By Stephen Zigmund 

Introduction

There are roughly 336,000 migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong, the majority of whom are Filipina (Justice Centre of Hong Kong, 2016). MDWs are required to live with their employers, creating a system highly vulnerable to abuse. It also means that to get away from work they must also leave their homes, a privilege not often granted by employers (Constable 1997). However, domestic workers are given Sundays off and the result is an incredible takeover of Hong Kong’s central commercial district.  Plazas, sidewalks, markets, stairwells, pedestrian overpasses become spaces for social interaction, correspondence, relaxation, and “private” time.

As Law (2001) notes, Filipina domestic workers have been gathering since the early 1980s, and this conversion of public space into “Little Manila” is now simply “part of the spectacle of modern life in Hong Kong” (Law, 2001, p. 266). In most large cities, one is simply not accustomed to seeing central commercial districts used in this manner, except during organized events, parades, or festivals. What makes this different is the type of activities performed. In addition to typical public activities of sitting, standing, eating, talking, buying and selling, these gatherings also include activities typically conducted indoors and in private, such as manicures, haircuts, and makeovers, or simply watching television (Law, 2001).

This use of space cannot be considered in isolation from the space of employment that conditions its possibility.  We must then follow the insight of Henri Lefebvre that “the space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space” (1974, p. 289) to better understand how the creative, vibrant space of “situated resistances” (Law, 2001, p. 280) also conceals a relation based on discipline, control, and exploitation (Constable, 1997).

Analysis

Because these activities are conducted in public they are considered by native Chinese to be an intentional flaunting of feminine sexuality, something women employers go to great lengths to suppress in their domestic workers (Constable, 1997). That this takeover of space also often occurs in the plazas of the skyscrapers of global banking giants serves to underscores its insurgent character (Hou, 2010).

On the one hand, this is a fascinating example of a collective practice that makes creative use of spaces which are not designed for assembly, thus constituting a “tactic” deployed to resist dominant planning strategies (de Certeau 1984). On the other hand, this practice makes visible in dramatic fashion a commodification of the domestic sphere through a “feminization of wage labor” (Parreñas, 2000, p. 561). The Sunday space of central Hong Kong then is a place of contradiction, highlighting intersections of gender, culture, sexuality, class, and the international division of labor.

This phenomenon must be understood as occurring under specific historical and economic conditions. In the case of the Philippines, the export of labor was explicitly considered an economic development strategy by former President Ferdinand Marcos. This strategy became formalized in the Labor Code of 1974, promoting overseas contract work which was seen as have double-sided benefits of lowering unemployment while providing a significant stream of income via workers’ remittances (De Guzman, 2003). The Philippines is now the world’s largest exporter of labor (Wee & Sim, 2003) with well over seven million documented Filipinos employed as overseas foreign workers and responsible for remittances totaling $7 billion (De Guzman 2003). Women account for nearly three-quarters of the land-based workforce, almost all of whom work as domestic helpers and entertainers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Middle East (Wee & Sim, 2003).

The largest single importer of Filipina MDWs is Hong Kong. Because they are employed on a short-term contract basis and required to live with their employer, MDWs are extremely vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse (De Guzman, 2003). A recent report found that MDWs in Hong Kong regularly work 70 hour weeks without a day off and therefore should be considered a form of forced labor (Justice Centre of Hong Kong, 2016).

These conditions of course do not occur in a vacuum. The fact that a third of all households with children employ MDWs is symptomatic of deeper changes in the labor structure of Hong Kong and global capitalism more generally.  Vernengo (2006) notes that the new international division of labor is characterized by an increasing financialization of the global economy that has placed commodity-producing nations in a position of credit and terms of trade dependency to US, European, and Chinese commercial and national banks, resulting in a spatial clustering of large corporations in regional and global finance centers. As one of these global financial centers, Hong Kong has benefited dramatically from these developments and is now one of the wealthiest cities in the world in terms of per capita GDP.

The economic restructuring in Hong Kong, in turn, has led female citizens to become more integrated into the service-dominated workforce in a process referred to as feminization of the workforce (De Guzman, 2003; Parreñas, 2000). Without child and dependent care programs to compensate for this integration of women into the workforce, workers are now needed to complete reproductive labor in the household. Wee and Sim note that “migrant  workers  who  are  domestic  helpers  are  hired  not  so  much to do housework, but to care for the young, the old and the disabled in the developed  economies  of  the  receiving  countries” (Wee & Sim, 2003, p. 3).  Parreñas calls this phenomenon “international transfer of caretaking” (Parreñas, 2000, p. 561).

Implications

While it can be argued that these gatherings of domestic workers in Hong Kong are a sign of empowerment, they can also be understood as a symptom of “the prevailing gender division of labor, as well as the existing dichotomization of state and family responsibilities, respectively, for formal  economic  production and informal social reproduction” (Wee & Sim, 2003, p. 3). That is to say, the demand for labor by Hong Kong’s growing service sector and the high cost of living in global financial center combine to create the conditions where both adults in a household must work. This initiates a commodification chain of reproductive labor whereby women entering the workforce in Hong Kong purchase the low-wage labor of Filipina domestic workers (and others from SE Asia) who, in turn, themselves purchase the even lower-wage labor of poorer women left behind in the Philippines (Parreñas, 2000). In this way, class relationships are introduced among female workers via the international transfer of caretaking, reinforcing and expanding the existing gender and racial divisions of labor (Parreñas, 2000).

While the takeover of public space in central Hong Kong could be understood as an insurgent tactic, the weekly emergence of “Little Manila” also make visible the dramatic social and spatial impacts of the economic restructurings of both the global market and labor forces. That the temporary spaces of migrant domestic workers often occupy the very property of the global finance giants that have encouraged and benefited from these restructurings should provide an important lesson to radical planners: the actual uses of public space should only be a starting point for deeper inquiries into the social functions of urban life, including the political-economic structures which drive the spatial tactics of the most vulnerable participants in the global economy.

References

By Sebastian Gallardo

Introduction

In the periphery of São Luis in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão, a group of predominantly Afrodescendent non-home-owning single mothers mobilized to occupy an unused state-owned housing project on April 4, 1996. In response, the state evicted them with the help of police, who ended up violently attacking them. As the group fought for their right to housing, they grew stronger as a community by (re)constructing their Afro-Diasporic collective memory. For instance, they took their name after Zumbi, who was the leader of the Palmares slave revolts and more recently became an icon for the Black movement in Brazil. Through collective negotiation with officials, the state of Maranhão eventually provided them with a housing complex in a different location.

As they continued their Afro-Diasporic community building project, they substituted the street names dedicated by state agencies in the new housing complex for the names of black leaders such as Negro Cosmes and Agutinê. They named their new community Zumbi dos Palmares and established a Candomble house, which serves both as a place of worship and a community-gathering center. This case, which was originally documented by a team of the research institute Nova Cartographia Social da Amazônia with the collaboration of residents (Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia, 2009), demonstrate that the Afro-Diasporic experience ultimately served as a mobilizing force against structural racism and as a base for collective planning.

Analysis

Political and economic power has long been configured along the lines of race throughout the Western Hemisphere (Ennis & Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2000, p. 394). This structural racism is perpetuated by conventional planning in the form of urban development and housing policies, which have historically favored the needs and wants of a predominantly European descendent minority over those of Afrodescendent and indigenous peoples. Such exclusionary forms of planning have ultimately served to “regulate certain bodies in space (female, non-White, gay)” (Sandercock [1999] cited in Sweet & Escalante, 2014, p. 1827). In the case of São Luis, black bodies were systemically excluded from the city. Even though state-led projects were developed to cater to the housing needs of the city’s most vulnerable populations, the Zumbi dos Palmares community was left out of such projects, illustrating Keish-Khan Perry’s argument that Afrodescendent people in Brazil are considered “out of place” in the new urban spaces built up in cities such as Salvador (2004, p. 821).

After the initial violent expulsion of the Zumbi dos Palmares, the government continued the exclusion of the black population in a more subtle yet not less discriminatory fashion by imposing a Eurocentric history over that of the Afrodescendent population and naming the Zumbi dos Palmares housing project after Roseana Sarney. However, the Zumbi dos Palmares substituted the names of the streets and the housing project for the names of black leaders from Brazil and around the world. In doing so, the Zumbi dos Palmares pursued what Miraftab refers to as a form of “insurgent planning” which “transgresses time bounds by seeking a historicized consciousness and promoting historical memory of present experiences” (2009, p. 49). Even though scholars such as France Windance Twine have argued that the black movement in Brazil has failed to reject the ideology of racial democracy, such collective actions against structural racism belies such claims (Perry, 2004, p. 823).

According to Catherine Walsh, “the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to colonial and imperial designs, to a geopolitics that universalizes European thought as a scientific truths, while subalternizing and invisibilizing other epistemes” (Perry and Rappaport, 2013, p. 30). In this regard, the Eurocentric theoretical base from which conventional planning stems is structurally conditioned to ignore Afro-diasporic knowledge in its practice and theory. For example, Eurocentric planning has employed public squares for spatial and social organization since colonial times. Instead, in their planning, the Zumbi dos Palmares community conceived the God’s Blacksmith Candomble House as their social and spatial frame of reference  (Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia, 2009, p. 5).

Implications

This case illustrates the structural and theoretical limitations of conventional planning, in particular the ways in which conventional planning fails to grasp nuanced and counterhegemonic conceptualizations of space, home and community. As the Zumbi dos Palmares community created space for Afro-diasporic religious practices, they also (re)constructed their Afro-diasporic community and created a space of their own that had both physical, social and spiritual dimensions. Through Candomble, they established a common sense of belonging. And by renaming their streets and their neighborhood after Afrodescendent leaders, they cultivated a shared experienced of continued collective resistance. That is to say, the Zumbi dos Palmares community did not adopt state-centered strategies of collective resistance nor did they establish a clientelist relationship with the state to confront “systems of hardship” (Miraftab, 2009, pp. 38–39). Instead of political maneuvering through “invited” or “invented” spaces of citizenship described by Miraftab (2009), the Zumbi dos Palmares directly contested conventional planning strategies in order to develop community-building capacity. They undertook a Gramscian “war of position,” thereby “creating the trench work of organization and consciousness, deferring frontal battler until later” (Hale, 2006, p. 14).

Ultimately, this case invites us to embrace more inclusive planning methods that allow us to (re)think people’s relationship with one another and how they relate to their home space. It sheds light on the ample possibilities for collective self-reflectivity which the co-production of knowledge affords in the pursuit of social justice as other scholars have argued (K.-K. Y. Perry & Rappaport, 2013; Sletto et al., 2014, p. 567).

References

By Julia Duranti-Martinez

Introduction

Colombia’s National Victims Unit has registered more than 440,000 victims of forced displacement in the Valle del Cauca province just since 2012. Home to roughly 3 million people, the provincial capital of Cali is a major receptor of these internally displaced persons from the Pacific Coast, leading to an acute housing crisis. Within this context of protracted armed conflict waged over natural resources, Cali’s urban Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Land Use Plan, POT) mirrors other Colombian cities in its appeal to private actors like real estate developers and finance institutions (Koch 2015) to address housing issues. However, the “Paradise City” project spearheaded by the public-private Empresa Municipal de Renovacion Urbana (Municipal Urban Renewal Company) has led to evictions in central Cali neighborhoods in the service of urban renewal.

Facing these multifaceted challenges, in April 2015 the national Hogar Digno Hogar Campaign for Habitat, Dignified Housing, and Public Utility Services emerged as a collective effort between diverse actors under the umbrella of the Congreso de los Pueblos (People’s Congress) and spearheaded by the center-left Polo Democratico Senator Alberto Castilla. A series of forums, educational and social media campaigns, and a national caravan culminated in a hearing in the Colombia’s National Congress in September 2015, which was attended by delegates from participating regions and accompanied by simultaneous public demonstrations in the capital of Bogotá and around the country.

Analysis

Hogar Digno Hogar’s rhetoric reclaims Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” (1968) and articulates concerns over housing quality in addition to access. Their framing relies on a Marxist critique which holds that under neoliberalism, the state has abdicated its responsibility for public service and housing provision to private companies. However, the varied and at times contradictory ways in which Colombian state institutions act can also be understood as producing “territories of exception” (Roy 2007, Sotomayor 2015), since the city administration has “excepted” itself from Colombia’s Constitutional guarantee to dignified housing as well as laws guaranteeing the right to prior consultation for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Communities.

Multi-layered displacements in Cali revictimize internally displaced persons from informal settlements and low-income neighborhoods. Additionally, they are deeply racialized processes. In November 2015, Afro-Colombian families living in the Las Orquideas informal settlement were violently evicted by Colombian riot police ESMAD, who shot tear gas and rubber bullets and taunted residents with racial slurs. More than 70% of the residents had already been displaced or otherwise affected by the armed conflict. The Las Orquideas case helps illustrate how urban development in Cali serves as an institutionalized mechanism to whiten the city (Perry 2004), which has the largest Afro-descendant population in South America outside of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. The exclusion of black residents from the “Paradise City” plan provide an ironic counterpoint (Smith 2016) to a city branding strategy that seeks to produce Cali pachanguero as a national and international referent for music, dance, and artistic expressions rooted in Afro-Colombian cultural traditions. While Hogar Digno Hogar does not explicitly address the racialized dynamic of Cali’s housing crisis, it did issue a statement in solidarity with the Las Orquideas community. The larger Congreso de los Pueblos structure also has a mandate focused on Afro-descendant and Indigenous issues, and the movement often articulates with Afro-descendant and Indigenous social movements.

Implications

At the same time that Cali’s housing crisis in racialized territories of exception is continually reproduced by state and parastate actors, other state institutions like the Victims Unit, the local, regional, and national Ombudsmen, the Health Secretariat, and the Center for Historical Memory do facilitate limited “invited spaces” (Miraftab 2009) and concessions to movements like Hogar Digno Hogar. Hogar Digno Hogar leverages legal frameworks and rights-based discourses in creative ways to hold the Colombian state accountable to its guarantee of dignified housing, a holistic framing that stands in contrast to debates around “affordable housing” in U.S. cities. That said, the spaces of exception and parastatal armed groups that allow Colombian state institutions to deny their responsibility in Cali’s housing crisis pose significant limitations to the utility of invited spaces alone for more democratic planning approaches. However, even as it cooperates with strategic Polo Democratico elected officials, Hogar Digno Hogar emphasizes both vias de derecho y vias de hecho (legal channels and direct action), creating “invented spaces” (Miraftab 2009) via encuentros, public street art, and demonstrations that raise consciousness around the need for structural change. Through simultaneously engaging with state institutions to make what material gains it can and going outside these officially-approved channels, Hogar Digno Hogar exposes precisely the limitations of institutionalized planning efforts under neoliberal regimes.

While Hogar Digno Hogar was originally envisioned as a six month campaign, it provides a useful lens for analyzing how insurgent planning processes may be articulated in a context of armed conflict and para/state violence. By making demands within legal and human rights frameworks and forming partnerships with strategic elected officials, Hogar Digno Hogar makes itself legible to the Colombian state, even as it also draws attention to the varied mechanisms by which the state legalizes displacement. Raising consciousness regarding the strategic nature of displacement for Colombian para/state actors is significant in a context where many analysts continue to erroneously reference a “failed state,” and opens space for more radical proposals to take shape. Planners should therefore acknowledge the important role that social movements like Hogar Digno Hogar play in working toward the utopia of deep democracy (Appadurai 2001) and recognize them as the primary actors that may be able to construct cities not determined by spaces of exception. This also requires critical planning analysis to incorporate the racialization of space and spacialization of race as a central feature of global urban development.

References

By Brian Eggert

Introduction

In the year 2016, the vast majority of Cuba’s population does not have Internet at home.  The most popular alternative is a black market of information distributed through USB drives in the form of paquetes semanales or “weekly packages” of homemade Internet.  These paquetes, which consist of news, video, music, books, and more, have created a host of new jobs for compilers and distributors.  These individuals compete based on the reputation, price, quality, and specialization of their products and set prices based on the supply and demand for specific content.  Some middle men travel in person between Havana and the provinces each week, all attempting to establish monopolies on niche categories of current information.  The foot soldiers beneath them work on commission, operating from known vending locations or even going door to door with printed lists of their offerings.  After reaching a fixed sales-quota assigned by the distributor, they are allowed to keep the remaining profits.  The distribution network thus forms a pyramidal structure that strikingly resembles the illegal drug trade, with the top spots held by compilers who have unique access to content, through a combination of technical skill and contacts able to leave the island and smuggle in the content and prerequisite hardware.  This illegal practice is common throughout the country and represents a serious new problem for the Cuban government, which must cope with the increasing mobility of digital information and its demand for a citizenry long stifled by censorship.

Analysis

In addition to filling a gap in the market for affordable and accessible content, the paquetes represent a form of cultural resistance to the government’s censorship, which in addition to politically threatening websites includes YouTube, Skype, most Google apps, and nearly all forms of private messaging.  While a technical solution to the censorship problem might be the use of VPNs, torrents, and encrypted messaging, such options are beyond the reach of most Cubans, who have relatively low levels of information literacy and use hardware and software considered obsolete by today’s standards.  For most Cubans, the illegal consumption of paquetes is the most viable form of protest to conditions they are ill equipped to fight technologically. In this way, their participation in the paquete market could be understood as a form of resistance that Bayat (2000) refers to as “quiet encroachment;” i.e. “small-scale, everyday, tiny activities which the agents could afford to articulate given their political constraints” (Bayat, 2000).  The government has attempted to combat this everyday encroachment through the formalization of the information economy, which included release of a free, state-sanctioned paquete called the mochila (“backpack”).  However, the mochila has failed to compete with the illegal versions that inspired it because it is seen as a mere extension of the censored and propagandistic content already available through other state media channels.  Moreover, inconsistent policing of the distribution of paquetes sends a mixed message to citizens, as does the government’s toleration of the 2015 launch of Netflix, which provides a formally illegal service to Cubans who have access to international payment methods.  The government is caught in a paradox, no longer capable of enforcing its totalitarian control of information through censorship efforts like the Black Spring of 2003, but not yet prepared for the consequences of free information in an ideologically captive society.

Implications

The illegality of the paquete is complicated by the conditions of its enforcement, which a Cuban scholar visiting UT-Austin described as “una naturalización de las cosas ilegales—la gente no sabe la ley (a naturalization of illegal things—the people don’t know the law).”  Someone caught selling or buying the paquete can receive punishment ranging from a slap on the wrist to prison time.  This inconsistency can be understood as an example of Ananya Roy’s concept of informality, where state authority is reproduced through the determination of states of exception (Roy, 2005).  Giorgio Agamben originally applied the state of exception to populations lacking territorial and institutional status: building on the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, he argued that refugees, ghetto dwellers, and other impermanent residents are deprived of citizenship in these contexts of legal uncertainty, leaving the determination of their governance to the often illogical and sometimes violent whims of the sovereign powers (Agamben, 1998).  By appropriating the state of exception beyond this specific context, Roy extends the concept to the notion of informality, which is present with varying degrees of visibility in nearly all sovereign-subject relationships.  In the case of Cuba’s information economy, with the state allowing the black market to thrive while cherry-picking arrests, the Cuban government is resorting to this very tactic in an attempt to assert its dominance over a population that can never know how far is too far.  Nonetheless, this governmental “right to exclude” faces a fearsome opponent in its natural proletarian counterpart, the “right not to be excluded,” which has the advantage of vast and ultimately uncontrollable complexity.

This vast complexity makes the paquete semanal an ideal case for analysis through the framework of ANT and assemblages, originally developed by Deleuze and Guattari, in which human agency is reduced to the same level as nonhuman agency.  Political, capitalistic, hedonistic, and revolutionary intentions all become irrelevant when viewed through this lens.  The human actors involved are content creators, compilers, sellers, and middle-men both local and long-range, buyers, law enforcement, state policymakers, network infrastructure/service providers, international corporations, and very importantly, international travelers who come and go from the island.  The nonhuman actors that complete the assemblage are airplanes, boats, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, shoes, computers, phones, tablets, myriad storage devices, and all manner of wires, cables, towers, and satellites.  Compilers constitute perhaps the most important node of this network, for they connect the local actors to all those external to Cuba.  While local, the agency of compilers resides in their relationships to travelers, information networks, and computers capable of quickly compiling a terabyte of data.  In their discussion of the “new mobilities” paradigm, Sheller & Urry (2006) describe these material actors as an “obligatory range of network tools.”  They contend, “The greater the proliferation of such ‘tools’ and hence the greater the networking possible, so the more that access to such tools is obligatory in order to participate fully in a ‘networked society’” (Sheller & Urry, 2006).  Thus, through incorporating the nonhuman actors and mobilities both physical and symbolic involved in the circulation of the paquete semanal, it is clear that it cannot be treated as a purely local phenomenon.  It is a smooth, fluid assemblage that crosses international boundaries.

In this way, the case of the paquete semanal provides important lessons for critical international planning.  First, it represents the possibility that survives in the face of governmental dominance when certain conditions of “liquid modernity” are present.  People must collaborate across social boundaries and construct new forms of solidarity based on necessity, a phenomenon that AbduMaliq Simone refers to as “people as infrastructure”.  This concept reflects “residents’ needs to generate concrete acts and contexts of social collaboration inscribed with multiple identities rather than in overseeing and enforcing modulated transactions among discrete population groups” (Simone, 2004).  Second, this case suggests that planners must embrace some amount of disorder or “disassembly” because, as Pablo Sendra reminds modern assemblage thinkers, “there is no diagram that does not also include, beside the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change, and resistance” (Sendra, 2015).  Such disassemblies, which planners tend to resist because they contradict the desire for order, provide the conditions for autonomy, innovation, and new jobs and markets as seen with the paquete in Cuba.

References

By Caroline Daigle

Introduction

On January 25, 2011, after 30 years of oppression at the hand of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, protestors took to the streets of Cairo and initiated the 18 day Egyptian Revolution. At the epicenter of this revolution, both literally and figuratively, lay Cairo’s famous Tahrir Square. After an initial mass protest in the square on January 25 followed by police retaliation and brutality against protesters on January 26, the square was finally occupied by “the people” and it existed as a city of nearly 400,000 until Mubarak resigned, ending his three decades of authoritarian rule at the collective demand of a mobilized citizenry. Tahrir means liberation, and I argue that it was because of the square’s agency and the people’s infrastructure that liberation became possible.

The materiality of Tahrir Square and the agency of non-human actors involved in the revolution played critical and active roles in the revolution. Likewise, the human network that emerged as “the people” during the revolution represents a crucial infrastructure that facilitated collective protest. Thus, this case is exemplary of insurgent planning in its overt expression of these often-unrecognized phenomena: non-human actors with agency and human networks that form the building blocks for infrastructure. By overcoming the traditional divide between human and non-human actors and asserting new roles for the use of public space, the 18 days of Tahrir exemplify how radical notions of planning can be used to understand and catalyze mass social change.

Analysis

Analyzing the events of Tahrir Square through a lens of assemblage theory facilitates a new understanding of the “place” involved in the Egyptian revolution. Pablo Sendra uses assemblage theory to locate Sennet’s 1970 notion of “the uses of disorder” within urban planning praxis (Sendra 2015, 821). He argues that the convergence of humans and non-human actors such as architecture, place, regulations, and histories allows for a certain “disorder” and the “unplanned use of public space” to emerge, exercising a powerful agency in the city (Sendra 2015, 822).

From this perspective, we can better understand how Tahrir Square’s physicality played a crucial role in catalyzing revolution. It is centrally located in Cairo with a multitude of arterial roads feeding into it from across the city. The square has historically been associated with public gatherings as well as with matters of the State, but under Mubarak, the spirit of Tahrir Square was stifled. Neoliberal policies began to redefine the public space as privatization and gentrification took effect and made it largely inaccessible. The authoritarian regime also erected barriers to physically segment open space in the Square in order to stifle mass gatherings and criminalize congregation (Elshahed 2011). Nevertheless, during the revolution the people set up camps within the space, devising their own versions of land use regulation by actively disobeying the regime’s order. Destroyed police vehicles formed a barricade around the new “city” of Tahrir, making the invented space of revolution formally demarcated by materiality that represented the toppled regime (Shokr 2011). Thus, in spite of and against the state’s imposed order, the people came together to creatively assemble a new conceptualization of urban space.

In coming together within this space, “the people” also became “a platform for reproducing life in the city” (Simone 2004, 408). The potent force behind Tahrir Square’s occupation can be better understood by analyzing the heterogeneous citizenry that promulgated it. The masses in Tahrir Square can be considered an embodiment of Simone’s concept of “people as infrastructure,” which is defined as “flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used” (Simone 2004, 407.) The revolution was framed by a simple demand written across a banner that hung over the square: “The People Want to Topple the Regime.” This collective identity of “the people” reached across religion, politics, class, age, and gender in order to forge a new network and further an “impossible demand” (Zizek quoted in Kamel [2012, 39]). In the expression of flexible citizenry within Tahrir Square, a notion of “the people” exists despite particular identities (Elshahed 2011, Kamel 2012, Shahin 2012). Within Tahrir Square, a bounded place was “…linked to specific identities, functions, lifestyles, and properties [where] the spaces of the city become legible for specific people at given places and times. These diagrams — what Henri Lefebvre calls “representations of space”—act to “pin down” inseparable connections between places, people, actions, and things” (Simone 2004, 409). Even though “the people” protested the regime for different reasons, the collective voice of these protests forged an infrastructure of inseparable connections in the assembled space within Tahrir Square, propelling social change in a tangible way.

Implications

Per Miraftab’s (2009, 33) definition of insurgent planning practices, both the human and non-human components of the “city” developed in Tahrir Square are “counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative” as they seek to disrupt the order of urban life in pursuit of a radical alternative. First, they are counter-hegemonic in their direct rejection of the state’s authority, disregarding laws against mobilization and demanding the downfall of the regime. Second, they are transgressive in how they catalyzed the Arab Spring and tapped into a collective memory of 30 years under authoritarian rule in order to seek liberation from within Liberation Square. Finally, they are imaginative because they created a utopia within the space that the State had turned into a neoliberal dystopia (Kamel, 2012).

This case encourages us to rethink the nature of planning. By applying assemblage theory, we can better understand the role of physical space and non-human actors in catalyzing mobilization and disorder. Similarly, understanding “people as infrastructure” (Simone 2004) reveals how heterogeneous networks of actors can form a collective voice for large-scale change through collaboration across individual identities. Tahrir Square ultimately makes us realize the simultaneously “place-less” and situated nature of community. The square provided the necessary, bounded, and situated “place” for revolution, but “the people,” a critical infrastructure, is an inherently (and necessarily) placeless and fluid community. The intersection of these two actors—a placeless community in a specifically bounded space—proved to be a powerful force that spurred social mobilization in the city. It is in these spaces where revolutionary change can be born.

References