Castells

Graeber

Porto-Gonçalves

Zibechi

English

Sam Halvorsen

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Area

Beyond Zuccotti Park: freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space edited by RonShiffman, RickBell, Lance JayBrown and LynneElizabeth Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012, xxii + 410 pp, £12.84 paperback ISBN 978-1-61332-009-9

Halvorsen, S

UCL Discovery

the need and opportunities to globalise China’s multifariousresponsibilities, in particular with regard to contributing to aninternational consensus over the conditions for business-ledgrowth. The end result is a very useful volume for scholars,policy-makers and activists engaging with Chinese–African rela-tions and with questions of China’s geopolitical and developmen-tal responsibilities towards Africa.Philippe Le BillonUniversity of British ColumbiaBeyond Zuccotti Park: freedom of assembly and theoccupation of public space edited by Ron Shiffman, RickBell, Lance Jay Brown and Lynne ElizabethOakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012, xxii + 410 pp, £12.84paperback ISBN 978-1-61332-009-9Beyond Zuccotti Park is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding catalogue of books on the Occupy movement that ﬁrstcame to life in New York on 17 September 2011. With nearly 40contributors from multiple disciplines, and packed with photo-graphs and diagrams, it is a fantastic resource that combinesempirical research, political interventions and interviews, broadlyfocused on exploring the role that public space can have inenhancing democracy in light of the Occupations that spreadfrom downtown Manhattan to hundreds of cities worldwide.Shiffman et al.’s collection introduces the reader to Occupy, prin-cipally Occupy Wall Street, through a series of opening texts,many of which are ethnographic, and provides a thoroughaccount of the ways in which public space has been produced bya range of agents, from policymakers, urban practitioners, activ-ists, artists and citizens, in the context of Occupy and varioushistorical precedents. Particular attention is given to New York’s‘Privately Owned Public Spaces’, which provided a legal loop-hole for occupying Zuccotti Park.The ﬁnal section brings togetherthe diverse discussions on public space and democracy into anormative exploration of how both the public sector and thosewho design urban space could respond to the successes andchallenges of Occupy.What makes this book stand out is the effort throughout toappreciate ‘the political power of physical places’, as MichaelKimmelman (p. xiii) puts it. Over the last few years there hasbeen an increasing tendency of both academics and activists toemphasise the contemporary signiﬁcance of online space, oftenevoked in phrases such as the ‘twitter revolution’ in popularmedia. In both discourse and practice, however, Occupy hasbeen centred on taking physical space, and very material strug-gles over the production of the urban. In this context evenManuel Castells (2012), a key theorist of the deterritorialised‘network society’, has acknowledged that contemporary socialmovements, from Tahir Square to Zuccotti Park, present a newspatial form in which the physical ‘space of places’ is as impor-tant as the online ‘space of ﬂows’. This book is one of the ﬁrstattempts to seriously engage with this physicality in the contextof the Occupy movement.The importance of a physical, public space (these terms areoften conﬂated) for enhancing democracy is given numerousexplanations by the different contributors: it provides visibilityfor movements and allows for discussion (Franck and Huang); itinspires and helps build mutual aid and solidarity (Shepard); itopens up a space of negotiation for greater rights (Smithsimon);it gives an ‘ofﬁce space for everyday people’ (Golan); it presentsa critique of spatial exclusion (Wiley); it creates places for newpolitical subjectivities (Rios); and it encourages an embodiedsense of community (Rose). This multiplicity of possibilities ofphysical space leads to a discussion on how best to produceurban space in order to foster these ideals. A key strength of thisbook is its inclusion of numerous urban practitioners, from artiststo architects and planners to policymakers. By sharing their expe-riences with us, this book presents a hopeful intervention on thepotentials of urban space post-Occupy, and allows us tore-imagine the agency of diverse actors in creating different kindsof democracies. At the same time, however, these interventionshave tensions underlying them, two of which most struck me.Firstly, the challenge of improving public space often leads toa discussion on better design and avoiding ‘failed spaces’ (p. 361).Some contributors, however, suggest that such an approach hintsat a spatial fetishism that underemphasises public praxis. Hou, forexample, distinguishes between ‘institutional public space’, suchas parks, squares and streets, which are abstractly produced for animagined public, and ‘insurgent public space’, produced throughthe messy practices of those who constantly ‘appropriate, reclaim,or occupy’ space (p. 92). Advocating the latter, he argues that it isthe constant (re)making of the public through their practices ofoccupying that should be the focus of our attention. Secondly,there is often an underlying assumption that inﬂuencing statepower is the best means to achieve improved public space anddemocracy, and the collection ends with a call to ‘occupy thevoting booth’.At the same time, there is a celebration of Occupy’semancipatory politics that was embedded in physical space.Indeed many see Occupy as part of a longstanding tradition ofanarchist democracy, changing society outside the voting booth(Graeber 2013). Shiffman et al. have helped shift our attentiontowards the spatial politics that lie at the heart of Occupy, and thisis essential, but they risk playing down its radical roots thatanimate its re-imaginations of democracy beyond the state.This leads me to my ﬁnal comment, on the excellent but attimes unfulﬁlled discussions of Occupy beyond Zuccotti Park.While the book plays close attention to the responses ofpolicymakers and urban practitioners in the post-camp period ofOccupy, it overlooks many of the spatial practices that havebeen central to the movement since being evicted from thesquares (e.g. the re-territorialisation of activists in projects suchas Occupy Sandy in New York). The book provides hints thatOccupy represents a new spatiality of the ‘global street’ (Sassen)or is embedding its values in our everyday lives post-Zuccotti(Atlas), yet there is little substance to these claims. More con-cretely, Segal argues that a key element of post-Zuccotti Occupycould be the mapping out and production of urban communalspaces (such as community gardens), while Lander andFreedman-Schnapp argue for extending democratic engagementbeyond camps and into local spaces such as libraries or thea-tres. Little else is said on the many ways that Occupy isre-imagining itself beyond Zuccotti Park.bs_bs_bannerReviews 509Area Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 507–510, 2013© 2013 The Author. Area published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers).This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Copyright line has been changed since ﬁrst publication on 5 November 2013.Finishing this collection of very engaging texts, I was leftfeeling that an important discussion was marginalised. It may beenlightening to look towards Latin America where the occupa-tion of public space has been a core tactic of contemporarysocial movements for many years. Researchers are claiming thatwe are seeing the production of ‘new territorialities’ in whichvalues and social relations are being created beyond the tradi-tional spaces of economic production and state democracy(Porto-Gonçalves 2001; Zibechi 2012). Is something similarhappening with Occupy? If so, what might the implications befor the policymakers and practitioners who contributed to thisbook? Is it possible that beyond Zuccotti Park also takes usbeyond a public space that is tied to institutionalised democracyand towards a more insurgent public, as Hou suggests? In con-clusion, I welcome this well-written and well-researched book,which provides signiﬁcant food for thought for both academicsand activists in the post-camp phase of the global Occupymovement.Sam HalvorsenUniversity College LondonReferencesCastells M 2012 Networks of outrage and hope: social move-ments in the internet age Polity, CambridgeGraeber D 2013 The democracy project. A history, a crisis, amovement Penguin, LondonPorto-Gonçalves C W 2001 Geo-grafías: movimientos sociales,nuevas territorialidades y sustentabilidad Siglo Veintiuno,Mexico DFZibechi R 2012 Territories in resistance: a cartography of LatinAmerican social movements AK Press, Oakland CA510 ReviewsArea Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 507–510, 2013© 2013 The Author. Area published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers).

Networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age Polity, Cambridge Graeber D

Beyond Zuccotti Park: freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space edited by Ron Shiffman, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown and Lynne Elizabeth Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012, xxii + 410 pp, £12.84 paperback ISBN 978-1-61332-009-9

Beyond Zuccotti Park: freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space edited by Ron Shiffman, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown and Lynne Elizabeth Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012, xxii + 410 pp, £12.84 paperback ISBN 978-1-61332-009-9

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