Protests in urban environments: review and research agenda

Spatial Practices: Modes of Action and Engagement with the City, 2020

Exploring the assertion that protests are an encapsulation of our right to the city, working against the culmination of measures put in place to curtail the impact of this public practice and its associated actions and agencies for participants. Expanding on observations realised at the Occupy LSX - London Stock Exchange (2011/12) protest camp as an exploratory framework, where the precarity over the role of dissent in contemporary neo-liberal societies becomes evident.

Conference Catalog, 2019

urban space, art, and social movements 2 2 Rebel streets : urban space, art, and social movements Art's presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life-where we experience politics. The new forms of agencies and strategies of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombing, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, creative campaigns and theatrical actions-among others-demand an active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space for new forms of political participation in the urban space.

2017

What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.

Planning Perspectives, 2016

This paper focuses on the way people define and challenge practices of distance during protest and the way protesters disrupt ‘generally established and universally visible and valid distances’ associated with the place. In illuminating these ideas, two case studies with seemingly similar socio-spatial characteristics are explored. The first case was initiated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and aimed to call attention to the nation’s neediest people by embarking on the ‘Poor People’s Campaign’, which settled people on the National Mall in an encampment they called Resurrection City (RC). The second action, the Occupy Movement, was an international protest movement directed towards social and economic inequality. The Occupy Movement called upon protesters to ‘flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months’ to call attention to the inequalities of global capitalism. The paper interprets the strategies and tactics used by the Poor People’s Campaign and the Occupy Movement to challenge distance, concluding with some reflections on the way contemporary forms of dissent are changing the way we perceive public space and its politics.

metropolitiques.eu

Social and political protests in urban public spaces are multiplying in cities all around the world. Tali Hatuka explains the role of space and gaze in the design of public dissent. "Whatever happens in Tahrir immediately becomes a national concern," the national daily Al-Ahram's Fatemah Farag wrote in 1999, 1 making it clear that the location and the design of recent protests play a crucial role in the meaning and effect of the action on the general public. Indeed, when Tahrir Square, usually a traffic-choked plaza at the heart of Cairo, is filled with thousands of protesters, it captures the attention of the world. This awareness of the role of space in enhancing the impact of protests characterizes the growing sophistication of citizens who carefully design and plan dissent. This sophistication is transnational, characterizing citizens in democratic and nondemocratic regimes who have become more aware of their power through their ability to craft events that increase support for their claims. Organizers generally plan protest for two purposes: first, an external purpose in which protesters confront a target and thereby enhance the impact of their political message; and second, an internal purpose in which protesters assemble and, in so doing, intensify emotional and political solidarity among participants. Aiming to achieve these goals, organizers take into account many interconnected features (schedule, number of participants, location of the event, surveillance, etc.) that contribute to the physical and cultural implications and meanings of an event. Yet what are the crucial factors in the design of a protest? I would argue that in the context of contemporary protests, two linked features matter: the spatial form of gathering and the gaze of remote viewers. Large numbers are a bonus, but not a necessity.

2015

In the past, we mastered riots by rifle and cannon. Today we use pick and trowel." Anonymous Parisian builder in 1858. 1 "We get up early, to BEAT the crowds"-Denver Police DNC commemorative t-shirt, 2008 Free and open speech is a fundamental right in democratic states. Whether in public or in private, the individual's right to open speech about political rule is well-protected in democracies. However, when people assemble in public spaces, and as a group vocally protest together, different forces and legalities come into play. Because any large group of people massed in an urban setting is not the normal state of affairs, these gatherings represent a potential threat to governing bodies. A mass political protest is only a few steps from a riot. At what point does a political demonstration become civil disobedience? What is the role of urban space in supporting or suppressing public political speech? How is public space used by demonstrators and regulators? What are the methods and goals of those who use and reorganize urban and public space? What role, if any, does the public-ness of public space have in affecting the beginnings, the processes, and the conclusions of protest? What are the implications or protest policing and crowd regulation for urban space? Mass protest has taken on new significance and new dimensions since the start of the first Gulf War. Prior to this, mass protest was usually related to specific protest issues, either on a local scale or national (specifically groups protesting apartheid in South Africa, nuclear disarmament, or poverty). 2 However, protests since then take as their cue dissatisfaction and frustration with issues of greater scope. First, these protests are in reaction to large systems and multinational problems; globalized markets have also resulted globalized resistance. Second, the protests tend to target localized events, in particular international economic summits. These summits and meetings are localized embodiments of neoliberal regimes in the developed world, and protests are reactions against the deregulation of industry and retreat of the state under neoliberal economic policies. Based on surveys of recent literature, news reports, and white papers, mass protests are gaining in both size and frequency. 3 While political protests in urban space are nothing new, the number and scale of mass assemblies for political purposes in public spaces has taken on new dimensions in the last decade. This increase in scale and scope of protests is accompanied by changing protest policing tactics. Spatial control tactics used against protesters worldwide, such as the "free-speech zone" and "kettling," are taking on similar characteristics worldwide. Perhaps the signature protest event of this new era was the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, where an unprecedented 40,000 protesters clashed with police over a few days, resulting in mass beatings, arrests and property damage....along with new spatial tactics of policing as well as of protest. The next significant event came in 2003 in the protests in Miami against the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference, where police used a new model of enforcement against tens of thousand of protesters, deploying innovations in protest policing under 1 Jones 367. 2 Tonkiss, as well as Dellaporta, Peterson and Reiter. 3 Ortiz et al tracks the increase in protest incidence across the globe from the period of 2006 to 2013, generally in response to economic issues. Global protest incidence grows steadily from 59 events in 2006 to 111 in the first half of 2013. The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone tracks incidences of protests and other events and shows a steady increase since 1979. Powers and Vogele explore an increase in protest movements from the Civil Rights era through the middle 1990s, Brenner and Theodore discuss the increasing number of protest events against neoliberalism (1979-2002) (4), and Sandine discusses crowd events from across American history, with particular focus on assembly rights in the 21 st century (Chs. 6-9). Further evidence is in the sheer record-breaking scale of protest events since 2003. Sagan iii what is now called the "Miami Model of Protest Policing." 4 Police used this approach again in 2004 in Los Angeles and New York City during the presidential conventions, and French police used similar tactics against protests across France in 2006. A significant element in the organization of urban political protest and the enforcement thereof has been the internationalization of methods of both protest and response. The largest protests occurring under neoliberal governance has been in response to issues that affect several nations at once. These protests typically have occurred in response to economic or military plans made in the developed world that have significant impact in the global south. The internationalization of economic and military policy under neoliberalism, combined with increasing availability of information on international developments available to citizens worldwide through communications media, has internationalized the protest response to these policies. Thus, the large protests in cities like Miami, Rostock and Seattle have not been against local events or even national policies, but rather held in solidarity with non-local and extra-national victims of said policies. Political protest has been a tradition in the United States dates to before the founding of the Republic, and the right of assembly and the protection of public speech is ensured by the Constitution. 5 However, the United States has never been as intertwined in international and global networks of power and trade as it is today, and, likewise, never before have protests in the United States been as connected to the international forces of resistance to those powers. Dozens of books have been written about globalization and its economic effects on both the global North and global South, the reorganization of power relationships between property owners and renters, and between mobile capital and embodied labor. 6 Do these new power relations entail changes in how protests are organized and managed? 7 Have there been changes in how protest events are organized by protesters, and regulated and administered to by police and enforcers? How are these changes reflected in the urban fabric that supports mass assembly? 8 What are the roles and responsibilities of professional environmental design in managing and policing protest? These new global economic relations are part of a shift from liberal economic policies into a new international economic formation called "neoliberalism." 9 Economic changes under neoliberalism bring with them new understandings of the economic relationships which underpin the production and regulation of urban space and urban life. According to geographer David Harvey, the main project of neoliberalism is the restoration of class power and the concentration of wealth among the already very wealthy. 10 This project is accomplished through financial and economic processes that reorganize urban economic relationships, altering relationships between users and regulators of urban space. This has caused a crisis in conceptions of public space, resulting in social and economic conflicts over rights to and uses of public urban spaces. When the vast array of stakeholders in urban life far outnumbers those who have direct economic stakes in urban property, how are mass public demonstrations treated? Along with new economic relationships, new spatial and administrative practices have developed under neoliberalism. How do these new relationships in urban living change the legal and procedural expectations of the role of citizen? These economic changes have brought about a corresponding shift in the administrative 4 Fernandez Ch. 4. 5 Particularly in the First Amendment, where the rights to free speech and peaceable assembly are laid out. 6 Specifically globalization as it relates to cities and urban form; see Cox, King 2004, Sassen, Smith, M., 2001. 7 Aihwa Ong's work on the relationship between neoliberalism, urban space and political economy. 8 Oscar Newman in particular deals with spatial design and crime prevention, and of course there is an entire subfield of build architecture entiled 'Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design' (CPTED), but other work (Lefebvre 1991, Low 2003, Kohn for some examples) specifically addresses transformations in urban space based on social and/or political practice.

2019

How do the landscapes of the 2017 Women’s March in the United States embrace the potential for socio-political dialogue within the urban context of 21st century cities? This research examines the routes and destinations taken by march participants in six American cities, looking at the design of the route, mode of procession, space of gathering, edge of dissension, and focus of the occupation. This analysis will provide perspectives on how people use and occupy urban spaces for democratic peaceful protest. The analysis of the spatial framework for these planned protests will suggest ways for landscape architects to understand and advocate for the relationship between designed public space and the ideals of public democracy. “We are experiencing a global shift toward a ‘social movement society’ in which protest is a routine part of political bargaining.” -Jenkins et all

Space and Culture, 2019

This article reflects on the potential of urban design to contribute to spatializing the theory of agonistic democracy grounding this reflection by three specific urban practices that have emerged from cracks in the democratic system under neoliberalism: a protest, a community-developed square, and an artistic intervention in the public space. The analysis of these practices valorizes the role of urban design as a potential methodology for contesting the consensus of democracy from the very praxis of shaping urban spaces illustrating how urban design practices can contribute to democratizing society. "How do urban design practices contribute to the discussion of democracy under neoliberalism?" The spatial practices analyzed were observed in three different neoliberal cities: marches in Santiago de Chile, an informal public space in Madrid's downtown, and an artistic intervention near Euston in London. Finally, the article constructs an agenda for a democratic contestation using urban design resulted from these explorations of spaces of dissensus.

Journal of Design for Resilience in Architecture and Planning

The common thread to urban movements happening worldwide in recent years is the fact that urban public space is used as a significant setting by city dwellers for expressing their “objections”. What has been experienced throughout urban movements when public spaces have been occupied enables us to grasp the meaning of occupied spaces in the city thus allowing us to get to know societies and cities. Therefore, this research has investigated the impact of urban public space on the consciousness, interaction and gathering of city dwellers as well as urban movements. Within the scope of the research, eight “rebel cities” have been analyzed, and have interviews with participants of urban movements from these cities. These are Tunis, Cairo, Barcelona, London, New York, Dublin, Paris, and Hamburg, respectively. The places where urban movements were visible in urban space and their surroundings have been analyzed using the Space Syntax method, and the gathering/unification/integration poten...