Zuccotti Park. Photo from CBS News
Following up on several earlier posts on the importance of occupying space in protest movements (for example, in Egypt, and in Bahrain), Michael Kimmelman has an article in today’s New York Times about ‘The Power of Place in Protest’. While the occasion for Kimmelman’s report is the month-long occupation of Zuccotti Park by the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City, his article offers an interesting bit of pop geography. “Politics troubles our conscience,” he writes, “but places haunt our imaginations.”
Kent State University, 1970. Photo: UPI
While my earlier posts have focused on the importance of public space, and the rights of citizens to claim public space as their own, the current occupation of Zuccotti Park offers a new and revealing twist on this issue. This is because Zuccotti Park is not actually public space, but is private property, owned by Brookfield Office Properties, whose chairman is John Zuccotti. Kimmelman writes,
A zoning variance granted to Brookfield years ago requires that the park, unlike a public, city-owned one, remain open day and night. This peculiarity of zoning law has turned an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of so much of what in the last couple of generations has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings. Think of the atrium of the I.B.M. tower on Madison Avenue and countless other places like it: “public” spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords. Zuccotti in principle is subject to Brookfield’s rules prohibiting tarps, sleeping bags and the storage of personal property on the site. The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).
Central Park, 1967. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
Geographers, like Don Mitchell (see his 2003 book The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space), and Sociologists, like Sharon Zukin (for example, Landscapes of Power and The Cultures of Cities), have been writing about this for some time. Among the various things that the Occupy Wall Street protests have been demonstrating is the importance of reclaiming public space in a world where space itself is increasingly privatized. This is an issue also raised in an earlier post about the struggles of Filipina maids in Singapore to claim spaces of leisure in the increasingly privatized spaces of the city.
geography1982 