Occupied Spaces

In cities across the globe, public plazas have become platforms for vocal—and visible—political dissent.

By Mohamed Elshahed

Photo © AP Photo/Ben Curtis

Tahrir Square, Cairo, in early 2011.

 

The occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square earlier this year has become a global symbol for citizen activism and peaceful resistance against oppression. Like Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the civil rights movement, the square was transformed into a visual and spatial representation of a people's struggle. Egyptians had been fighting the Mubarak regime's oppressive policies for two decades with little success. But the media image of an anonymous critical mass of protesters occupying an open urban space galvanized international media in ways that the atrocities of the regime and its record of torture failed to accomplish.

In the last year, protests have erupted in public spaces around the globe. In Boston, demonstrators held placards that read “Walk like an Egyptian,” and in London, protesters renamed Trafalgar Square “Tahrir Square.” From Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv to Syntagma Square in Athens, people have been using public spaces as platforms to voice their displeasure with government policies, to discuss political futures, and to criticize the current economic system. Most of the protest movements this year were restricted to North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe—until the Occupy Movement commenced across America this fall.

Occupy Wall Street in New York's Zuccotti Park began in September and became a hugely successful media event, with its symbolic value due to its proximity to the financial district. Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park hardly seem comparable: Tahrir Square is a vast space the size of several football fields while Zuccotti Park is small, tucked into the dense fabric of the city. And while Tahrir Square is the geographic and symbolic center of Cairo, Zuccotti Park isn't a well-known civic plaza. Zuccotti Park's symbolic value is in the making, whereas Tahrir Square has more than a century of historical symbolism as a space of resistance. Most significantly, Zuccotti Park differs from Tahrir Square for being publicly accessible yet privately owned.

Present-day Tahrir Square is actually a traffic circle with several isolated spaces for public gathering. The area was home to army barracks when it was still well outside the city in the 19th century. By 1902, the Egyptian Museum opened, creating a northern edge to the square, and the modern city expanded, transforming the area into a tourist and civic center. Tahrir Square was never designed; rather, it is the result of a series of partially implemented urban plans. The heart of the square, previously a parade ground, was transformed in 1955 into a grassy public park with a large fountain, benches, and a few trees. Beginning in the 1970s, parts of the park gave way to a bus station and parking. Massive antiwar protests, started by university students, erupted in the early 1990s against Mubarak's supportive stance for the American-led Iraq War. These events posed a significant challenge to Mubarak's presidency. The park was closed (and later sold to a development company) as part of the regime's crackdown. (Today, traffic dominates the square, with a few isolated gathering areas on the periphery.)

In addition to limiting civic space, the Mubarak regime enacted legal limits on public assembly under the so-called Emergency Law, an Orwellian set of rules that almost entirely banned public protest. These physical and legal limitations on public space raised the popularity of privately owned parks such as Azhar Park. The city's shopping malls, rather than the city's streets, became spaces for promenading. Political dissent went to the Internet.

Zuccotti Park was meant for passive use, a representative of the owner Brookfield Properties stated. It is not limited by rules for the city's public parks—which close at night—which made its 24-hour occupation possible. On November 15, city police swept protesters from it, at least temporarily, citing health and safety concerns. (Right before this, Brookfield posted new rules for the park prohibiting camping there.)

Another major difference between New York and Cairo is that Zuccotti protesters had direct access to the park, whereas Cairo authorities completely sealed off Tahrir Square on January 28, 2011, once they knew a major protest was planned. By that evening, after intense fighting between protesters and the police, the public regained the square as a political space, not simply a plaza to be used passively.

Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park each test the relationship between the public and authority when it comes to political uses of the city. Tahrir Square unlocked a regime's grip on civic space, while the protest in Zuccotti Park escalated the complex relationship among the public, the authorities, and private enterprise. The idea of privately owned public space emerged decades ago in New York as a means for developers to get permission to build higher than the code allows, by providing a public amenity. Protesters at Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza Park, which opened in 1968, effectively exploited the system: Not only has their use of the park been unrestricted by public-park policies, but their protest didn't even require the normal process of getting a police permit—a mechanism which undermines the notion of challenging the status quo.

Despite the differences among Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, and similar sites of political activism around the world, there are commonalities to be celebrated. Protests in Cairo and New York have empowered citizens. The global Occupy movements have avoided the cult of personality, making them resilient. Urban spaces have become symbolic of protest rather than casual, recreational use.

Mubarak's authoritarianism was manifest in horrid economic policies that allowed the top 1 percent of the population to control and monopolize the country's resources and wealth: Economic injustice is at the heart of Egypt's uprising. Regardless of the politics of design in the United States and across world capitals, city dwellers are giving new political meanings to city squares as they rally for economic justice. Demonstrators in New York refer to Zuccotti Park by its former name, Liberty Park. There's a fine irony in the notion that corporate greed and political influence have been protested on a plaza that was created as a zoning swap to increase the fortunes of Brookfield. Despite variations in civil liberties from one country to the next, public space has proven to be a common denominator, transforming quiet urban oases into dynamic places where people protest oppression in all its forms.

Mohamed Elshahed is a doctoral candidate at NYU’s Middle East Studies Department. He blogs about Cairo at CairObserver.com.

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