Siting, citing and reciting commemoration have taken many forms, most spectacularly in the Arab intifadas.  What are some of the contemporary forms of political commemoration as they are inscribed on space?  How do conflicting commemorative acts co-inhabit, or do they displace each other?  How are spaces of commemoration narrated or otherwise tied into narrative flow? How and when does commemoration become an act of resistance? How is commemoration deployed in political processes of repression?  When and how is commemoration banned, suspended, punished? How are urban heritage sites made available for consumption in the construction of either state power or resistance? Sites for discussion and presentation may include those in Tunis, Cairo, Libya, Syria, the demolished former Pearl Roundabout in Manama, Bahrain; Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, the Hariri shrine, and the National Museum; Hizballah’s Mlita Museum in South Lebanon; Ma’man Allah cemetery in Jerusalem and the so-called Museum of Tolerance to be built on its ruins. We will connect and compare these to commemorative sites in other contested places: Mexico City’s Zocalo, Johannesburg’s Sauer Street, outside Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters,and the steps of Cape Town’s St George’s Cathedral; Tiananmen Square, Beijing;  New York’s Zucotti Park and the symbolics of Wall Street; “Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo” in Buenos Aires; the Washington Mall; and London’s Trafalgar Square.

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“The street” is central to all uprisings, not least the Arab intifadas.  A place of gathering and resistance, of presence and contestation, “the street refuses,” “the street demands,” and so on.  How do such expressions tie in to the slogan made famous across the Arab world, “al-shaab yureed…” or “the people desire or demand…”?  How does “street” relate to “people?”  What about streets in the more ordinary sense: what is the relation, material and semiotic, between “the street” as a political mode and actual urban streets? What are the political performatives that transform a street into “the street”, from “riots” to organized interventions, from conventional protest marches to flash mobs, from  shouted slogans to toyi-toying, and from tear gas to tasers, and batons to tanks? In short, from immediate disruptions to mass mediated interventions and projections? Is there an identifiable style to “the street”?

Space is constituted also by movements and trajectories cutting across and  through it.  Yet those trajectories are marked at different speeds, often take different modes, and may be out of synch with one another. Certain populations or groups are (supposed to be) immobilized and fixed. Their movement itself becomes a vital act of resistance.   How do different spatial trajectories play a role in the current Arab revolts?  How do speed and movement translate into political action or containment?  What about the lingering question of immobility for Palestinians—and mobilization, in every sense of the term, as the obvious antidote?  What about the proliferation of walls in different sites around the world, that shape movement as much as deny it, and the attendant struggles to undercut or bypass them?

Walking often comes to express—sometimes willingly, sometimes forcibly—a kind of alternative to modernity itself (e.g., occupied Palestinians). Wars likewise make walking a primary mode of transportation, both as a strategy of war and as the effect of wars displacements (e.g., Libya). During the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the distinction between, on the one hand, the kind of intimate knowledge of the land and landscape that only walking makes possible, and, on the other hand, mechanized modes of surveillance and seemingly (but in the end not really) omnipotent power that are utterly inimical to walking, turned out to be one of the pivots of the resistance.  Even under more banal circumstances, walking offers a very different form of access to sites and streets, and makes available a very different understanding of landscape and location, than other more mechanized forms of transport. It also produces a different habitation of time and speed. Scales of movement—walking skateboarding, cycling, automobiles, buses, and trains—produce very different experiences of the city which will be examined too.

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The current wave of “Occupy” movements across the world invoke the time honored resisting heritage of reclaiming space. Public spaces in the city are occupied as a form of political protest, of expressing dissent, as a strategy to influence the government of the city/nation.  People have also occupied spaces in the city as a strategy to access shelter or carve out spaces for themselves in otherwise unaffordable and unwelcoming places. At stake in this politics of the city is the “right to the city” (Lefebvre): to imagine and shape the life of the “city” according to one’s (own or collective)  desires. The act of occupying property is political, aimed at enabling alternatives. How do these different forms of occupying space fit together? How do Occupy protests tie to the million-person marches both historically and more recently (e.g., Hizballah’s demonstrations and encampments in central Beirut)?  How should we approach and consider acts of demarcatjng territory, the mobilization of neighborhoods and communities—for self-policing for example—outside actual arenas of resistance, and the resulting new lines of demarcation inscribed on the urban fabric, whether in Tahrir Square,  Zucotti Park, or informal settlements.

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For as long as there have been barriers and attempts to restrict movement, there have been symbolic and other material acts of resistance. How do different forms of graphical protest, different modes of inscribing, laying claim to, reclaiming or transforming spatial markers operate in relation to each other: verbal as opposed to visual graphics, for example; or the extent to which certain graphic styles or actual markers or works can be or have been transposed from one site to another (e.g. Banksy, or JR)?   What are the different graphical modes used to inscribe (or contain) resistance in Palestine or Beirut, across Latin America or in city streets throughout Africa?  How do different modes interact with or contest each other?  How have these modes of inscription changed recently?

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Urban, architectural, and other modes of official or state planning number among the key modes in which larger political narratives and practices are given spatial form. Planning is also a site for contestation and resistance. So how is planning itself a site for occupation of all kinds: a mode of commemoration, enactment, erasure?  How is planning also a site for contestation and resistance? In many ways, planning projects become focal points where confrontations over the future of the city, the form it will take and the actors who will be able to claim a place in it are able to/will not be enacted. We will focus here on the Occupied Territories of Palestine, on the remaking of Beirut after the Civil War and the invasion by Israel in 2006, but also on post-apartheid cities, on the development of cities for tourism as well as global sporting events, as the enactment of development projects like airports, dams, and highways. Local populations are displaced and take to the streets in resistance (in China or Jordan, London or Bahrain, for instance) Planning can also be the focal point for directly surfacing and enacting alternatives, as in contemporary practices of participatory budgeting (e.g. Porto Allegre).

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Space is constituted also by movements and trajectories cutting across and  through it.  Yet those trajectories are marked at different speeds, often take different modes, and may be out of synch with one another. Certain populations or groups are (supposed to be) immobilized and fixed. Their movement itself becomes a vital act of resistance.   How do different spatial trajectories play a role in the current Arab revolts?  How do speed and movement translate into political action or containment?  What about the lingering question of immobility for Palestinians—and mobilization, in every sense of the term, as the obvious antidote?  What about the proliferation of walls in different sites around the world, that shape movement as much as deny it, and the attendant struggles to undercut or bypass them?

Walking often comes to express—sometimes willingly, sometimes forcibly—a kind of alternative to modernity itself (e.g., occupied Palestinians). Wars likewise make walking a primary mode of transportation, both as a strategy of war and as the effect of wars displacements (e.g., Libya). During the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the distinction between, on the one hand, the kind of intimate knowledge of the land and landscape that only walking makes possible, and, on the other hand, mechanized modes of surveillance and seemingly (but in the end not really) omnipotent power that are utterly inimical to walking, turned out to be one of the pivots of the resistance.  Even under more banal circumstances, walking offers a very different form of access to sites and streets, and makes available a very different understanding of landscape and location, than other more mechanized forms of transport. It also produces a different habitation of time and speed. Scales of movement—walking skateboarding, cycling, automobiles, buses, and trains—produce very different experiences of the city which will be examined too.

>> Discuss in the Conversations Forum