![Occupy Wall Street, Day 60, November 15, 2011, after the police evicted protestors and cleaned the park. [Photo by David Shankbone]](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/ci/ciolh18taz89mjaa.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat "Occupy Wall Street, Day 60, November 15, 2011, after the police evicted protestors and cleaned the park. [Photo by David Shankbone]")
For if there is one abiding historical certainty it is that, eventually, things change. And they can be made to change. There is no such thing, however, as a revolutionary architecture. Nor does history ever simply start from scratch. Instead, post-revolutionary questions can be posed in advance to infrastructures that already exist.... to reinvent what used to be called housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and farms in a way that asks: What else must change for these changes to be possible? — Places Journal
Reinhold Martin argues that architects must plan for post-revolutionary conditions. A follow-up to his earlier essay for Places, "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do."
2 Comments
Among many other things, OWS has thus revealed the doubly-bound character of "privately owned public spaces," and by extension of "public-private partnerships."
This line where Martin extends the critical lens to not just POPS but PPS (public-private partnerships) is to me key. It is also a warning that is well timed, because at least at (my) local level one common approach articulated in the face of the current austerity/recession is further pursuance and development of PPPs. Because the argument goes it leverages public dollars. I wonder though if development of a more occupiable or usable public space would result from the exclusion of the private partnership? More inherently public resulting then simply from the funding source? Or is as he suggests the very nature of "the state" a more fundamental factor..
I remember passionate arguments in undergraduate architecture school - in 1986! - about whether a shopping mall is a public space. Of course it isn't. In the intervening 25 years the world has only become more private, and public spaces less available to all.
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