependence mechanism. The title "The Streets Are (Not) Ours" alongside the subtitle "Public. Public! Public?" forms a tripartite cognitive progression: parenthetical silence deconstructs habitual assumptions, the exclamation embodies defiant claims over public identity, and the terminal question mark signals ontological inquiry. Examining Montréal's Art District, Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, and Guangzhou’s urban hubs as case studies, the research maps this conceptual trajectory across two experimental phases.

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Phase one established four cognitive channels: "Sonic Space" (deconstructing urban perception through cross-city soundwalks), "Bounded Ownership" (critiquing regulation of individual rights), "Space Occupation Phenomena" (documenting transient collective ownership), and "Public Interzone" (boundary negotiation through musical performance). Soundwalks revealed how participants’ questions — "How do we define hometown soundscapes? What identities emerge from acoustic divergence under shared skies?" — ultimately manifest public ownership as affect-laden projections conditioned by multilayered constraints.

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Phase two, "Public. Public! Public?", enacts cognitive transformation through creative videography. Artists captured crowd dynamics at Guangzhou intersections via quadripartite perspectives: aerial surveillance (power gaze), horizontal scans (egalitarian documentary), POV immersion (body politics), and panoramic observation (systems analysis). Montage synthesis generates a fluid interpretive field, simultaneously echoing the exclamation’s defiance ("Public!" as tangible cry) and materializing the question mark’s deconstruction ("Public?" as plural dialectic). This evidences how space users—as emotional field nuclei — form dynamic organisms whose interactions continuously reshape environmental multiplicities.