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Re a Ing the It He Ccu O E Ent and Ts R an Resonances Reaing the it he ccu oeent and ts ran Resonances R Vanderbilt University SALLY O’DRISCOLL Fairfield University he ccu oeent in loer anhaan and its such as Nuit Debout in Paris, 2016. These efforts were not directed by later oshoots challenge the a uran sace is used professional urbanists or architects, but rather by grass-roots groups. and oliced his article eaines the selfreresenta Nonetheless, the disciplines of architecture and urban planning that tion of ccu and its relationshi to an organiation now aspire to foster community-based design have much to learn from of sace designated for arious uses ith cultural and these provocations of the urban status quo. The last time the potential of “anonymous architecture” (to borrow Bernard Rudolfsky’s term) to olitical signicance his essa ass architects and change professional practice was recognized was, unsurprisingly, in the uranists to consider the ilications of such occu nineteen-sixties, when “the philosophy and know-how of the anony- ations for conceiing the deocratic cit mous builders” was believed to present “the largest untapped source of architectural inspiration for post?industrial man.”1 THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT When people come together to occupy space in political protest, they One could say that the visual/textual self-representation developed lay bare their desire to claim that space in a fiercely intentional way: they at Liberty Square was a guidepost to the deliberate reshaping of pub- are determined to shape it to meet specifically articulated community lic urban space that formed the core of the Occupy mission. The visual/ needs. Thus an examination of such protests, ephemeral though they textual style speaks for the desire to use urban space in new ways that may be, reveals a trove of information about the desires of a particular were enacted in those protests – the style carries the enormous cultural section of the community in relation to developing a new vision of pub- weight of a visionary deployment of progressive politics in the city. The lic urban space. As such, these projects constitute “counter-hegemonic emphasis here on “desire” is key, for although Occupy has often been architectural practices” that resist the economics, aesthetics, and politics characterized as a politically strategic, even necessary, movement, it has of urban building as it currently exists. less frequently been thought of an expression of desires of many kinds on the part of its participants. In discussing the significance of New York The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 in New York City offered an City as a crucible for the formulation of Latino identity (a decade before excellent example of what can be learned about the social priorities of Occupy), Agustin Lo-Montes noted that the “right to the city” came not the protesters: the ways they transformed uccotti Park (formerly known just from the “need” to create political communities in different ways, as Liberty Square), made clear what they considered the best uses of but also from the “desire” to do so.2 Similarly, the urban intervention urban space when mobilized by the community at large rather than by constituted by Occupy grew not only from the need to make political a Wall Street elite. They created a library; spaces for consensus- driven action spatial and visible, but also from a frequently expressed desire to decision making and educational discussion; food; sleeping places; a grey create new communities to challenge the dominant values of the neolib- water recycling system; and art, performance, and entertainment – all eral capitalist society. offered regardless of ability to pay. Observers also noted an iconic style of visual and textual self-representation emerging from those protests – a ENACTMENT AND REPRESENTATION IN THE OCCUPY WALL style of representation that functioned as shorthand for the protesters’ STREET MOVEMENT sociopolitical goals. Although Occupy, and later Nuit Debout, had manifestations in many At a distance of some years, it is now possible to see how certain ele- other cities, the specific places in which the occupations took place ments of the Occupy movement’s reorganization of space and the informed how they worked politically and spatially. Occupy and the related self-representation of that space were picked up and used over later movements had the power to temporarily reshape public space and over again in other protests and occupations around the world, indi- not only because physical people were actually in the space but because cating their importance in the lexicon of progressive desire for a different they marked it in deliberate, significant ways that enabled the commu- kind of urban life; it is also fascinating that the idiosyncratic self-repre- nity to recognize and define itself. In this essay we focus on the physical sentational style of Occupy has been faithfully repurposed in occupations occupation rather than on the social media/internet driven organizing Is Another Architecture Possible? Brooklyn Says, “Move to Detroit” 197 Figure 1: Occupy Wall Street – the grey water system, courtesy Lisa Guido. global configurations of the coloniality of power.”6 Signage is ephemeral, and for that reason it can be produced and deployed quickly to change that formed a related sense of community. Both aspects of Occupy have the meaning of a space, where new buildings and monuments would been discussed by Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder, who conclude take years to design and buildassuming there were agreement on what that as powerful as online communities and organizing are, “Bodies in they should be and represent. the street still matter for commanding attention and galvanizing engage- ment.”3 The physical occupation of space remains a powerful tool, which THE AESTHETICS OF OCCUPY AND THEIR CONTINUED CULTURAL works on multiple levels and resonates with individuals and communi- SIGNIFICANCE ties, and in the political realm. In an earlier essay on the visual/textual Ephemeral interventions such as Occupy and Nuit Debout have spatial work produced by Occupy Wall Street, we labeled this form of physical forms that can be analyzed and that distinguish them from earlier street manifestation an ephemeral intervention: an event that involves print protests from which they, to some extent, developed. The modern occu- (itself possessing textual and visual elements), sound, movement, and pations do not, for instance, consist of hastily assembled barricades as interaction between actors and spectators, all enacted within a particular was the case for nineteenth-century protests. For Occupy New York, public space that is mobilized for political purposes. These multimedia we have the careful spatial analysis conducted by Massey and Snyder. interventions are important civically and cannot be understood except Borrowing the term “taskspace” from anthropologist Tim Ingold, they as a totality: the various elements function synergistically.4 Ephemeral have described the kind of space adapted by Occupy from the existing interventions are a crucial aspect of public life in the modern period. hardscape in Liberty Plaza. They showed that the Occupiers organized They are most often used as a mode of resistance, played out in public their encampment according to functions or “tasks,” along a “gradient” space, against state poweralthough they can also be demonstrations from northeast to southwest that “shaded from public to private, mind of state power used to control the populace, using the very same to body, waking to sleeping, and reason to faith.” The camp capitalized strategies.5 on the contours of the park as well as on its hardscape to dictate the location of its various components.7 Ephemeral interventions are crucial to social, political, and cultural pro- cesses because they are particularly powerful in producing affect and Its urban plan was only one dimension of Occupy’s aesthetic, which was identification in the participants. So doing, ephemeral interventions also reflected in the character of much of the ephemera produced by have the potential to change the nature of public space, if only tempo- the movement and which accounts for some of its political effectiveness. rarily. For instance, in Manhattan, Occupy shifted the meaning of public While the open-endedness of Occupy’s plaormflexible enough to spaces that formerly represented the power and authority of the state accommodate oppositions to income disparity, unequal access to higher and corporationsand where individuals felt relatively unimportantto education, student debt, unemployment, and moreand its canny one in which the people present felt themselves to be powerful partici- deployment of the “99” slogan have been cited as reasons for which it pants in democracy. In Paris, Nuit Debout appropriated the Place de la gained traction, the specific organization of urban space and visual strat- Rpublique, a space that was produced by government administrations egies used have been given relatively less credit. As participant Michael overseeing urban development in the nineteenth century, but is also Ellick observed, “Occupy’s approach was not to organize by policy but associated with republican revolution. to organize by spectacle, and by archetype, and by emotion and idea, and to find a different way of speaking to the people.”8 In the wake of In the current essay, we turn our attention to the aspects of Occupy that Occupy, all of its aesthetic characteristics and practices have been repli- have demonstrated their cultural power by being replicated
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