The Unsquared Square or Protest and Contemporary Publics

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago we began a critique of the public square as a site of social interaction and protest. We observed fear, distrust, decay, and the abandonment of cities and public space as social functions shifted to controllable private spaces. The automobile, the insulating character of air conditioners, and the ability to transcend local sites through telecommunication devices offered options siphoning life into new and complex configurations. We lamented the fall of the city and the rise of the “none-city”: the lifeless deserted, safe, predictable and boring collection of sameness known as suburban sprawl, particularly as found in the United States, but also present in European urban and suburban design and development. The village square, the community square, slowly began to deteriorate, sometimes even disappear, lost in the proliferation of strip malls of sameness. Traditional public spaces, be they formal downtown civic spaces or informal gathering spots integrated into neighborhoods, that once helped promote social interaction and a sense of community, began to disappear. Plazas, town squares, parks, marketplaces, public commons and malls, public greens, all places that provide social space—potential sites of human interaction and protest—decreased in number and function. We noted the civic functions of public space competed with media technology that shifts interaction inward, away from less predictable public contacts or corporeal threat. Then a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square serving as a catalyst for protests that would bring down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, shake regimes in Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and lead to a crackdown on Internet access as far away as China. Protests spread to Asia and Europe and eventually to the United States with the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The events in Tahrir Square (Freedom or Liberty Square) in Cairo, Syntagma Square in Athens, Revolution Square in Moscow, and Zuccotti Park in New York (to name a few) have catapulted public places into the forefront of civic life once again and restored symbols of revolution.