Abstract
Over the past few years, activists around the world have used urban spaces in dialogue with online and location-based media to build new publics and polities dedicated to systemic social change. From Tehran to Cairo and from Madrid to New York, citizens have claimed streets and squares to press citizenship claims and realize more insurgent forms of self-government. In parallel, they have used smartphones and computers along with social media, blogs, and crowdmaps to assemble online and in digital communications circuits. Many of today’s most turbulent political actions emerge through the dialogue between physical places and virtual spaces as citizens and activists leverage the affordances of streets and squares as well as online media to perform temporary publics and counterpublics.
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Notes
For overviews of Occupy, see Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space, eds. Ron Shiffmann et al. (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012); Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (New York: OR Books, 2011); and Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder, “Occupying Wall Street: Places and Spaces of Political Protest,” Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, places.designobserver.com (September 17, 2012).
Bernard E. Harcourt, “Political Disobedience,” Critical Inquiry 39:1 (Autumn 2012): 33–55.
Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation,” American Ethnologist 39:2 (2012): 259–79: 260–61.
On the POPS system, see Jerrold S. Kayden, The New York City Department of City Planning, and The Municipal Art Society, Privately Owned Public Spaces: The New York City Experience (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2000);
and Benjamin Shepard and Greg Smithsimon, The Beach beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces (Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2011): chapters 2–3.
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008), http://twobits.net/discuss/. See also http://p2pfoundation.net/Recursive_Public.
See Patrick Meier, “Theorizing Ushahidi: An Academic Treatise,” http://irevolution.net/2011/10/02/theorizing-ushahidi/ (October 2, 2011) and Andrew Turner, Introduction to Neogeography (Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006).
#JEZ3PREZ and ATCHU, “On the Question of the Anarchives of Occupy Wall Street,” E-misferica 9.1–9.2 (2012), http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/es/e-misferica-91/jez3prezaatchu. The concept of potlatch employed in this proposal evokes that developed in Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
Ethan Gould, quoted in Alan Feuer, “Occupy Sandy: A Movement Moves to Relief,” New York Times, November 9, 2012; FEMA, Hurricane Sandy: Youthful Energy and Idealism Tackles Real World Disaster Response (Innovative Practice bulletin), August 22, 2013, https://www.llis.dhs.gov/content/innovative-practice-hurricane-sandy-youthful-energy-and-idealism-tackles-real-world-disaster.
Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, The Resilient Network: @OccupySandy #SuperstormSandy (report), September 30, 2013:19, 52, 47, and 32.
Diane E. Davis and Prassanna Raman, “The Physicality of Citizenship: The Built Environment and Insurgent Urbanism,” Thresholds 41 (Spring 2013): 60–71.
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© 2015 Jordan Geiger
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Massey, J., Snyder, B. (2015). The Hypercity That Occupy Built. In: Geiger, J. (eds) Entr’acte. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414182_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414182_5
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