710
Opinion of Souter, J.
Kennedy's view of the rule that should determine what is a public forum and with his conclusion that the public areas of the airports at issue here qualify as such. The designation of a given piece of public property as a traditional public forum must not merely state a conclusion that the property falls within a static category including streets, parks, sidewalks, and perhaps not much more, but must represent a conclusion that the property is no different in principle from such examples, which we have previously described as "archetypes" of property from which the government was and is powerless to exclude speech. See Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U. S. 474, 480 (1988). To treat the class of such forums as closed by their description as "traditional," taking that word merely as a charter for examining the history of the particular public property claimed as a forum, has no warrant in a Constitution whose values are not to be left behind in the city streets that are no longer the only focus of our community life. If that were the line of our direction, we might as well abandon the public forum doctrine altogether.
Nor is that a Scylla without Charybdis. Public forum analysis is stultified not only by treating its archetypes as closed categories, but by treating its candidates so categorically as to defeat their identification with the archetypes. We need not say that all "transportation nodes" or all airports are public forums in order to find that certain metropolitan airports are. Thus, the enquiry may and must relate to the particular property at issue and not necessarily to the "precise classification of the property." See ante, at 697 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). It is true that property of some types will invariably be public forums. "No particularized inquiry into the precise nature of a specific street is necessary; all public streets are held in the public trust and are properly considered traditional public fora." Frisby, supra, at 481. But to find one example of a certain property type (e. g., airports, post offices, etc.) that is not a public forum is not to rule out all properties of that sort.
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