Revolutionary Space

How would the revolution have been different if the public spaces of Cairo were different?  What if the protestors had been forced to carry out their protests on narrow streets, where the sheer magnitude of the crowd could never be captured in a single gaze, as it could in Tahrir?

Walking through Paris, I’m reminded of how Haussman’s boulevards were designed, in part, to keep Napoleon’s potential opposition from barricading streets and controlling large swaths of the city.

This article points up a very different means of modern protest than what was ever confronted in the 18th and 19th centuries. The crowd has become a force for its own sake. Finding strength and courage in numbers, while perhaps initiated online, multiplies in public and overwhelms the spark of the online organizing. Though it has not occurred everywhere, this is a radical change in the public space of opposition, when power did not need to derive from the consent, or the support, of the governed.

In the early 1970’s, in the shadow of student protests, fear of powerful crowds led many planners to turn away from squares and open gathering spaces. I’m thinking specifically of SUNY Albany and other college campuses, intended to keep student protests from occurring, by placing a central building such as a library directly in the campus’s main square. This, in effect, turned the campus inside out and dehumanized it, by purposefully inverting and eliminating the classical Jeffersonian space found at the University of Virginia and emulated at Columbia University and around the world.

Imagine Washington without the Mall, or New York without Times Square or Central Park. Recall Beijing’s fear of the Tiananmen Square protesters. Revolutionary spaces are also social spaces. They are gathering spaces. Without them, not only can masses not express themselves, but human connections are deliberately limited. Humanizing places creates human expression; free human expression can lead to revolution.