(Or, Why I really L-tilted-O-V-E the hell out of out of public space)
I was sitting outside of Dock
Street brewery; across the street, a mid-June evening was doing its thing in
Cedar Park. The light of that summering dusk imitated the exact tincture of my
Rye IPA. In the park, some guys were being really voluble—more than I’d ever
felt possible—about a chess game. Squatters—a contented encampment of dreds and
patches and wagging dog tails—basked on the grass. Kids sproinged around on the
playground, and were having every possible adventure on the jungle gym. They
were just enacting their arcane kid-doings, but were also inadvertently—gorgeously—showing
off the racial utopia that West Philly can occasionally be.
As I was watching the park’s
proliferations, as I was enjoying my beer outdoors, my friend Megan was
answering the question I’d asked when we first sat down: “What’s the deal with
Gezi Park?” Megan has friends in Istanbul, and she also has ties to the worlds
of architecture and urban planning. She’d been doing her darndest, via Facebook
and other social media, to make us Americans aware of the deal with Gezi Park.
On an open-windowed June night in
Philadelphia, Megan explained to me that the Gezi Park protests were, most immediately,
about public space. “Imagine,” Megan said, gesturing across the street, “that
Cedar Park was one of the last open green spaces in Philadelphia.” She
described how the pedestrian grit and haphazard economy of the ancient square
were to be replaced by a bizarre mall, which, it seemed, managed to be garishly
modern and, at the same time, blindly anachronistic. Currently, the park—like
public spaces everywhere—creates an unrestricted, non-hierarchical space,
“where” according to this article, “locals, especially the urban poor, can
spend time without spending a penny.”
Meanwhile, the planned mall—in the
eyes of activists, sociologists and architects—was basically a Disney-World
version of past Ottoman splendor, a commodified nod to the grandeur of Empire,
re-branded into sleek metallic angles and sterile swaths of concrete. Moreover,
the protestors in Gezi Park saw the plans for bulldozing the park as a metaphor
for their Prime Minister’s full-throttle wreckage of Turkish democracy. In other words, “The square has become an arena for clashing worldviews: an
unyielding leader’s top-down, neo-Ottoman, conservative vision of the nation as
a regional power versus a bottom-up, pluralist, disordered, primarily young,
less Islamist vision of the country as a modern democracy.”
I’m a wholly amateur geek about all
things relevant to urban planning and gentrification, so I was enthralled by
what Megan had to say about the fate of public space in Istanbul. At the same
time, I felt a little silly that I hadn’t been following this monumental turn
in international events more closely. I’d known that something was going on. However, I’d been busy with my own
protests—protests against the draconian budget cuts facing Philadelphia’s
public school system. These protests actually took place in two public spaces
that have always struck inordinate awe into me: the Capitol Building in
Harrisburg, and Philadelphia’s City Hall.
Even though being in Harrisburg
felt like trespassing on enemy territory, I did pause for a moment to admire
the iridescent, beetle-like sheen of the Capitol’s green-tiled dome. Inside the
building—despite my being quite cowed and awkward in my lobbying attempts—I
adored the gold filigree on inner arches, the firmament-like sparkle of inlay
on the ceiling, and the mythical Arabian-Nights-type brass lamps suspended in
the hallways.
I feel the same way about Philly
City Hall—even when I’m yelling “Shame!” at its impassive edifice. Though its
North, South, West and East corridors are an olfactory adventure (not the good
kind; as in urine) and its halls are just as soaked with corruption, it’s still
a pretty bad-ass façade. Intricate and frilly cake-like layers pile up right
into the sky, and the indefatigable bronze stance of Billy Penn makes a noble
gesture of hope for the city. When I was a kid, of course, no building was
allowed to surpass his sincere, persecuted, pacifistic hat. But, as evidenced
by Gezi Park, commerce always wins—even over that erstwhile, earnest Quaker
fellow. So City Hall and Billy Penn provide me with a sense of solidarity with
the city. Philadelphia’s mayor—and its School Reform Commission, and its
various Superintendants—haven’t done much to earn that sense of solidarity.
Instead, it comes—block upon granite block—from the testimony of our public
space itself.
Really—I must admit—I’m a fool for
monuments in general. I get way too into the aloof planes of an obelisk, a
cupola’s luminous hover, or a public square’s pigeon-speckled generosity. I
even favor a little graffiti on monuments—not the major, grave, never-to-be-defaced
monuments, mind you. But the true intent of a public space often seems
strangely complemented by graffiti’s snarls and convolutions. It somehow adds
to the conversation, and keeps the democratic work of those spaces infected
with a necessary dynamism.
But before my conversation with Megan,
I had never realized that my veneration of these places stems from the very
same impulses that make me super-loyal to the public school system. And—while I
was protesting, while thousands of citizens were protesting in Turkey—it never
even occurred to me that the people in the news articles—articles that I barely
comprehended—might actually be fighting a fight quite similar to my own. It
never occurred to me that the neo-liberal machines felling trees in Turkey
might be nearly identical to the ideological forces that were leveling public
education in Philadelphia.
When the School District budget
crisis was finally “resolved” (read: postponed for the summer at worst, for one
year at best), I began researching the Occupy Gezi movement. I was astounded,
while reading about Gezi Park, to find entire phrases and sentences that could
have been lifted from an article about my School District’s increasing
fetishization of privatization. The following statement, made by a British policy analyst, uncannily mirrors education activists’ critiques of unchecked charter
school expansion.
“The privatization
of the public realm, through the growth of ‘private-public’ space, produces
overcontrolled, sterile places which lack connection to the reality and
diversity of the local environment, with the result that they all tend to look
the same… They also raise serious questions about democracy and
accountability.”
Many charter schools in
Philadelphia have adopted a “franchise” model; they have “branded” their
particular approach—ideologically, as well as through outward signifiers such
as uniforms. This formulaic, metrics-based approach to educational success is
replicated from Germantown to Grey’s Ferry, from South Philly to North Philly.
Charters hack down the gnarled roots of these communities, allowing the
charter’s business model to roll smoothly in. Charter schools are a showcase of
sleek, mall-like institutional design; they’re basically the educational
equivalent of a Forever 21 store, replicating the same pattern without regard
to the environs. And, of course, the “individualized experience” of online charter schools renders the
public space of actual—non-virtual— local communities utterly razed, nullified
and silenced.
This trend toward homogenized
instruction is also affecting higher education. In a recent open letter, the
Philosophy Department at San Jose University protested the proliferation of
massively open online courses (MOOCs). They write:
the thought of the
exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments
across the country is downright scary—something out of a dystopian novel.
Departments across the country possess unique specializations and character,
and should stay that way…. Diversity in schools of thought and plurality of
points of view are at the heart of liberal education.
In university departments, public
schools, and parks—all over the world—“unique specializations and character…
diversity… and plurality of points of view” can fight totalitarianism, and
stave off the monolithic glass and steel of malls.
Finally, the language used to
describe the autocratic destruction of Gezi Park was shockingly evocative of
the disenfranchisement recently experienced by Philadelphia students, teachers
and parents. This article describes the contentious blueprints for the new use
of Gezi Park as “a grand project ‘produced, not for the city residents, but
despite them.’” This is an eerily apt description of the School Reform
Commission’s prototype for the future of Philadelphia schools. The plasticized,
sanitized version of Gezi Park was anathema to citizens of a democratic
nation—not only because they undermined the symbols
of democracy, but also because they undermined the processes of democracy. Similarly, while the School District holds
public forums that ostensibly give community members a voice in their schools,
these forums seem like a hollow charade. Parents, students and teachers—in
other words, the direct stakeholders—have wept, protested, and been arrested in
their pleas against school closure and charterization. Meanwhile, of the
five-member School Reform Commission, there is not one Commissioner who is
elected by the parent/student/teacher triune; instead, the Commission consists
entirely of mayoral and gubernatorial appointees. This amazing article, entitled “From Istanbul to Rio to Philly, this Democracy Thing Is Broken,”glosses the mounting frustration felt by regular people in these so-called
Democratic nations, as we realize that “it increasingly seems impossible
to fix democracy and capitalism at the ballot box.”
I’ve always believed that we, as a
society, are only as good as our public schools. But before my conversation
with Megan, it never occurred to me that we’re also only as good as our public space. It never occurred to me that the
health of our public schools and the health of our public spaces are so
inextricably intertwined—and that the same global trends are threatening both.
But here’s the thing. In the midst
of my conversation with Megan—as I was facing the celebratory actuality of
Cedar Park, as I was imbibing an immediate exchange of ideas—I found myself
thinking, I should really post something
about this on Facebook. After all, Facebook—the Internet in general—is, for
my generation, what public squares were for generations of the past—a place to
hawk all kinds of ideas, a place to barter gossip, a place to foment civil
unrest. But Facebook isn’t actually a space…
and it’s not entirely public either.
The walls in Gezi Park were
artfully defaced with a sprawl of graffiti; they were a liquid, shifting
palimpsest. The walls of the park reclaimed space from the icons of corporate marketing, showcasing the citizens’ polyglot resistance to the monolingual
symbols of capitalism. Facebook walls, however, are actually the property of a
massive corporation; their design is proscriptive and—despite the individual
quirks or funkiness of profile pictures—basically uniform. Whether one is
posting in Istanbul or in Philadelphia, Facebook pages—like neo-liberal public
spaces—“all tend to look the same.” Our Facebook walls are papered—insidiously
pasted thick—with advertisements; every time I log on to exchange various
public declarations with my friends, I’m assaulted with grotesque “tips on how
to lose belly fat” and hotel suggestions for whatever city I’d recently
googled. Facebook makes “recommendations” for where I might live and where I
might work; I once joked with a friend that, in the near future, it will begin
recommending what our “relationship status” should be—and with whom. If my
Facebook wall is a public space, then why is it littered with manipulative,
invasive “suggested posts” for local spas and pet food stores? If it truly is
the case that “politics in the 21st century is about private freedoms and public space,” then what political statement is my reliance upon Facebook
making?
In the 21st Century, the
concept of community is increasingly grafted onto an intangible space—faces
fixed in restrictive, sterile boxes, comments detached from the timbre of the
voices that make them. But it seems that, in Gezi Park, people were, by
reclaiming public space, also reclaiming community: community that was actual
and not virtual, community that was tactile—smelling of meatballs and cigarette
smoke—and not ephemeral—fixed in the annals of some corporate entity.
Clearly, I am not a dedicated
Luddite; this very blog is hosted by Google, and promoted on Facebook. I know
that it would be ditheringly reductive of me to claim that social media is the
only factor eroding the power and presence of our public spaces. And social
media has revolutionized the scope of organizing—it has transformed #occupygezi
into a worldwide solidarity movement, and it allowed students in Philly
to—almost overnight—mobilize thousands for walkouts. However, according to one source,
public space, even a modest and chaotic swath of it like Taksim, again reveals itself as fundamentally more powerful than social media, which produce virtual communities. Revolutions happen in the flesh.
When I make the claim that we are
only as good as our public space, I must also add that we are only as good as
the public space that we choose for
ourselves. If we identify ourselves solely
with the communities demarcated by Facebook and Google, it is possible that we
are actually complicit in the mechanisms of corporatization. If we prefer the
infinite reaches of the internet to the finitude of our parks, we might
actually be ceding away our democracy of particularity. If we live and move and
have our being in the spaces created by our i-phones, then we must accept that
we live and move and have our being in a privatized space. In that case, it
should not surprise us when the localized spaces of our classrooms—the
struggles and the victories that could be situated only in Kensington, only in
Overbrook—are outsourced to Fill-in-Inspirational-Word,
Inc. or Our-Stocks-Are-Always-Rising
CyberCharter.
A few months ago—when news of
Philadelphia’s budget cuts was first surfacing—students at my school organized
a teach-in. Tables were arranged in a square, and a mélange of students,
teachers and alumni encamped for hours after school, facing one another, piling
on questions and answers and all sorts of discourse. We were, in effect,
creating a sort of public space; even our seating arrangement was, in a way,
the blueprint of what democracies are meant to be. We were speaking of the
inevitable demise of our schools, but I felt strangely full of hope. What I
thought about—what I referenced in my last remark—was Fahrenheit 451. When people think of that novel, they often
remember a dictatorial society in which illiteracy was enforced upon the
masses. However, the novel itself describes how—in the solipsistic pursuit of
entertainment—people simply lost interest
in reading. From there, the government was able to exploit this lack of popular
investment, and forcibly, exploitatively, take books away from its citizens.
But my kids—our kids—from this
specific Philadelphia—hadn’t lost interest in the future of democracy, in the
future of education. They weren’t at home, subsumed by the ephemeral spaces of
Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram.
Instead—as I told them—you’re here,
in this actual space. You’re coming together, here. And here—this place—is
where change begins.
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