Gabe’s Timeline

I chose Zuccotti Park as the place for my timeline because it was the site of the Occupy Wall Street movement. However, I presented the park in a way that didn’t confine the space as only the site of this event – upon further research, I discovered the public square was significant for many reasons. First and foremost, the park is emblematic of the sweeping trend of neoliberal policy in modern cities across the globe. Zuccotti Park is a POPS, meaning it is a public space that sits on privately owned land. POPS are prevalent throughout New York and allow the city to provide adequate open and public space to residents without having to deal with the costs of maintenance. This is also a positive tradeoff because private companies are then held responsible for their public footprint and how urbanites perceive the companies influence on the city. Problems begin to arise, however, when questions of who has a right to the space arise. Since the park is public and must be open 24 hours a day, protestors believe they have a right to the space but officials view them as restricting the freedom of others to use the square. It’s a very difficult urban dilemma with no clear solutions, which is why I began my timeline in Antiquity.

By beginning the timeline in ancient Greece, I hope to demonstrate that public squares and the question of who has the right to use them have existed for as long as humans have settled together. The term public square has always been deceiving, because history shows that a segment of the population was consistently excluded and oppressed from the space. In 500 BCE, it was women, slaves, and foreigners who couldn’t access public squares. In 2011, it was anarchists and those that were fed up with the financial establishment that were eventually barred from accessing public space. Further, by beginning in Antiquity and traveling to other parts of the world, its possible to show how public squares have a number of universal uses, as well as public squares that serve very particular functions for a specific city – Boston Common was a pasture for grazing, like many other public spaces at the time, but was simultaneously the site of antislavery protests as well as civil rights demonstrations.

Lastly, at the root of my timeline is my own love of urban public squares. In any city I visit, I am immediately drawn to the wide-open and bustling spaces of public squares. I’ve spent entire days simply sitting on benches, people watching and eves dropping. It’s where the best of city-life is on display at any hour of the day and where a visitor can gain the most profound sense of place. Cities are usually distinguished most by their skylines, but it’s what happens in between those looming skyscrapers, in the urban public squares, that give a city its true character.