Abstract
Since their September 2011 emergence, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy movement have sparked a deluge of scholarship and documentary projects on contemporary activism, democracy, capitalism, and crisis. Beyond Zuccotti Park adds a unique inflection to the chorus by forefronting the perspectives of architects, designers, and urban planners, with additional context from legal scholars and social theorists. They argue that grassroots democratic practices are conditioned by the public spaces they occupy; in turn, OWS compels a political imperative for planners to construct spaces that permit and privilege freedom of assembly, although such a task proves difficult when laws, governance, state power, and uneven public uses are in play.
Chapters vary widely, including case studies, theoretical analyses, and even extended thought experiments. The overall effect mimics the cacophony of activities associated with OWS: less coherence than might be desired in an anthology, but brimming with resonances within and beyond the collection. Several authors position Zuccotti Park and other ‘privately owned public spaces’ within an unusual place specific history, drawing city politics, capital accumulation, and legal contortions into a provocative materialist analysis that could be applied to other public spaces. Others highlight the challenge of making a space ‘public’ when ‘the public’ is highly uneven, as evidenced by the lack of participants of color in OWS. (Strangely, the place of the homeless in public spaces is largely dismissed – a missed opportunity given OWS’s problematic relationship with homeless peoples.) This latter theme only hints at public space’s negative functions of securitization and exclusion that largely inspired OWS’s tactic of occupation in the first place; instead, most contributors emphasize public space’s positive role as a site for democratic discourse.
While designers and the public sector are positioned throughout the book as the primary political agents for intervention into public space, there are additional trajectories, such as Paula Segal’s direct actions using art and mapping, or Benjamin Shepard’s discussion of OWS as the mobilization of everyday resistance. Direct participation in OWS or other radical movements is curiously absent overall. Since the key problematic of the anthology is the relationship between what planners think of the public and what the public does with the spaces made by planners, a stronger effort to facilitate these conversations would have been more illustrative of the potentials and challenges at issue. The chapters featuring conversations between coeditor Ron Shiffman and more engaged movement participants best exemplify this practice of solidarity and support.
Geographers will glean from the anthology many insights concerning spaces of protest, democracy, and urban life, as well as fruitful interdisciplinary connections with architecture and urban planning fields. Those more skeptical of the democratic imaginaries offered will find the book illuminating for its unaddressed questions. The celebration of OWS’s ‘democracy in action’ certainly rang hollow when two dozen mayors of all political stripes coordinated evictions of all Occupy encampments with tear gas and police batons. The limits of such ‘actually existing’ democracy – and OWS’s direct challenge to these limits – can spark conversations that Beyond Zuccotti Park declines to raise.