Beyond Zuccotti Park, by Ron Shiffman

Abstract

Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space Eds. Ron Schiffman, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, and Lynne Elizabeth New Village Press, 2012 Reviewed by Matt Wade The occupation of Zuccotti Park and the Occupy Wall Street Movement inspired a flurry of ideas and excitement, and led to a cacophony of debates about public space, protest, and the meaning of the movement. A year later, our tents long stashed away, many of us imagined that the conversation was closed. Instead, just a year after OWS led to public encampments in cities across the US, Beyond Zuccotti Park provides a fantastic collection of celebrations and criticisms of OWS. This collection of essays includes contributions from notable academics, activists, city officials, social service professionals, and design practitioners. The diversity of authors mirrors the broad range of debates that the movement inspired, and the pieces in the volume address themes ranging from public space and democracy, to New York’s privately owned public spaces, to populist design. The contributions at the beginning of the book focus on the occupation of public space and the rise of an occupation movement in cities across the globe. Occupation is itself an ambiguous term, with progressive as well as colonial implications. Some authors celebrate the transformative experience of the occupation of Zuccotti Park and the community that was produced by addressing the challenges of an ad hoc habitation, including the provision of food and latrines and engineering bike-powered energy sources. Other authors reflect upon the meaning and symbols of occupation. Jeffrey Hou 1 examines the distinction between the politics of what he terms “institutional public space” and “insurgent public space,” suggesting that transformative actions result from the appropriation of space beyond the intent of its design or beyond the boundaries of the appropriate. Saskia Sassen further argues that the occupy movement constitutes what she calls the “global street,” a critical “part of our global modernity” that has arisen in the age of global finance, as a tool for the voiceless to make demands upon power. Finally, some critical pieces question the occupation of the center, the financial district and symbolic hub of global capitalist power. These authors contend that even this radical space contains racial coding, 1. Volume 25 of the Berkeley Planning Journal features a review of Jeffrey Hou’s Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. This review is available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5990f284