NEW YORK’S streets are as gritty as the city’s reputation, traffic-clogged canyons of concrete where New Yorkers, on foot and in vehicles, jostle and growl, exulting all the while. Stared down a Hummer lately? Yet there is a growing desire to tame New York’s 5,800 miles of streets, sidewalks and highways, which constitute the city’s principal social space.

The most highly publicized effort is Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal, which was approved by the City Council on Monday and as of Friday evening was awaiting a vote by the State Legislature. But ideas for calming New York’s historically hectic streets go far beyond congestion pricing. Those ideas, moreover, seem to signal a shift in the basic thinking of what streets are for.

“For decades, the Department of Transportation’s job has been to move vehicles as quickly as possible,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the agency’s commissioner. “We’re taking a look at it a little bit differently now. There is a tremendous hunger for what we can do to make it easier for people to get around, to improve the quality of our streets and plazas, to make it easier for people to linger.”

These street reformers  planners, architects and urban officials from around the globe  are questioning the conventional street-curb-sidewalk motif, challenging the dominance of cars, and devising ways to use street furniture, plants and even radical new vehicles to transform the experience of the street.