Toward a Radical Spatiality: Dissident Architectural Practices in Contemporary Occupations

Production of Dissident Spaces: The Umbrella as an Activator of Spatial Practices

Between September 26 and December 15, 2014, in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement was created as a prodemocracy protest against Beijing addressing Hong Kong’s 2017 elections. The movement claimed a true universal suffrage and received general support from local citizens and people around the world through social media (Chan, 2014). Because most of the spaces to gather in this city are private, the epicenter of the occupation was the HSBC building lobby, a private public space (a space open to the public but of private property) (Figure 1). During the development of the protests, thousands of people were involved trying to gather close to this building, although as the city lacks public spaces, protestors occupied only the spaces they could: highways, bridges, and sidewalks (the city’s infrastructure). This situation highlightted how much the private sector owned the city, making people aware of the importance of public spaces. And as a collective response, they turned themselves into occupiers by remaining in these infrastructures.

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Figure 1.

HSBC building lobby, Hong Kong.

When protestors became occupiers, they started to use daily-life objects and transformed them into dissident objects by domesticating the city’s pseudopublic spaces. People created safety zones and villages with cardboards and textiles, and umbrellas were deployed as temporary roofs. The Figure 2 presents a rapidly constructed barrack in a metro station exit, made with umbrellas, ladders, and plastic and metal fences, possibly taken away from the police. In addition, protestors took photos, record videos, and posted them on Facebook and Twitter, capturing a real-time, in-process dissidence in both public spaces, the virtual and the physical.

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Figure 2.

Nameless In China [NamelessInChina]. (28 September 2014). #UmbrellaRevolution #UmbrellaMovement Umbrellas block an exit of Admiralty station. via @AgnesBun [Tweet].

A multiplication of these series of artifacts generated a resilient urbanism in which hasty architectural decisions built symbolic urban landscapes. Nevertheless, there was one object that developed itself into a symbol of this occupation: the umbrella. The umbrella was a powerful image of protection and resistance, as the artist Kacey Wong indicates: “It’s a soft thing but it’s also very hard in terms of our determination to win this battle” (Hume & Park, 2014). Soon, people carrying umbrellas in bulk started using them for sheltering, barricading, or writing slogans, as part of sculptures, and so on, bringing to the area, an “enormous feeling of brotherhood” (Hume & Park, 2014). The umbrella became a device for installations, assemblages, and barricades, and as a means of protection from teargas. This general exposure of umbrellas during this occupation was possible because they are part of the quotidian life of Hong Kong citizens, especially during the summer season, when temperatures rise above 30°C and it rains most days. ² It happened to be unusually hot and sunny during midday in September 2014; thus, there were umbrellas floating all around the city. In one of the clashes with the police, a photographer shot a picture of a man walking through a cloud of teargas holding an umbrella; ³ it became viral and it was called “The Umbrella Man,” similar to the iconic “Tank Man” ⁴ in Beijing in 1989. Some days later, a statue of this Umbrella Man emerged overnight in front of the HSBC lobby, a roughly 3.5-meter-high statue made of wood blocks, holding a bright yellow umbrella with the right arm outstretched. ⁵ Soon, protestors began to use umbrellas in different ways, including for the construction of barricades as lines of defense, and the “police start[ed] seeing an ocean of umbrellas on the front line instead of protesters . . .; it is an artefact that is just effective in defending.” ⁶

First, as prototypes, these assemblages brought a sense of community design that acted as a social process in the infrastructure, in this case, of Hong Kong. For doing so, one of the first steps citizens took was the recognition of the place in which they were located. The observation included a spatial identification of architectural objects (height, scale, volume, and typology of buildings), open spaces (streets, highways, sidewalks, gardens, parks, squares—public or private), materiality (concrete, glass, brick, cobblestone), and infrastructure (highways, bridges, ports, metro stations, roads, rails). This process could be described as an interpretive historical architectural method—classified by Linda Groat and David Wang (2002) in their book Architectural Research Methods—that allows the grasping of a logical argumentation by observation, identification, and interpretation.

Being aware of the precarious situation in which they were placed, occupiers became more proactive to doing more with less. It was the explosion of in-situ ad-hoc designs as artifacts that began a relationship to the context at different scales, toward spatial, social, and psychological experiences. In this platform, the relationship with architecture, design, space, community, temporality, and events, shaped a state of dissidence in the urban landscape through these dissident devices. What happened in occupations was that design was rebelling against the institution. During the occupation, a design teacher in Hong Kong, Patricia Choi, encouraged students to design and build desks in highways. Soon, precarious desks started to form a part of the urban landscape, as they were being built day by day; the place became popular and later was named as “Umbrella Study Corner,” with the purpose that any student could use the facility. These desks were placed along the curbs of highways. Made of cardboard, paperboard, or hardboard, their frontal structure leaned on plastic or wooden sticks, or a pile or cardboard; a set of umbrellas shaped roofs, and plastic boxes, cardboards, pallets, or simply the asphalt served as chairs. The limits of the area were delineated by drawing on the floor with tape, which in turn was covered with papers, cardboards, plastics, or textiles.

Close to this area was placed the “Street Library.” Like the “Study Corner,” the library was developed as a process rather than as a final object. It started first with the location of pallets; people stacked them up on highways, and voluntarily, citizens started to place books in the shelves. Soon, fabrics, plastics, and tents, formed roofs by using a light structure such as metal, plastic, and wooden sticks. Gradually, a phenomenon of domestication started to pervade the area. Sofas, floor lamps, pallets as coffee tables, mattresses, plastic fences that served also as bookshelves, plastic hangers serving to create fabric structures for inner partitions, plastic bins as plant pots, speed reducers as counters, and hundreds of drawings, stickers, and post-it notes were gathered together by the occupiers for the “Street Library.”

Thus, the Cartesian logic, which has traditionally proposed dual relationships, did not involve completely the paradigm of human nature—the transformation of states. The desire to be visible in the Umbrella Movement worked alongside the production of the space on a human scale. The “free space” proposed by contemporary occupations, which included virtual and physical public spaces, was suitable for invention, creation, and new types of inhabiting under extreme conditions. They became new technologies that responded to collective needs under hyperplanned purposes (lack of public space, infrastructure, skyscrapers, and high-speed mobilization), and they implieed, in contrast, circumstances of humanizing the city by creating new spaces, new assemblages, and new situations. These assemblies in the space are considered as “dissident architectural artefacts,” which give a potential to people to design, use, and delete practices and activities, creating instead new critical approaches to architectural practices in everyday life.

To this extent, daily-life objects in quotidian situations are expected to have an acceptable dramatic role related to a specific social scenario, according to Erving Goffman (1971), that is conceived as mundane (Delgado, 2011). Without porting sociability, the umbrella applied a certain promiscuity that deformed spatial structured organizations instantly, because of the multitude’s reappropriation that generated identity and symbolism in the place through dissident artifacts. People reinvented themselves in a process that reached a high temporization through a maximum appropriation of their spatial conditions. Hence, the Umbrella Movement generated architectural practices in which materiality is not disconnected from symbolism, keeping its physical components while objects are rearranged in a dissenter mode. At this point, dissidence is defined based on Jacques Rancière’s (2010) reflection:

[Dissensus] is not a designation of conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or “bodies.” This is the way in which dissensus can be said to reside at the hearth of politics, since at bottom the latter itself consists in an activity that redraws the frame within which common objects are determined. . . . A radical intervention in human affairs by which the entire aesthetic field is reorganised, and we see things we have not seen before. (p. 139)

Dissensus presents not only a model of opposition but also tactics to open up a territory for different purposes, where elements are choreographed in a conflictual but nonviolent way (Hirsch & Miessen, 2012). In addition, Ines Weizman (2014), in her book Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, relates dissidence with the architectural imagination as a discontent that is transformed into political actions. Political practices such as revolts are determined by radical and fundamental contestations of the way subjects are governed. In addition, Michel Feher ⁷ indicates that what dissent pursues is the mobilization of civic passion in a struggle for a radical reorganization to enforce relations. Dissidence does not present a material sense; it “hunts” for space. Thus, spatial practices, movements, and gestures are camouflaged in architecture, changing its meaning and becoming more self- and autonomous action.

Over time, the scope of architectural dissent has been demonstrated by a refusal to participate in projects deemed unjust, by subversion of the norms and language of dominant/dominating architecture, or by a retreat into the private domain of paper architecture of hidden pedagogy (I. Weizman, 2012a). As such, the challenge of dissident practice lies between political compliance, acts of resistance and architecture’s limiting concepts. (Weizman, 2014, p. 7).

On the other hand, dissident architectural practices create new ways to relate to Lefebvre’s common space, in which invisible objects or bodies, collectives, multitudes, micro-actions, edifications, urban elements, and spatial practices perform an arhythmical temporality. Therefore, these dissident objects blur the boundaries of what is in or out, central or peripheral, visible or invisible, sensible or perceptible, within a certain frame of time and space. Seen as collective praxis processes, they constitute “the identification of use-value as the active, collective, antagonistic element within real subsumption as crisis” (Negri, 2003). It is a distribution of the sensible when the materialities of bodies, of “sensible-intelligible experiences,” are in tension with the built environment.

(De-)(Re)-Territorializing Dissident Architectural Practices

The Umbrella Movement altered Hong Kong’s infrastructures, their functions and images. Avenues were turned into camping zones, sidewalks into open kitchens, bridges into playgrounds, overpasses into stages, public building facades into art murals, and so on. There were zones for cinemas, first aid spots, study corners, press stands, messages on banners and walls, tweets, YouTube videos, interactive workshops, and the list continues. However, this spatial transformation in Hong Kong is subtle because it did not affect the materiality of the space but only its image and use. At the center of the protest site, in the Central Government Complex, occupiers replicated Prague’s “Lennon Wall.” The original Lennon Wall is located in Mala Strana, Prague, where an anonymous artist painted John Lennon’s face after his death in 1980, representing him as a peaceful symbol in contrast to the local political regime (at that time, Czech Republic was under a communist regime). Soon, people started putting up messages, quotes, lyrics, and paintings about peace, love, and freedom on the wall. The police tried repeatedly to whitewash over the portrait and messages, but every day, the wall was filled again with poems, pieces, and paintings depicting Lennon, despite the presence of CCTV cameras and all-night guards. It was mostly students who continued with this series of dissenting actions in this particular space, and ironically, they were described as the “Lennonism movement.” ⁸

Thirty-four years later, occupiers filled with colorful Post-it notes (more than 10,000) the exterior staircase of the Central Government Complex in Hong Kong, with written messages about democracy, universal suffrage, solidarity, peace, and freedom, song lyrics and epigrams, many of them related to Lennon, as urban installation reclaims publicness in a new way. While traditional protests usually involve graffiti and paintings, the exceptional (de-)(re)territorialization of the imaginary Lennon Wall in Hong Kong materializes collaborative spatial practices that fit a forum for exchange and communication. The wall turns into a device for protest, while post-it notes are physical tweets. In this sense, the occupiers used post-it notes to avoid damaging or affecting the private property materially, but at the same time, they changed its aspect and use, and gave a new symbolism to the building. This collective action was generated in this soft way after some organizers released the online document Manual of Disobedience. ⁹ This document refers to the legalities and illegalities according to Hong Kong’s urban law that indicates what actions protestors could perform and what actions are legally banned. It also specifies the limits of private and public property and suggests to avoid damaging or destroying buildings and infrastructures. Thousands of post-it notes covered the building’s surface without affecting its structure; they were part of a series of micro dissident actions that turned, in this case, the city’s infrastructure into an improvised outdoor gallery of politically inspired art.

This collective praxis liberates itself from a structured system and achieves asymmetries in the spatial relation, endowing with spontaneity a process instead of a plan. De-localizing, de-situating, disjoining, disturbing, propagating, wandering in a nomadic practice, drifting, in the middle, between, in between, intermediating, intertying, intervolving, separating, toward, moving, developing, becoming, all constitute tactics for shifting the urban landscape. There is an inherent possibility of reversal and collectivity, where qualifications disappear and spatial practices generate radical spaces. Dissident architectural practices become the playground where new ways of movement take form, addressing rarely materials, embodying relations that occur in spatial practices, and developing alternative concepts of body, space, time, and movement beyond the discursive state. The practice of (de-)(re)territorialization becomes the leitmotif for a reconceptualization of architectural urban relations, making one lose settled boundaries.

The occupation challenges established parameters, while dissident practices are DIY (do it yourself) urbanism modes that communicate information, techniques, tactics, content, material, and symbolism into public spaces. As in urban guerrilla practices, occupiers become agents of maximum efficiency, making more with less and reaching almost a level of precariousness. This dissident collective body ranges from the most pragmatic aspects of the occupation (logistics, security, food, hygiene, medical care) to the most reflective ones (e.g., building up alternative microsocieties on the steam of a larger one). This situation is echoed in the manifesto created during the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly on October 15, 2011, when the occupiers generated a list of spatial zones:

These zones reflect the basic needs of occupations and occupiers, to bring domesticity to their new inhabiting areas, which in this case are not particular to Occupy Wall Street but are also reflected in Gezi/Taksim, Tahrir Square, and the Umbrella Movement (Figures 3 and 4). Figure 3 represents the consequence of a street battle in Gezi/Taksim, from a chaotic state of clashes to an autonomous, self-regulated body, which concludes as an assemblage of the commons. It is an assemblage that contrasts with structuralism frameworks (Farías & Bender, 2010) and articulations of human–nonhuman materialities through relations of exteriority (McFarlane, 2011). These assemblages are capable of creating dissident spatialities throughout a temporal ad hoc architecture, where everyday materials and objects bend spatial practices, initiating subversive designs under a state of exception. By using these tactics during the transformation of the public spatial conception, occupiers turn these spaces into hybrid urban zones. Thus, these systems could be planned or accidental, but in this extreme context, design performs a chaotic mobility of objects that involves a conception of new designing methods.

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Figure 3.

Tahrir Square: Radical spatiality.

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Figure 4.

Gezi Park/Taksim Square: Radical spatiality.

Simultaneously, there was a virtual occupation that was also a (de-)(re)territorialization. Fearing that the government would shut down the Internet, as it happened in Egypt in 2011, occupiers used the mobile app FireChat to communicate. This app works with Bluetooth and requires a maximum distance of 65 m between sender and receiver. In less than a week, the app had more than 5.1 million chat rooms, and during the peak of the occupation, it was downloaded half a million times, registering 37,000 mobiles using it at the time. ¹⁰ This virtual condition generated a much closer corporal approach between the occupiers, initiating a new spatial dynamic in the contemporary public space (physical + virtual) and breeding a relation for the new socio-spatial makers. The fact that this app that uses Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi or 3G or 4G incentivized an approximation of bodies and changed the scale and measurement of actions in the space of occupation within the built environment.

There is an obsolete relation between the body and the contemporary city, in the sense that social dynamics are continuously changing but the built environment does not evolve or adapt at the same speed. This obsolescence in urban materiality is visible not only in the Umbrella Movement but also in Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, los Indignados, Gezi Park, and so on, because they alter the use, image, and relations of public spaces. These occupations show that reducing the body to a standardized model is a short abstraction of bodies and spaces. Indeed, occupiers challenge this standard representation as nonexisting bodies and generate instead a new spatialization of the body, an architectural body ¹¹ that involves with its context and develops processes of symbiosis and synergy. These events scrap against the standardization and put in its place bodies and spaces as living entities that evolve, generating approaches in the architectural organization of spaces and acting from the contemporary role of objects, which “is not a passive clump of matter rusting in an otherwise vital universe. An object is force-full (…) ” (Meehan, Graham, & Marston, 2013).

Thus, quotidian objects and mobile applications add a factor of kinship between being artistic and political discontent, not by themselves but in communication with others. Urban elements sabotage conventional practices and become part of an in situ design, highlighting new architectural practices generated by anybody and everybody, alongside virtual platforms, and altering consequently the use and image of public spaces.

Ad Hoc Architecture in the Contemporary Public Space

What it takes to make a relationship to make a thing?

(. . .)

What it takes to make a thing to make a relationship? (Jane Rendell, 2018)

Umbrellas, FireChat, and post-it notes become dissident tools that when performed collectively act as elements of an ad hoc architecture. These ad hoc architectures are articulations of conflicts that negotiate with the discourse of temporal spaces based on the principles of proximity, coexistence, and interaction. Ad hoc architecture places practices through movement (walking) and mobility (ideas, objects, bodies, schemes, tweets) and forms a space of experience where actions produce resonances. The Umbrella Movement generated a dissident space that created new meanings identified and produced by people on the streets, following Iain Chambers’s (1993) ideas:

. . . do not suggest any obvious integration with an existing cultural consensus or obliteration in the mainstream of modern life, but rather with the shifting, mixing, contaminating, experimenting, revisiting and recomposing that the wider horizons and the inter- and trans-cultural networks of the metropolis both permit and encourage. (p. 94)

Ad hoc architecture and dissident architectural practices form radical practices where the collective materializes dissident bodies by becoming global networks in the contemporary public space (physical + virtual). The dissident spatial experience attempts a break in the sequence of urban habits and customs, changing the space, exploring the temporal existence of a determined practice, and provoking new quotidian relations. It produces an apparatus in which the proximity and overlapping of dissident bodies generate infusions of spatio-temporal articulations, characterized by nonexcludability and nonrivalry, meaning that the public spaces used could be any space in the architectural urban landscape as determined by dissident spatial practices. This dissident experience of things reinvent the significance of the everyday, presenting a necessity for being responsive to conditions that provide a space that is felt, understood, immediate, tactile, legible, and backed by the public.

This new urban condition acts as a capacity that promotes the creation of platforms that invigorate subversively buildings, streets, neighborhoods, behaviors, structures, and spatial relations. It strategizes the space through representations of political frameworks in an aesthetic scope: digital media (cameras, laptops, live tweeting, Facebook posts, streaming), black bloc tactics, operational zones, art camps, meditation spots, and so on. Hence, dissident architectural practices are far from being discrete; they innately striate the space of the occupation with a contained energy that gives place to a substantial porosity in private and public borders and arranges the dynamics of appropriation. The architecture of occupation is instant and ever-changing, collective and intermittent, practical and radical; it changes from radicalizing as a systematic product to radicalization as a systematic motor.

Because the space of the occupation is dynamic, it is a process of change and impermanence, not a single local strategy or a relativized unfettered position. In this regard, ad hoc architecture and dissident architectural practices perform a spatiality (space + time) that is experienced during the state of exception of the occupation, when occupiers generate new architectural spaces without being represented but representing themselves, making an immanent experience of the event. The form of generating the collective gives an enormous potential to produce a spatiality. “Collective” means to bring bodies together to practice politics, to collaborate, to participate, to extend, to share, as tactics that germinate in the radicality of temporal actions.

While people occupy public spaces, a new spatial design dimension starts to take shape: bodies in proximity, making contact, keeping contact, and excluding contact during days and nights, create situations in which gestures appear to have a new significance and intimacy. The moment comes from handshakes, grasping of forearms, or holding hands for building human chains, letting a new intimacy pass through them. These socio-material assemblies, according to Bruno Latour, modify the space of relationships, interactions, and performances and open new modes of thinking and behaving. As these dissident architectural practices are mainly formed collectively, design and participation are placed on the same platform, meaning that the approach to design is focused on infrastructuring, challenging at the same time the potentialities that design and device have when placed in use and after the specific range of activities (Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012). The infrastructuring strategy attends to the existing conditions of infrastructures, to design indeterminacy and incompleteness, giving the “free space” for unanticipated events, performances, and actions (Allen, Agrest, & Ostrow, 2000). It transforms the static and one-functional infrastructure into a dynamic, heterogeneous system.

Both strategies and tactics, in Michel de Certeau’s terms, produce a critical spatial practice. Strategies intend to generate places that follow abstract models, whereas tactics do not obey the laws of places. Hence, they are designed for use but also for appropriation in use. Because they are developed with daily-life objects in everyday practices, the design process is decisive when its approach becomes a shift from involving users in the design process to using every moment as a potential design situation.

Materials and objects take proximities too: sleeping on the asphalt, waking up on the road, the pattern of concrete on one’s hands, umbrella shelters for protecting from teargas attacks, lodging structures made of bamboo sticks, plastic wrap walls, road medians like offices, texting on the ground, taking pictures of the cascading lights of skyscrapers, pavements covered by chalk, bodies touching the city, and so on, are tactics made of multiple micro-occupations. Only a collective acting together can create this radical space, where people do not simply exist side by side in the space, indifferent to one another, neither objects nor materials, but explicitly appear for one another. Sitting, waiting, and walking around the tents on the asphalt reflect a temporal dynamic that is a lot of waiting, talking, and watching. People discover the breadth of a street, what is incomplete, and the delay opens up unpredictable relations and forms a spatiality that is based on complex varieties of contributors as nonstable conditions and contradictions. A de-territorialization and reterritorialization of dialectics go alongside these spaces. In this spatiality, the potential of the multitude relates material affection and performative actions, presenting intensities within the production in the state of exception, a multitude as “The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common . . .” (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 165). They do not represent themselves as productive forces but as creative processes. Hence, collective dissident practices take the event of the multitude as acting in and on, in which determined actions increase their potentialities and virtual power.

Radical Spatiality

The temporal ad hoc architecture is ultimately presented not merely as a formal act but as an enabler of political actions, of communication, and of the production of dissident spaces. Objects, structures, bodies, boundaries, public spaces, virtual spaces, laws, regulations, practices, movements, dynamics, and reinventions resonate in the contemporary public space under a constant threat of disappearance, which fabricates the radical spatiality. It is a displacement that creates the commons in a spiral and expansive relationship with all the elements and reinvents the public space through dissidence.

This radical spatiality re-creates the relationships among all its components, constantly but temporally. In occupations, there is a reterritorialization of the public space through the use of a common device: the tent (physical and virtual). The tent is a structure that is pragmatic for temporal occupancy and is seen as an indeterminate, mobile, rapidly deployable device that acts as an architectural strategy. It counterpoints the idea of home as static, nuclear, enclosed, solid, and stately, and gives to occupiers the power to generate micro-occupations, expanding the limits—physical and imaginary—of the architectural urban landscape. The fabrication of the common ground of the ad hoc architecture shapes the limits and possibilities of organic environments in the core of hyperdense commercial city centers, as it happened in Istanbul, Hong Kong, and New York. When tents are placed in public spaces, it presents the shift from protests to occupations: Tents are arranged in rows, fitted neatly between the highways and streets; they repurpose themselves as community noticeboards and transform the asphalt into a canvas for political expression. By way of illustration, the Umbrella Movement turned the infrastructure that serves only mobility purposes into a hyperstructure through collective dissident practices. Highways are transmuted into libraries, classrooms, food supply stations, cinemas, workshops, toilets, allotments, art exhibitions, agora for assembly, flower gardens, mosques, and mobile food centers. This practice brings the notion of habit, which displaces traditional conceptions of subjectivity to be placed in some deep inner self. “They seek subjectivity rather in daily experience, practices and conduct. Habit is the common in practice: the common that we continually produce and the common that serves as the basis for our actions” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 197) .

Reacting to the agonistic public spaces in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement had the goal of democratic politics in all its extents, empowering the voices of all by multiplying and intensifying the occupation of the city. All these activities are full of passion, imagination, and engagement, while following a rational knowledge through design, innovation, and appropriation of everyday practices in particular sites (infrastructures).

The deployment of architectural practices as a means of disruption that is an attempt at an ideal way of inhabiting the city, within a radical spatiality, suits the practice of disobedient design, while its extension reaches a stage of creating new urban public landscapes. Indeed, radical spatiality transmutes tents and barracks not only into physical artifacts but also into dissident infrastructures and tools. When objects are produced by dissident architectural practices, they induce different intensities and interactions within public spaces, a platform that introduces scenarios to explore radical spatiality as a verb instead of as a noun.

Occupations generate a radical spatiality that activates short-term, low-cost, and reachable interventions and policies. The creative potential unleashes social interactions and process tactics that develop multiple affective spaces in the city in making. Radical spatiality exists as inception; it gains energy and force while producing the commons. Thus, the city’s infrastructures are hacked during occupations through architectural practices: DIY shelters, chair bombing, parklets, guerrilla gardens, bike lines, and such like, providing a dose of whimsy and envisioning different notions of public spaces. They compel examples of do tanks (contrary to think tanks) and disobedient urban squads that subvert slow formalities. Although dissidence is about creatively reshaping the surroundings (whether in the physical or virtual space) and short-circuiting existing systems, “it is ultimately about disrupting existing processes” (Lydon & Garcia, 2015).

The radical is spatialized when there is a radical coding, a temporality, and an experienced spatial practice within the existing built environment. These spatial symbols of occupations differentiate institutional public spaces and insurgent public spaces. They transform quotidian actions into subversive ones with spatial experiences beyond the intents of their design or beyond the boundaries of reappropriation. The mobilization in this spatiality means that the act of experiencing and practicing in the city with a dissident approach is an essential factor for the commons, while the idea of mobilization is essentially derived from the general idea of collectivity. According to David Niven (2004), the essence of mobilization is to conceive the fact that access to information increases and raises participation within the cognitive and behavioral context. It opens opportunities to share ideas, strategies, tactics, and practices, involving movement and producing a public space that allows the mobilization of data, information, objects, resources, knowledge, and technology. The radical spatiality forms a rhizome, a decentered, horizontal, multisited assemblage of innumerable focal points connected with each other in space and time.

Thus, radical spatiality is a nonbinary relation of private and public, inside and outside, architecture and social science, the one or the other; it is a continuum that manifests itself in a plane of resilient simultaneities. Ad hoc architecture and dissident architectural practices provide conditions for a radical spatiality that diagnoses processes of becomings ¹² and reterritorialization of obsolete urban dynamics. Rem Koolhaas claims that the public sphere has withered away or perished. However, he is not talking about a specific urban landscape that has become obsolete; rather, it is more about the cultural and political practice that defines it: the practice of freedom, political, personal, and collective. Hence, radical spatiality does not recover the cultural, spatial, and life losses but provides all the conditions for their reinvention (not creation). It is experienced in an evolving time–space that David Harvey describes as time and space that shrink simultaneously, whereas Lefebvre (1996) discusses how the scheme of urban forms is the most immediate and concrete way of forming a city. This point allows people to produce their own socio-spatial conditions: The meeting of different elements in dissident ways countenances the focus of design making. It is a sense of possibilities that empowers the everyday urban culture, actions, and landscape, emboldening the radical spatiality of bodies to move freely by experiencing the space within a public sphere, and processing culturally a dissident architectural urban landscape. Nevertheless, the temporality and continuity of this spatiality depend on temporal inside actions and interactions. The discontinuity, arhythm, shock, and disturbance act as an urban narrative that produces dissident design practices as a radical spatiality by exploring, making, practicing, failing, and reinventing, temporarily and intermittently.

Conclusion

The Umbrella Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Gezi Park, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube cannot be separated. Text messages help people share ideas, and photos and videos that become viral during occupations communicate actions—all enabled by mobile apps that presume a wide availability. Assembling in the virtual space shifts how protestors participate and organize in the physical space. These architectural practices create from the ordinary something extraordinary and widely accessible, blurring established parameters and limits, becoming interconnected networks, crafting linkages between subjects and objects, and achieving temporally the becomings. As multiple active micro-occupations, they enhance dissident assemblages, meaning that short-term actions induce long-term transformations. These processes highlight moments that reveal how informal, mobile, temporary, and tactical the architectural practices could be, exploring a modification of the contemporary public space as “disturbing the order of things in the interest of change” (Hamdi, 2013). These spatial practices use a deliberate and accessible means for achieving desires (commons) while embedding flexibility into the experience and project process.

The Umbrella Movement occupation demonstrates that the physical presence of the body is the most important action when protesting, and it includes other characteristics that push the boundaries of dissident practices. The inclusion of the virtual space in the physical space creates a new perception of “public,” the contemporary public space. In addition, social fractions assembled when they form new social structures become symbolic spaces that transform themselves into the space of the commons (Göle, 2013). In fact, the occupation spaces provide a stage for interaction and performativity, creating its own language and repertoire of action, and present opportunities for gathering, congregating, debating, supporting, and reassembling. Occupiers reinvent the space by using objects that serve to perform specific tasks, and turn them into something different through dissident architectural practices. They do not necessarily solve conflicts but deal with disagreements as constructive, creative, and innovative processes.

Besides, dissident architectural practices are not spontaneous: They are prepared but not planned. They have an organization but are not a system; they are a body that can be activated and also deactivated. They cause conflicts and new forms of relationships between spaces, and they reinvent the organization of urban elements and their materialism and meanings toward a radical spatiality. In this regard, the common space is shaped through the practices of an emerging and heterogeneous community that tries to exchange any kind of relation, information, practice, and experience with other communities, through acts of establishing common spaces, discriminations, separations, and barriers countered in this urban geography.

Throughout the making of radical spatiality, another spatial situation is visible, one that shifts the meaning of experiencing spatial practices and sets parameters that affect directly the production of architectural urban landscape design. When the Umbrella Movement started as an occupation, it took the HSBC building lobby because of its symbolism, although this is a private–public space, an open public space but private property. This action made visible the large privatization of public spaces in Hong Kong, a situation similar to Occupy Wall Street in New York, which also made visible the privatizing of public land. In the latter case, the Occupy Wall Street protesters occupied Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space, meaning that these kinds of spaces are open to the public but remain as private property. Such spaces are the product of an urban regulation that acts as a bonus trade-off between local governments and private developers, who are granted the right to build bigger and/or taller buildings than is permissible based on zoning guidelines, the POPS (Privately Owned Public Space) (Kayden, 2000).

The extended application of this regulation in cities as distant as New York and Hong Kong reflects a desire to control public space. Thus, practices created and developed during occupations could be enacted as opportunities to transform temporary fixed, controlled, and established spaces through the collective experience in the contemporary public space. Dissident architectural practices and ad hoc architectures display an intimacy and community that activate other spatialities, going beyond the public–private relationships and performing design strategies in a dissident mode.