Jay Walljasper, Senior Fellow at On the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org, created OTC’s book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. A speaker, communications strategist and writer and editor, he chronicles stories from around the world that point us toward a more equitable, sustainable and enjoyable future. He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and a senior associate at the urban affairs consortium Citiscope. Walljasper also writes a column about city life for Shareable.net and is a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning. For more of his work, see JayWalljasper....
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From Middle East to Madison, Justice Depends on Public Spaces
What happens when people have no place to gather as citizens?
By Jay Walljasper
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Egyptians celebrate their democratic victory in Tahrir Square (Credit: Photo by Ramy Raoof under a Creative Commons license via flickr.com)
I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square
The influence of the new digital commons in democratic uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain has been chronicled at length in news reports from the Middle East, with Facebook, twitter and other social media winning praise as dictatorbusters.
But the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands. To celebrate their victory over the Mubarak regime, for example, protesters in Cairo jubilantly returned to Tahrir Square, where the revolution was born, to pick up trash.
It’s the same story all over the Middle East. In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, people express their aspirations and face bloody reprisals in Green Square and Martyr’s Square. In Bahrain, they boldly march in Pearl Square in the capital city of Manama. In Yemen, protests have taken place in public spaces near the university in Sanaa, which students renamed Tahrir Square. Kept out of the central Revolution Square in Tehran by the repressive government, Iranian dissidents gather in Valiasr Square and Vanak Sqaure.
Last week in Tunisia, they changed the name of the main square in Tunis to honor Mohammad Bouazizi, an unlicensed street vendor whose suicide in December in response to government harassment sparked the revolution that toppled the regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
The course of recent history was rewritten by events happening in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as dissidents ousting an oppressive regime in December 1989 helped bring down Communism. Those protests were inspired in part by events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that seized the world’s imagination earlier that year when democracy activists unsuccessfully challenged the power of China’s dictatorship.
This is not just an Old World thing. The Boston Common has been a sight of protests, and public gatherings for three centuries. In 1713, two hundred Bostonians protested food shortages in the city and in 1969 100,000 protested the Vietnam War.
The state capitol in Madison, where thousands of workers now protest the Wisconsin governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represent another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was named by Project for Public Spaces as one of the great public spaces of the world “This is truly the town square that early Americans imagined as the crux of democracy,” the PPS website explains.
The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capital are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor, but those groundskeepers are presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.
This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park or other public space that is open to all. An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate run shopping malls replaced downtowns as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, who almost certainly will say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls, which limits our abilities to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens.
Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the site of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services and other expressions of a community.
The moment when I first became aware of the importance of public spaces was when the Minnesota Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987. I did not have tickets to the game but gathered hopefully with thousands of others outside the stadium in Minneapolis to share in the joy of the victory. When the Twins won the game, thousands more poured out of the ballpark into the streets and we all marched to…where? Minneapolis has no downtown square or landmark gathering place so we milled around the streets for a while—an unsatisfying way to celebrate a World Series championship. If it had been the Red Sox, everyone would head for the Boston Common. We weren’t so lucky.
I’ve often wondered if this lack of a central commons in Minneapolis and most other American communities somehow inhibits our civic expression. With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square.
Posted February 22, 2011
Legacy Comments
This is so true. Today when
This is so true. Today when hundreds of Bostonians wanted to stand in solidarity with Wisconsin and its public workers, we headed to our Boston Commons and adjoining State House steps.
I also remember hearing that when Ronald Reagan was Governor of CA he insisted that a new UC campus be built without a central gathering point to thwart student demonstrations.
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Sometime I think demonstration like that is useless. In any sensitive things, people will not easily following their waords.
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I don’t think demonstrations are useless, they are the best working instrument for people to make pressure on governments, they usually succeed.
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You are, more or less, right,
You are, more or less, right, Mr. Walljasper. Minneapolis does not have a commons like the Boston Commons. Minnesota does. It has a State Capitol building with expansive lawns.
But Minneapolis has quite a lot of commons, public space. Think of all the parkland around its lovely lakes. You could rally a couple hundred thousand people at the north end of Lake Harriet, placing your main speakers in the bandshell. The parkland north of the bandshell goes way, way up and don’t forget the beach parkways… all public lands, yes?
And Hennepin Mall itself is a kind of commons. I have shivered my ass off watching the Holidazzle Parade, surely citizens marching in unison could claim that street as its commons?
And the Hennepin County Government center has some grassy park alongside it (on top of the underground garage. Not big enough for 100,000.
And the U. of MN, that is public commons, right? It has some spectacular grounds, similar to Harvard Yard, modeled, I think, after Harvard Yard.
I lived in Minneapolis when the Twins won the World Series in 1987.
I found a fantastic speech presented by law professor Louis Wolcher on this website, onthecommons.org. Wolcher talked about the history of commoning and how the thirteenth century movement to ‘enclose’ the commons became what we now take for granted as our system of ownership of what is, in my opinion, rightfully owned by all: ownership of the earth and its endless bounty is the commons, yes? Anyway, Wolcher’s great speech references Grant Hardin’s great article from the sixties that address the tragedy of the commons and discusses how managed shared commons tend to be remarkably efficient, and effective and he proposes that instead of addressing ‘management’ of our commons, our shared resources (which I include as the air we breath, ground we walk on, sky we behold, etc. it’s all ours together), we talk about a tragedy of imagination. We have lost the commons because we have lost the power to imagine it as ours. We can take that back. The next time the Twins win the world series, maybe some community organizers, working on behalf of the human commons, will organize a rally along one of the gorgeous parkways on the Mississippi River or the lawns of the U. of MN or the state capitol lawns or even one of the less spectacular lakes right inside the city of Minneapolis. I can envision an awesome displayed of a 100,000 on the north shore of Lake Calhoun. Lake Street runs along the north end of the lake, right? and it gets very wide and a street is a commons, right?
Minneapolis has plenty of commons space. What it lacks if an imaginative people to inhabit that commons. Take it back.
I’m still thinking! … . New
I’m still thinking! … . New York City has Central Park as its commons, The Boston Commons is, essentially, a park.
I moved to Minneapolis in the mid-seventies from Chicago. Chicago has a fantastic park system, as well as its fantastic waterfront. And, I am pretty sure, the same visionaries that designed Chicago’s park system designed Minneapolis’. Don’t overlook the commons that Minneapolis has just because it is not located right next to the main focus of downtown commerce the way the Boston Commons is.
As I reflect on what constitutes ‘a public commons’, I am thinking that parks are the commons. No city in this country has a better park system than Minneapolis. Parks are commons. Downtown Minneapolis has great riverfront commons on both side of the Mississippi. And so does St. Paul, come to think of it.
And little neighborhood parks all over.
I think many people are thinking about gigantic commons right now because of what just happened in egypt.
Keep in mind that the demonstrators in Madison are demonstrating at a state capital. Wisconsin does not have better capitol grounds than MN. It is not fair to compare Minneapolis’ commons with a state’s commons.
I think Minneapolis has tons of great public space. Loring Park. Powderhorn Park (how many thousands turn out for the May Day Parade: the setting is fantastic for public demonstrations) … areyou defining a city’s commons as being downtown? I don’t think that’s right. It shows a lack of inspiration and imagination and a lack of ownership of the commons that truly exist.
Shifting my thoughts over to St. Paul. .. what about the state fairgrounds, or the vast parklands of Como Park?
Don’t allow MN’s topography to obscure the great shared spaces that exist. The lakes are also part of the commons.
And this: I am more interested in smaller scale commons. Every neighborhood in Minneapolis has a park and most of those parks have park buildings and they all have ball fields. A ball field is a perfectly good commons. We don’t need room for 70,000 demonstrators. We can have 70,000 demonstrators linked by technology meeting simultaneously all across one city, 10,000 in Powderhorn, another 10,000 by Diamond Lake, 20,000 by Lake Calhoun, 30,000 at Lake Harriet and I am blanking the names of lakes north of Lake Calhoun … . . if someone wanted to have a demonstration the size of what we saw Saturday in Madison, there are many spots in Minneapolis wehre it could happen. Down by Hiawatha Falls there is an enormous, sprawling flat park before you get to the falls. That’s a great commons and if you factor in the whole parkway — Minnehaha Parkway? — in that part of the city, you could have a ribbon of human commons marching … .
Gosh, I love all the commons in Minneapolis and it seems tragic that a commons visionary such as yourself, Mr. Walljasper, does not see your own city’s jewels in the crown of commons that is Minneapolis.
I think what is missing in Minneapolis is missing in many American cities: the people have lost their sense of ownership of what belongs to them, the commons. And look at how cities are selling off that commons, such as the way the city of Chicago sold its parking spaces (well, leased them for 75 years) to a for-profit business. I don’t know how it can even be legal for a city to sell off its own commons. How can that be?
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