[Zurück]

L. Franta:
"Transforming by Practice. Moving Beyond the Dichotomy of Private and Public Space";
Vortrag: AAG Annual Meeting 2016, San Francisco; 29.03.2016 - 02.04.2016.

The decline of `true´ public space by means of commodification, surveillance, and policing of behavior restricting the potential of public space being an arena for the `public´ expressing alternative politics has been discussed in vast bodies of literature (Staeheli & Mitchell 2008, Low&Smith 2005, Davis 1992). Privatization and thus ownership and management is yet another aspect considered substantial in the discourses on public spaces, as shown by Mitchell (2003) or Zukin (1996). However, a reduction of the discourse about the changes in public space merely on questions of privatization and ownership leaves little conceptual room for understanding the dynamic characteristics of urban space, as the emergence of longer-term occupations of privately owned public spaces by the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) showed. As OWS and other large protests (Umbrella movement) reclaimed `public´ spaces with private management in particular, the distinction between public spaces as being the sole locus for voicing political claims as opposed to privately managed or private spaces offers limited explanatory possibilities in this case. This contribution is set to explore how OWS managed to overcome the limitations of and appropriate a privately managed public space in the midst of highly commodified and policed New York City and Amsterdam, based on an actor-network-theory approach to urban space. The case of OWS showed how social movements were able to overcome the barrier of privatization and transformed the place into a space for the public by using a particular set of practices of protest to transform urban space.