http://wwwm.theatlantic.com/international/archive/20/04/a-dictatorsiguide-to-urban-design/283953/
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I was checking the page view count today and I noticed that we are over 8,300. That's fantastic. I really appreciate all your support. I do want to apologize for the erratic posts over the last few weeks, things have been in flux. I'm slowly getting back to the posts and fleshing them out.
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Protesters in the Euromaidan
Kiev, Ukraine
online.wsj.com |
Changing the subject, this has been quite a busy two-an-half-weeks for the Ukraine. Over the course of the now concluded Twenty-Second Olympic Games in Sochi, the Ukraine ousted their former President Viktor Yanukovych over the past weekend, replacing him with newly freed Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com) The epicenter of the protests that led to the removal of President Yanukovych was the Euromaidan. According to Matt Ford, the author of
The Atlantic article "A Dictator's Guide to Urban Design," the Euromaidan is a fusion of the words
euro, a reference to the opposition's wish to move towards the European Union and the Arabic/Persian word for square. The implication of this combination suggests that protesters not only see their country as part of Europe but also see Europe as an idea that "implies genuine democracy, trustworthy police and sincere respect for human right." More so, the fact that the protests took place in a public square speak to an increasingly common phenomena of using public squares as sites for political protest or a calculated effort by autocrats to suppress dissent through urban design.
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Freedom Square
Tblisi, Georgia
aboutgeorgia.ge |
Historically, not all political and social revolutions have taken place in public squares, however many of the recent ones, including those in the former Soviet Satellites have taken place in the public domain. In 2004, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution took place in the very same site that saw bloody clashes between protesters and police, forcing former President Yanukovych to call for early elections and a return to the 2004 Constitution. The significance of the public square was made acutely obvious during the Arab Spring protests. At the height of the Egyptian protests in 2011, an anonymous essayist described how Tahrir Square signified the larger repression of Egyptian civil society. Tahrir Square was built in the nineteenth century based on the "Paris on
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Protester in Tahrir Square (2013)
Cairo, Egypt
newsweek.com |
the Nile" master plan. It acquired its current name, Tahrir (Liberation) when it became the site of the Egyptian Revolutions of 1919 and 1952. In the past few weeks, Tahrir has become a genuinely public square.
Prior to the current wave of protests, Tahrir was just a busy traffic circle, a result of limitations imposed by political design and policies that not only discouraged but outright prohibited public assembly. Under not yet lifted martial law, established in 1981 when former President Hosni Mubarak took office, a gathering of even a few people could result in in arrest. Like all autocrats, former President Mubarak understand the power of a public square, as place for people to meet, mingle, assemble, protest, perform, and exchange ideas-a true
maidan. A true Midan al-Tahrir would have been viewed as a security threat to the regime, and over the years the former Mubarak government deployed physical design of urban space as primary means of discouraging democracy.
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Midan al-Tahrir
content.time.com |
For Tahrir, using the physical design of urban spaces as a means of suppression meant, putting up fences and subdividing open space into manageable plots of grass and sidewalks. One example cited by Matt Ford is the large port of the square in front of the Egyptian museum was, until the sixties, a green space with crisscrossing paths and a grand fountain. Here, students and their families would gather during the day and it was a lover's lane for couples in the middle of the city. In the seventies, the government fenced off the area without any explanation of what would happen to this popular place. Cairenes thought it was being
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Cairo street map
lib.utexas.edu |
closed for construction of a planned metro or other infrastructure project. During the 2011 protests, the fence was taken down and used as a barricade to protect the anti-Mubarak demonstrators from security forces. The removal of the fence ultimately revealed that none of the much speculated infrastructure projects never came to fruition. Instead, a chunk of public space had been taken away to prevent exactly what had occurred. The street layout of the Egyptian capital made Tahrir Square the ideal place to launch a revolution. The square is centrally located, near the Egyptian Parliament building, former President Mubarak's political party headquarters, the presidential palace, numerous embassies, and hotels filled with foreign journalists to broadcast the events. After the president stepped down, other Arab capitals became sites for revolution.
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Martyr's Square
Tripoli, Libya
news.com.au |
In Libya, Martyrs' Square in Tripoli became the symbol of the successful overthrow of Moammar Khaddafi. in 2011. The square, originally named
Piazza Italia, during Italian colonial rule, a common practice during Western expansion in Africa and Asian, it was renamed Independence Square by the Libyan monarchy. Under the Khaddafi regime, it was christened "Green Square," in difference to the much hated leader's political ideology. After his overthrow, the interim government re-dubbed it Martyrs' Square in memory of those who perished fighting the pro-Khaddafi forces during the Libyan Civil War. Not
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Pearl Roundabout (destroyed)
Manana, Bahrain
theguardian.com |
all public spaces survive their revolutionary moment. In 2011, Manana, Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout was filled with demonstrators. In response, the government retook the traffic circle, tearing up the grass area with backhoes and demolished the Pearl Monument in order to re-establish order.
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Rendering of Baron Hausmann's plan for Paris
arthistoryarchive.com |
It was the French that pioneered the conscious use of urban design for political purpose. In the early nineteenth century, the City of Paris was still stuck in its medieval urban plan, suffering from overcrowding and poor infrastructure. Baron Hausmann's urban planning revolution in the mid-nineteenth century under Napoleon III gave Paris a modern sewage system, suburban parks, and the metro systems. In the same fell swoop, he ordered the demolition of the raucous lower-class neighborhoods, exiling their residents to the suburbs, and replaced the cramped narrow alleys with wide grand boulevards. Thus, in the event of an uprising, such as the ones in France's history, French authorities hoped that the wider boulevards would be harder to barricade and easier for columns of soldiers to march through and put down the rabble. Similar logic is used in contemporary times.
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Naypyidaw, Myanmar
nytimes.com |
In 2005, Burma's ruling party moved the seat of government from Yangon, a sprawling metropolis of five million people, to the newly built inland capital at Naypyidaw, for security purposes. Officially, the Myanmar government officials claim that a million people live there, but the actual total is likely far lower. When the Saffron Revolution broke out in2007, the large-scale protests that took hold of other Myanmar cities never happened in Naypyidaw and the ruling junta remained in power after a short brutal crack down. Matt Ford speculates that even if the city's actual population had been large enough, where would the hold their demonstrations? Government urban planners used the broad boulevards to demarcate neighborhoods specifically set aside for officials, with no public square or central plaza for residents to congregate. There even a moat around the presidential palace.
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Pyongyang, North Korea
theatlantic.com |
Never one to be topped, in 2008 the man of the moment Russian President Vladimir Putin looked to the past for inspiration, reviving the tradition of Soviet style military parades in Red Square. Prefer subtlety? The imposing North Korean capital of Pyongyang is composed of massive slabs of concrete that reek of conformity. Only those most loyal to the Kim regime are allowed to reside in one of the city's identical apartment blocks that recall the Stalinist era urban design. According to Matt Ford, the capital is defined by the "largest monuments of questionable taste [that] dot the cityscape...linked by absurdly wide Hausmannian boulevards and colossal public squares devoid of an actual public." The vast public spaces exists solely for the glory of the state and the Kim cult of personality.
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Tiananmen Square
Beijing, People's Republic of China
en.wikipedia.org |
If too much pubic space is a bad thing, then Tiananmen Square in Beijing, People's Republic of China is the worst offender. The square, the fourth-largest public plaza in the world, can in the words of Tim Waterman and Ed Wall; cited by Mr. Ford, "...paradoxically considered 'the opposite of public space." The titanic scale of the plaza dwarfs the individual, reinforcing the subservience of one person to the state. It's better suited for parading the troops, not the quotidien activities of the citizenry. The infamous tank-led crack down of pro-democracy activists occupying the square was a grim reminder how mass demonstrations can fall. Yet, not all dictators are quite able to make use of urban design. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu grand redesign of Bucharest, in the eighties, destroyed about one-fifth of the
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Bucharest, Romania during the Ceauşescu regime
vivid.ro |
capital and installed a sprawling mass of concrete buildings, including the world's largest parliament building, dominating the city's skyline. As Karmic law would have it, none of this prevented the crowd from turning on him during him during a speech in Revolution Square in December 1989. Both Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife were captured, convicted, and executed by firing squad.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
This brings us back to Midan al-Tahrir, three years after the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak. This past summer, the protesters returned to the square to demand the ouster of Mohammed Morsi, the first democratically elected president. Mr. Morsi is currently on trial for allegedly inciting murder and using violence against demonstrators. The square is currently empty and workers are putting up ten-foot tall gates decorated with spikes and painted in Egyptian national colors. Matt Ford, paraphrasing Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, "one cannot live in a cradle forever." Will the Euromaidan meet a similar fate?
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