The Power of Public Space

Source: NYT

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has a piece in today's New York Times that points out the symbolic significance of Occupy Wall Street's actual locale of occupation: the privately owned Zuccotti Park.

The park, owned by a private real estate corporation, was made open to the public in exchange for a zoning variance and therefore is subject to rules made by its private owner.


Kimmelman writes:

This peculiarity of zoning law has turned an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of so much of what in the last couple of generations has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings. Think of the atrium of the I.B.M. tower on Madison Avenue and countless other places like it: “public” spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords. 

Kimmelman goes on to discuss the many public spaces which have served as ground for political voices over the years: Kent State, Tahrir Square, Tiannamen.  Without pubic space, there is nowhere for people to converge, to overcome their isolation, to "discover their own numbers," as Kimmelman puts it.

The irony is stark.  Much of what the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to stand for- nebulous as it may be at this point- has to do with preserving some semblance of public life.  And yet the launching pad for this movement, instead of being a place owned by the people, is instead owned and controlled by a private corporation.

As Kimmelman succinctly puts it:

The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).