Читать книгу: «Urban Protest»
ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
Contents
Abbreviations
A Note on Language
Foreword by Julie Wilhelmsen
Preface
1 Starting Point
Part I
2 Space in Context
2.1 Complexities of Urban Contention
2.1.1 Form
2.1.2 Motivation
2.1.3 Waves
2.2 Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia
2.3 Relevance
3 Mapping the Field
3.1 Protests
3.1.1 Repertoires
3.1.2 Nonviolent Contention
3.1.3 Colour Revolutions
3.1.4 Non-spatial Factors
3.2 Space
3.2.1 Public Space
3.2.2 Physical Space
3.2.3 Contested Spaces
3.3 The Gap
4 Definitions and Research Questions
4.1 What Is a Mass Protest?
4.2 What Is Urban Public Space?
4.3 Research Questions
5 Theorising and Development
5.1 Approaches to Theorising
5.1.1 Field Work
5.1.2 Respondents
5.1.3 Mapping
5.2 Ethical Considerations
5.2.1 Interview Ethics
5.2.2 Practical Utility
5.3 Geographical Determinism
5.4 Conception
5.4.1 M.A. Thesis
5.4.2 PhD Proposal
5.5 Theorising
5.5.1 Prestudy
5.5.2 Formulating a Theory
5.5.3 Transitional Study
5.6 Causal Chains
5.7 Main Study
5.8 Post-test Theorising
6 Variables and Methodology
6.1 Independent Variables
6.1.1 Perceived Elements
6.1.2 Physical Elements
6.1.3 Social Elements
6.2 Intermediary Variables
6.2.1 Spatial Qualities
6.2.2 The Political Environment
6.3 Dependent Variables
6.3.1 Emergence
6.3.2 Realisation
6.3.3 Impact
Part II
7 Prestudy
7.1 Physical Space
7.1.1 Spatial and Urban History
7.1.2 Daily Use
7.1.3 Protest Space
7.2 Symbolic Value
7.2.1 25 Years of Protest
7.3 Function
7.4 Conclusions
8 Transitional Study
8.1 A Spatial Perspective
8.2 Belarusian Protests from Glasnost’ to Lukashenka
8.3 Perceived elements
8.3.1 October Square
8.3.2 Independence Square
8.4 Social Elements
8.4.1 The Political Centre
8.4.2 The People’s Centre
8.4.3 Independence Square
8.4.4 October Square
8.5 Physical Elements
8.5.1 October Square and Ploshcha 2006
8.5.2 Independence Square and Ploshcha 2010
8.6 Conclusions
9 Main Study
9.1 Towards a Spatial Perspective
9.1.1 Spatial Elements
9.1.2 Spatial Qualities and the Political Environment
9.1.3 Protest Areas
9.2 Moscow, Swamp Square and the March of Millions
9.2.1 The Political Environment of Moscow
9.2.2 Public Spaces in Moscow
9.2.3 The Elements
9.2.4 Spatial Qualities
9.2.5 Emergence, Realization, Impact
9.3 Conclusions
Part III
10 To Paris and Beyond
10.1 Republic Square and the Yellow Vests
10.1.1 Applying the Model
10.2 Summary and Conclusions
10.2.1 “So what?”
10.2.2 Limitations
10.3 Moving On
References
Abbreviations
CAT Collective Action Theory
DOC Dynamics Of Contention
NESH National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Norway)
OWS Occupy Wall Street
POS Political Opportunity Structure theory
PRT Prospect-Refuge Theory
PT Process Tracing
RCT Rational Choice Theory
RMP Resource Mobilisation Perspective
ROC Repertoire Of Contention
RSCPR Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations
SCM Structure-Cognitive Model
A Note on Language
This book describes events, people, and places mainly from three Eastern Slavic countries: Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Each of these countries uses the Cyrillic script and has its own national language, as well as linguistic variations encompassing proper nouns: yet, for historical reasons, Russian has become the lingua franca of the region. The long history of Russian hegemony and long periods of russification have also led to the widespread international adoption of Russian forms for Ukrainian and Belarusian proper nouns. For these reasons, the Ukrainian capital is usually known as Kiev (from Rus. Киев), rather than Kyiv (from Ukr. Київ). Likewise, the Belarusian president is known as Lukashenko (Rus.: Лукашенко), not Lukashenka (Bel.: Лукашенка); while the conflict region in Eastern Ukraine is known as Donbass (Russian: Донбасс), not Donbas (Ukrainian: Донбас). Conversely, some proper nouns are known by their national variants, as is the case with the current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyi (Ukr.: Володимир Зеленський), not Vladimir Zelenskii (Rus.: Владимир Зеленский), and Hrodna for the town in Western Belarus (Bel.: Гродна), rather than Grodno (Rus.: Гродно).
Scholars are often advised to use the transliterations most predominant in English, as these are most recognisable to the majority of readers. Yet such a language policy often leads to inconsistencies, and readers asking why some proper nouns are based on the Russian forms while others are not. As far as I can see, there are only two solutions to this problem. Either the scholar consistently and exclusively transliterates from the relevant Russian forms; or, conversely, they transliterate all proper nouns from the local languages. The former solution is often used because it is more consistent with the predominant name forms in English. (Another reason might be that most scholars within the field have a level of proficiency in Russian, but limited knowledge of the other two languages). The choice of Russian could additionally be justified by the large prevalence of Russophone speakers in all three countries. Although there is a precedent for the former solution in East Slavic area studies, the latter is not unheard-of, and scholars such as the Canadian historian David R. Marples (2004) and the British political scientist Taras Kuzio (2005) use the national variants of proper nouns.
I have chosen the latter option. Thus, the transliterations of proper nouns found in this book reflect their national origins. The reader will also encounter proper nouns that are less frequently used, such as Kyiv and Lukashenka (rather than Kiev and Lukashenko). However, I have retained the familiar variants of some terms and proper nouns in order to avoid confusion (e.g. Kievan Rus’, not Kievskaia Rus’ from Rus. Киевская Русь; or Kyivs’ka Rus’ from Ukr. Київська Русь).
I have used the ALA-LC Romanisation tables from The Library of Congress for all Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian words, with some exceptions. I have avoided confusing typographic ligatures and diacritical marks, such as i͡e for the Russian е; and ï for the Ukrainian ї. Similarly, I have kept some internationally recognised variants that are too omnipresent to change: for example, the former Russian president is Boris Yeltsin rather than Ieltsin (or, with ligatures, I͡Elt͡sin).
To complicate the matter further, in Belarus, there are three written languages: Russian and Belarusian, both of which are official languages, and the classic Belarusian Tarashkevitsa. The name of the president could be transliterated as Aleksandr Lukashenko (Russian); Aliaksandr Lukashenka (Belarusian); and Aliaksandar Lukashenka (Belarusian Tarashkevitsa). I use the official Belarusian (Aliaksandr) for proper nouns. Please note that the Belarusian letter ў is transliterated as w, not u.
For consistency’s sake, I use the translated forms of place names in this book (i.e. October Square, not Kastrychnitskaia). A notable exception is Maidan (Ukr.: square), which is used both instead of the longer original (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) and the translation (Independence Square), the reason being that Maidan has become a widely recognised word in the West, even among non-Slavists.
All translations are my own unless stated otherwise.
Foreword
What impact does the physical space in which protesters raise their grievances have on their success or failure in achieving their goals? This is the intriguing question that Arve Hansen raises, and to which this book provides a theoretically, methodologically, and empirically sophisticated answer. It elaborates a theoretical model to explore the causal connections between urban public space and mass protests. As such, it is not only a valuable but also a major contribution to the growing research on mass protests and urban space.
This book also presents and analyses three of the most acute cases of urban protest today, namely those of Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. The combination of thematic focus and empirical case studies can, therefore, hardly be more timely. A wave of protest movements is rolling across what we refer to as the ‘former Soviet space’. Judging by recent events, it is not going to stop any time soon; even in Russia, where enormous and costly efforts have been made to create ‘stability’ under President Putin. The intense, at times highly simplistic public debate around these events makes this distinctly scholarly contribution particularly welcome. The book gives us details and specifics about the very different social and physical spaces of Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow, despite their common Soviet heritage.
This analysis is built on the results of the author’s extensive field work: interviews as well as personal observations, all based in Hansen’s thorough knowledge of all three East Slavic languages and cultures and his experience of living in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Careful attention is paid to the history and symbolic value of the urban spaces under analysis. The meticulous circuit of observing, noting, mapping, and interviewing is particularly commendable, resulting as it does in clear visual and textual presentations of the protest spaces in Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow.
Hansen’s approach to the theoretical debate on protest, and the core terms within it, is also nuanced and attentive to detail. He crafts his definitions of mass protest and urban public space, as well as his theoretical model, using the cases at hand and in close consultation with the extant literature. The outcome is an excellent piece of academic handiwork. The process of developing the theoretical model over time, guided by empirical findings in the individual case studies, is presented clearly and well. Reading this book will prove highly instructive for students who wish to learn how to combine in-depth empirical work with theory development.
Examining the theoretical debate on protest, Hansen identifies a lack of attention in the literature to the connection between space and protest. Rightly pointing out the dangers of geographical determinism, he sets himself the ambitious aim of providing the systematic and generalised approach to space and protest that is missing. A comprehensive explanation of urban protest will have to include a wider set of social variables beyond those investigated in this book, which is clearly part of a broader, evolving research agenda under development. However, by the end of the book, Hansen has convincingly demonstrated the importance of geographical space and how it contributes to the emergence, realisation, and impact of protests. The spatial perspective also promises a fruitful application to cases beyond the former Soviet space.
Julie Wilhelmsen
Senior Research FellowNorwegian Institute of International Affairs
Preface
This book is based on my doctoral thesis, Mass Protests from a Spatial Perspective: Discontent and Urban Public Space in Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow (Hansen 2020), which I defended and published in March 2020 at UiT: the Arctic University of Norway.
The question that spurred me to write my thesis—and, subsequently, this book—was how mass protests are affected by urban public space.
Based on field work in Eastern Europe spanning several years and interviews with demonstrators, protest organisers, and observers, I gradually developed an approach to assess the enabling and constraining effects of urban public spaces on public protest. I call this model the spatial perspective on mass protests; or the spatial perspective, for short.
The model was tested and refined by looking closely at three case studies, each of which served as the basis for an academic article. These case studies investigate protest spaces in three different cities—Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow—and reflect three stages in the development of the spatial perspective. My thesis originally consisted of the three articles mentioned here, framed by seven introductory chapters.
The main difference between the thesis and the book you are now reading is that the three articles have here been integrated as chapters in their own right, for improved readability.
In addition, feedback from the doctoral committee has been incorporated where required, and some additional minor tweaks have been made to the case studies. However, the arguments and structure of the original articles have been kept largely unchanged. The main advantage of this approach is that it more clearly shows how the spatial perspective was developed.
One possible drawback of keeping the article-based chapters intact is that it has prevented me from updating some key information: The president of Ukraine, for instance, is no longer Petro Poroshenko, as stated in the first case study from 2016. The opposition in Minsk of 2020 is no longer coloured by its geopolitical views to the extent it was at the time of publishing the second case study in 2017. And Moscow, described in the third case study from 2019, is no longer as cluttered by fences and building projects as it was when I conducted field work in the city.
The purpose of these chapters is not, however, to describe current events—such information may be found elsewhere—but to illuminate the importance of urban protest, and to help researchers across a range of academic disciplines to understand this largely neglected element of societal contention. I believe the minor issues I have mentioned here will not distract the reader from the main subject and message of the book. In any case, it is necessary to summarise in brief the key events that have taken place since I wrote my original thesis.
Since the publication of Mass Protests from a Spatial Perspective, several important things have happened in the post-Soviet part of the world, demonstrating that a spatial perspective is relevant and important for our understanding of protest.
In the far eastern region of Russia, Khabarovsk Krai, for example, thousands of people have regularly gathered on Lenin Square since July 2020 to demonstrate against the Russian regime and the imprisonment of former governor Sergei Frugal (Flikke 2020, 16–18). The contestation between demonstrators and police over who controls Lenin Square shows that this particular space is symbolically important, at least for the parties involved.
Lenin Square has also contributed to producing powerful imagery for the national and regional opposition. A movement against the Russian leadership, able to fill one of the largest urban squares in Russia with people (the square’s size is second only to Red Square in Moscow), has the potential to reduce Kremlin influence over the Far East.
The protests have now spread from Khabarovsk to other Siberian cities, including Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok, and Omsk (Gladkikh and Ievstafieva 2020; Taiga.info 2020), and there have even been demonstrations of support for the Siberian dissenters in St. Petersburg and Moscow (BBC Russian Service 2020a). Increasingly, the authorities have begun resorting to violence in order to supress the movement (BBC Russian Service 2020b), but the protesters show few signs of stopping.
Another mass movement for change is currently underway in Belarus, on the borderland between Russia and the EU. Here, a wave of urban contention has struck every major city and most towns across the republic, beginning well before the presidential elections of 9 August 2020. Angered by election fraud and spurred on by the relentless brutality of government agencies, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have aimed at—and in many cases succeeded in—occupying and appropriating urban spaces that have long been associated with President Aliaksandr Lukashenka. This has happened in spite of presidential control over a powerful army of law enforcement agencies, ready to use violence to suppress dissent.
In the capital, Minsk, protesters are marking “their” territories with the white-red-white flag of the opposition and tying ribbons wherever they can. An open space on Charviakova Street, outside the city centre, has even been turned into the Square of Changes (Bel.: Ploshcha peramen), complete with opposition flags, a mural to “the DJs of change”, and regular evening concerts (Boguslavskaia 2020). The struggle over the Belarusian presidency is an urban conflict in more than one sense.
Finally, in Kyrgyzstan, mass protests erupted on Ala-Too Square in the capital Bishkek in early October 2020, triggered by fraudulent parliamentary elections (Pikulicka-Wilczewska 2020). Here, too, the protesters’ choice of square was no coincidence. Two previous revolutions began on Ala-Too Square, and it seems likely that the protests of October 2020 will result in a third Kyrgyz Revolution in the space of little over 15 years.
These three events show how social and political protests continue to utilise and interact with urban public space and its possibilities. The spatial perspective presented in this book offers an additional dimension for understanding their complex dynamics.
I would like to thank the many people who have read and commented on this project during its development, especially my examiners Julie Wilhelmsen, Andrii Portnov, and Bjarge Schwenke Fors and my two closest colleagues at UiT, Yngvar Steinholt and Andrei Rogatchevski.
Thanks are also due to Kirsty Jane Falconer for her thorough language editing, Valerie Lange and Jana Dävers at ibidem Press, and to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society series editor Andreas Umland.
I would further like to thank all respondents and interviewees for contributing to this book. Their accounts have been invaluable.
Finally, I wish to thank my family—especially my wife and friend Marina Dyshlovska—for loving support while writing this book.
Arve Hansen, Oslo, January 2021
Figure 1: Post-electoral protest, Minsk, August 2020
Photo: Artem Podrez / Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/protesters-in-belarus-5119461/
1 Starting Point
Went to Kyiv […] metro still closed […] Got around the police blockades easily. […] I returned to the Maidan. Still felt like a safe place.
Kyiv, 20th February 2014
This excerpt is from one of the numerous field notes I made during the final days of the Ukrainian revolution (2013–2014). I was studying the events in Kyiv for a research project in East Slavic area studies (Hansen 2015), and went to the iconic site of the protests, Maidan (Independence Square), to observe the scene after the latest clashes between police and protesters. The contention in Kyiv had started three months earlier in response to the government’s sudden U-turn away from EU integration, and it had rapidly changed into a broad movement against the incumbent president Ianukovych. The conflict escalated into violence and, by this point, many people had been killed.
I arrived at Maidan for the second time that day at approximately four or five o’clock in the afternoon. At the time, rumour had it that 780 protesters had been killed over the previous 24 hours.1 The city was in a state of shock, and there was much uncertainty as to what would happen next. Yet, for some reason, I felt quite safe where I was standing.
I knew Maidan well: the entrances and exits, the many tunnels underneath, the seemingly random monuments mixed with intrusive advertising boards, kiosks, and architecture from all periods of Ukraine’s Soviet and post-Soviet past. Many times over the previous three months, I had wondered why this particular space had become the symbol of protest in Ukraine. Now, during these final days of the revolution, it was evident that the authorities had been unable to clear the square and stop protesters (or curious people like me) from entering it, despite numerous road blocks and a heavy riot police presence. Strangely, I also noticed that, even though everything was uncertain and no one knew whether the authorities would launch another attack, it didn’t feel particularly frightening to be where I was standing. If anything, I figured, I could always find a way out.
It became apparent to me then that Maidan was a very suitable place for protest, although I could not define precisely why.
Maidan is merely one of several examples of a town square that has turned into a location of great political significance. Actions and events spring immediately to mind at the mere mention of the Bastille, Red Square, Taksim, or Tahrir. We associate these places with the making of history: places where revolutions have been started, dictators ousted, or rebellions crushed.
Central urban spaces can thus create powerful imagery, and we intuitively understand that space has importance. Yet how are massive collective actions, such as the latest Ukrainian revolution, affected by urban public space? Or, to put it another way, how does urban space facilitate and/or inhibit public protests? These questions led me to the current study.
Figure 2: Maidan, Kyiv, February 2014a
Photo: Arve Hansen
Structure
This book describes the development of a spatial perspective on mass protests, a model which has been applied to three case studies: Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. It consists of ten chapters, divided into three main parts, one theoretical, one practical, and one concluding.
Part I opens in chapter 2 with a contextualisation of space and its central position in human society since the prehistoric era. It outlines a history of contention in urban public spaces, and explains why public spaces in the East Slavic region form the topic of this book.
Having established that urban public space has both a historic and a contemporary relevance, chapter 3 provides a systematic review, in two sections, of the existing research on protests and space. The first section (3.1) includes general theories within sociology and political science, and research on the specific conditions necessary for a collective action or revolution to occur. The second (3.2) looks at the various research on public (philosophy), physical (architecture, urban planning, geography), and contested space (urbanism). In the third section (3.3), an existing gap in the available research is identified. Even if connections between space and protest are discovered in the research literature, and from a variety of perspectives, none of the publications surveyed provide a systematic and generalised approach to the analysis of this causal relationship.
Chapter 4 continues the discussion of chapter 3 by providing two key definitions of mass protests (4.1) and urban public space (4.2), before stating the primary and secondary research questions of this book in full (4.3).
The theorising and development of the spatial perspective, from the conception of an idea to a complete theoretical model, are described in chapter 5. This includes the theory and approaches to theorising applied during the various stages of the model’s development (5.1), and some of the ethical considerations taken into account during the process (5.2), as well as my main reservation about developing a theory with a focus on geography. From this starting point, the development of the model is traced from its beginnings (5.4) through different stages of theorising and testing (5.5) to a description of the causal chains between urban space and mass protests employed in the final model (5.6). The project’s three case studies were written in parallel with the model’s development, and thus also reflect the various stages of the process. The first case is described as a prestudy (5.5.1), the second as a transitional study (5.5.3), and the third as the main study, demonstrating how the spatial perspective can be applied in its current form (5.7).
The causal mechanisms described in chapter five are explicated in chapter 6, including the model’s independent (6.1), intermediary (6.2), and dependent variables (6.3).
Part II consists of three chapters, each based to a large extent on the cases described in chapter 5: The prestudy of Maidan in Kyiv (chapter 7); the transitional study of October Square and Independence Square in Minsk (chapter 8); and the main study of Swamp Square in Moscow (chapter 9).
The single chapter of Part III—chapter 10—provides a final demonstration of the spatial perspective as applied to Republic Square (Place de la République), Paris, during a demonstration there on 6 January 2019 by the Yellow Vests (Fr.: Mouvement des gilets jaunes). The case study is used to demonstrate how the research questions outlined in chapter 4 have been answered, and forms the basis for arguing that the model can be used as a tool and a language to discuss spaces of contention and to provide new insights into the study of social movements and mass protests. Following a brief review of the contents, findings, and utility of this book, I then suggest a few ways in which the spatial perspective can be developed further.
1 The Ukrainian Ministry of Health later announced that the actual number of those killed was 82 (Ukrainian Ministry of Health 2014).
Part I
Figure 3: Maidan, Kyiv, December 2013
Photo: Arve Hansen
2 Space in Context
Human beings are cognitive creatures. We experience the world around us through our external sensory input, such as touch, smell, and sight, which our brains interpret based on our experiences, memory, and thoughts. One fundamental aspect of the experienced world is space and, consciously or subconsciously, we never stop interpreting the physical environment around us. This does not imply that we are necessarily aware of how this analysis is done, or even that it is being done in the first place. We often are unable to appreciate the full extent and impact of it or to explain how it works to a third party. Nevertheless, we are instinctively aware of our surroundings, sense their uses, opportunities, dangers, and risks, and adapt our behaviour accordingly.1
This keen sense of place has probably played a vital part in the survival of our species. When our early hominid ancestors, millions of years ago, entered new ground, instincts would be activated to provide information about the possibilities and dangers that particular space might provide. Exploring a new location, an individual would be sensitive to whether the space made them feel relaxed and safe, or alert and uneasy.
Over time, as the human capacity for social interaction evolved, space would come to be perceived not just as a place that might provide food and a chance to eat (or, conversely, a threat of being attacked and eaten), but also as a location for the increasingly complex social interactions between individuals within a group. Thus, the instinctive human perception of space would come to include information about other people and about the social interactions and relations occurring in that space. A newly arrived individual would, for example, soon sense whether this was a place to eat, relax, converse, and mate, or to be on its guard against other individuals in the group. It would know—with little conscious effort—where its allies and friends were, find the possible exits, sense whether it belonged in the group, and locate itself strategically according to its position in the social hierarchy: whether funny, loud, and boastful at the centre of the group, or reserved, quiet, and humble near one of the exits. Individuals who were oblivious to such social space would probably end up as outcasts, or worse, killed.
According to the Australian anthropologist Terrence Twomey (2014), our discovery and domestication of fire hundreds of thousands, perhaps even over a million years ago (Gowlett 2016) probably facilitated the evolution of human cooperation. Twomey explains how making a fire and keeping it going was a costly endeavour, yet the result was a good from which all the individuals in a group could greatly benefit. Hence, the domestication of fire would stimulate cooperation (Twomey 2014). We could therefore imagine that, for groups of hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times, the campfire would become one of the first dedicated spaces for social interaction. Here, people would flock together not only to eat and sleep in the relative safety from predators, insects, and cold weather, but also to process past events, discuss gains and risks, and make a plan of action for the day to come.
After the Neolithic Revolution of approximately 10 000 BCE, humans gradually started to live in fixed settlements and the new agricultural technology laid the foundation for explosive population growth (Bellwood and Oxenham 2008). In the new and increasingly urban setting, the locations of social interaction and planning would probably move from the campfire into urban spaces, such as marketplaces, town squares, or other focal points of growing villages and cities. We can find archaeological evidence from the Bronze and Iron ages, for instance, which indicate that social and deliberative spaces were valued to such an extent that they were rganizati as various forms of political institutions. Popular assemblies in urban space could be found in the Ancient Greek Agora (Anc. Greek.: ἀγορά), the Roman Forum Romanum, and the Slavic Veche (Rus.: вече); or, conversely, in the outskirts of settlements, such as the Scandinavian Thing (Icel.: þing).
However, urban spaces have some significant limitations as formal places of deliberation and public administration. Notably, the central plaza of a large city may not have enough physical space available for all people to attend, and large groups of people are often at risk of being affected by demagoguery. For these and other reasons, in most societies, public rganization moved into the remit of formal political institutions. Yet the cities’ urban spaces have remained as necessary parts of the landscape, needed in order for people to move from one place to another. Additionally, they function as places for trade, recreation, and social interaction. Urban spaces are often the location of joyful activities such as festivals and public entertainments, but also, sometimes, of floggings and executions. Some rulers might use the city’s focal point to display their might, too—for instance, in the form of army drills and parades. Moreover, although the majority of formal decisions now occur in buildings, the potential use value of urban space for people to discuss, deliberate, and decide on a course of action has not gone away.
Throughout human history, people have tended to congregate in central places in times of trouble. Such gatherings sometimes occur on the initiative of rulers to collectively find a solution to a shared problem (such as how to respond to an imminent invasion or the death of a prince). Yet, every so often, the ruling elites are themselves perceived as the problem, and the urban squares and marketplaces might be seized by the people and turned into arenas of opposition.
Figure 4: Althing, Iceland
Iceland’s form of popular assembly (Icel.: Alþingi) was first located on Thingvellir (the Assembly Fields, Icel.: Þingvellir)/Lögberg in the tenth century CE. Photo: Andrei Rogatchevski
2.1 Complexities of Urban Contention
Urban contention has a large number of aspects, and several of these are discussed in the next chapter. But there are three ways to look at and categorise urban collective actions that should be mentioned here to provide the reader with a sense of the complexity of the phenomenon: 1) the various forms of urban contention, 2) the motivations people have for action: and, 3) the local, regional, and global tendencies or waves of contention of which the collective action is part.
2.1.1 Form
One form of urban contention is the violent mob, wholly or partially controlled by powerful individuals such as politicians, religious leaders, and oligarchs. The mob has often been used as a tool to incite violence in cities against political opponents and so change the political landscape. In the Ancient Roman Republic, for example, groups of discontented plebeians often became an important force in the frequent (and often violent) transitions of power (Brunt 1966). Another example might be the veche (popular assembly) of the Medieval East Slavic Novgorod Republic (1136–1478), where the crowd were often more powerful than their prince. Historical chronicles recount how the Novgorodians, under heavy influence from wealthy boyars, sometimes removed ineffective leaders by force (Paul 2008; Evtuhov, Goldfrank, Hughes, and Stites 2004, 88–89).
Urban contention can also be seen in the uncontrolled violent crowd which, under pressure, stands up to the ruling elites and overthrows them in violent riots, uprisings, and revolutions. The French Revolution (1789–1799) is a particularly prominent example because it shows how space can both foster discontent and provide a suitable environment for insurgencies.2
Conversely, urban discontent can manifest as nonviolent protests, such as the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. (Lumsden 2000), or the 1919 May Fourth Movement at Tiananmen Square in Beijing (Wasserstrom 2005).
2.1.2 Motivation
Another way to look at urban contention is by considering the motivation for the action. The US is a fitting example to illustrate that urban contention can have a wide range of different motives, ranging from a wish to improve living conditions, e.g. the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (De-Michele 2008), to the many movements against wars and military interventions (see for example the protests against the war in Vietnam [History.com 2019], and in Iraq [Chan 2003]). Cities in the US have also seen multiple protests for the equal rights of oppressed groups in society, such as the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the birth of the Gay Rights Movement (Kuhn 2011), the feminist movements of the 1970s (Spain 2016), and the more recent Black Lives Matter protests (Karduni 2017); collective actions aimed at causing harm, such as racially motivated violence in Southern US cities (Olzak 1990); religiously inspired protests, such as the Washington for Jesus rally in 1980 (Flippen 2011, 1–23), and social movements against economic inequality, such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest movement (Gillham, Edwards, and Noakes 2013).
2.1.3 Waves
A third approach to urban discontent is to see it as waves that come and go, sweeping through periods in history, changing power structures and the layout of societies. A large number of such waves of contention have occurred throughout history in cities across the globe. In Eastern Europe, for example, we can identify at least four waves, shown here together with their political aftermath:
1917
Eastern Europe did not become part of the three European waves of revolution of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s that followed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. But the radical new ideas of European thinkers, combined with the grievances of war and deep inequality in society, turned into a series of urban uprisings in the Russian Empire and eventually into the October Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Union was created in the aftermath of this revolution.3
1950s and 1960s
The second wave of urban discontent in Eastern Europe started during the period of thaw introduced by Nikita Khrushchev in the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953. A series of mass protests against poor standards of living and political repressions broke out in the streets and squares of major cities in the Eastern Bloc. Notably, uprisings and demonstrations occurred in 1953 on Leipziger Straße in Berlin (Ostermann and Byrne 2001, 163–165), in 1956 on Adam Mickiewicz Square in Poznań (Grzelczak n.d., 98–101) and on Kossuth Lajos Square in Budapest, also in 1956.4 The public spaces of cities in several of the Warsaw Pact countries also featured in the worldwide protest movements of 1968, four years after the thaw ended. 5
1985 to 1991
From the second half of the 1980s, triggered by the 1986 glasnost (transparency/openness) and perestroika (restructuring) reform policies, urban protests started to appear in the Eastern Bloc. In the Baltics, for example, protesters actively used music in what would later be known as the Singing Revolution of 1987–1991 (Smidchens 2014). Opponents of the Soviet regime rganized numerous concerts in city centres and formed a human chain between the three capitals, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, to demonstrate their unity in their discontent with the USSR (2014, 249). These actions inspired similar protests, notably in Ukraine (Hansen, Rogatchevski, Steinholt and Wickström 2019, 36–37). Between 1989 and 1991, the Warsaw Pact gradually fell apart as series of both nonviolent and violent anti-communist revolutions occurred in capital cities across the Eastern Bloc. Notable events include masses of East Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the failed military coup of August 1991, which was partly stopped by the masses of people who went out into the public spaces of Moscow and other Russian cities (Marples 2004, 84). The Soviet Union was dissolved later that same year.
2000s
Following a somewhat chaotic decade in the 1990s,6 a new wave of social movements and mass protests hit the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia in the 2000s (see fig. 5). Inspired by the Eastern European protests of the late 1980s, the demonstrators used nonviolent means to occupy central public squares in capital cities. The protests were often triggered by election fraud, and they demanded (and often achieved) the resignation of the elites that had managed to hold on to power after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc. The social movements of the 2000s are usually known as colour revolutions, with reference to the bright colours and symbols employed by the protesters. Although not in the former Soviet Union, the Yugoslavian Bulldozer Revolution, which overthrew President Slobodan Milošević in 2000, is often regarded as the first of the colour revolutions (e.g. by Tucker 2005).
Figure 5: Notable protests and colour revolutions in post-Soviet states in the 2000s
| Year | Country | Focal point | Name(s) | Result |
| 2003 | Georgia | In front of the Parliament (Tbilisi) | Rose Revolution | Resignation of President Shevardnadze, new parliamentary elections. |
| 2003–2004 | Armenia | Freedom Square (Yerevan) | 2003–2004 Armenian Protests | Forceful removal of protesters, legal retributions against protesters and protest organisers. |
| 2004–2005 | Ukraine | Maidan (Kyiv) | Orange Revolution | New presidential elections. |
| 2005 | Kyrgyzstan | Ala-Too Square (Bishkek) | Tulip Revolution | Resignation of President Akayev, new presidential elections. |
| 2005 | Azerbaijan | Gelebe/Galaba Square (Baku) | 2005 Azerbaijani Protests | Some concessions. “[O]fficial results for 7 or 8 of 125 parliamentary seats [were] annulled.” (Chivers 2005) |
| 2006 | Belarus | October Square (Minsk) | Kalinowskyi Square/Jeans Revolution | Forceful removal of the protest camp, legal retributions against protesters and protest organisers. |
| 2008 | Armenia | Freedom Square (Yerevan) | 2008 Armenian Protests | Forceful removal of the protest camp, protesters killed, legal retributions against protesters and protest organisers. |
| 2009 | Moldova | Great National Assembly Square (Chișinău) | Twitter Revolution | New parliamentary elections, resignation of President Voronin. |
The above three categories (form, motivation, waves) are not intended to be exhaustive, but to illustrate that “urban contention” is a multifaceted term with historic and contemporary relevance to most regions in the world. The following section serves two purposes: 1) to provide a justification for choosing Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow as case studies for the three articles in this study; and 2) to show that space and protests are important factors which have affected, and continue to affect, the political situation in the East Slavic area.
2.2 Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia
Since this study is limited by a number of factors, such as time, funding, and space available, the project has been narrowed down geographically. The case studies are limited to the capital cities of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia for three main reasons. Firstly, the three countries have many similarities. Secondly, despite these similarities, there are some interesting differences between the respective national opposition movements. Finally, two outside factors have pushed me to select these cases. I shall return to these shortly.
Furthermore, each case study has also been geographically limited to one or two urban public spaces, as the word limitations provided by the journal article format rarely allow for more. The choices and delimitations for each case study are discussed more thoroughly in each of the three chapters.
Similarities
Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow are the capital cities of the countries often referred to as the Slavic Triangle (see e.g. Godin 2014), a term originating from the countries’ shared history. The territories of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia each cover parts of Kievan Rus’ (pprox.. 882–1240), the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1722), and the Russian Empire (1722–1917), and they were all signatories to the Treaty of the Creation of the USSR in 1922, which was dissolved in 1991 by the collective decision of the three heads of state. In post-Soviet times, the three countries have struggled with many of the same obstacles: a brutal transition from planned to market economy, widespread corruption, autocratic leadership, popular discontent, etc. Moreover, there are strong ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, architectural, economic, and criminal similarities and bonds between the three countries.
Figure 6: The Slavic Triangle (map)
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Map: Júlio Reis/Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en) (edited by Arve Hansen)
Differences
However, the differences between the three countries are significant, too. Ukraine was one of the countries upended by a revolution in the 2000s, as the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 resulted in regime change. Conversely, Belarus and Russia avoided becoming part of the wave of colour revolutions.7 This tendency repeated itself in the 2010s, as protests in Minsk and Moscow at the start of the decade all ended badly for the protesters,8 whilst the latest Ukrainian revolution of 2013–2014, centred on Maidan in downtown Kyiv, led to regime change for the second time in nine years.9 Today, protests continue to exert an influence on local and regional politics.10
Moreover, whereas the opposition in Kyiv has Maidan as an urban space designated for protest, the opposition in Minsk has very limited access to the city’s urban spaces; and in Moscow, although the authorities do allow protests, they carefully select which spaces to sanction for such actions, most probably to restrict the impact of the protests.
Outside factors
This study forms part of a research group studying Russian space (broadly understood to include Belarus and Ukraine).11 I have also lived in each country for an extended period of time (in Belarus, 2006–2010; in Ukraine, the first half of 2011 and 2013–2017; in Russia, 2011–2013). I thus have first-hand knowledge of, and a network of friends and acquaintances in, each of the three cities.
2.3 Relevance
Since prehistoric times, people have related by necessity to the intricacies of physical and social space, to the associations and emotions such spaces evoke, as well as to the possibilities and obstacles they provide. Even though our environment has changed, our basic human instincts are still active and, as in the prehistoric era, people congregate to discuss, deliberate, interact, and—in times of trouble—struggle together to find a solution to the problem.
The small selection of collective actions mentioned in this chapter demonstrates that urban mass protest can be a means of changing society, used by people across the world. With the spread of social media, waves of protest can expand with increased speed, and the Internet has facilitated the extension of protest movements, such as the colour revolutions, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the Yellow Vests. However, although the Internet is available in and used by the majority of the world’s population, people still use physical space in order to protest. This is because the presence of a group of people assembled at a focal point of the city serves a number of purposes that are rarely served by collective online action. A physical protest shows that there is discontent in the city, and that people are willing to sacrifice time and effort to come out in support of their cause.
I do not wish to undermine the power of the Internet as a tool for mobilising people to protest. Social media outlets clearly have several qualities suitable for facilitating and/or organising mass protest (see for example Herasimenka 2016). Yet, for a collective action to be effective, it more often than not needs some form of physical manifestation. Urban protests occur where people are concentrated, and so are often hard to ignore. On one hand, citizens are forced to react to the protests as they obstruct movement and demand attention, and some might be inspired to join in. On the other, the authorities are also forced to react, and their reaction (whether by way of official statements, violence, or both) might further spread the news of discontent. Mass protest also represents a form of threat to the authorities. It might mean that people expect the authorities to change their ways, or else they will not vote for those in power again; and it might discourage others from doing so, too. It can also be a threat of violence, as a large group of discontented people has the potential of turning into a mob and removing the authorities by force.
Consequently, urban public space has both a historic and a contemporary relevance, and the ways in which people perceive and use space, especially at times of contention, still have an impact on local, regional, and global politics and society today.
How are mass protests affected by geographical urban space in modern cities? To answer this question, it is first of all necessary to consult the research literature to see whether such a spatial perspective exists. If not, how should such a model be structured?
1 This way of thinking about human nature has its roots back in the cognitive turn of the mid 1950s. At this time, sciences such as psychology, linguistics, and anthropology began distancing themselves from the traditional way of looking at the mind and body as separate entities; and the new cognitive sciences moved towards a more integrated interpretation of the human mind, which sees most aspects of the human body (and possibly the environment in which it moves) as interrelated (Miller 2003; Núñez and Cooperrider 2013; Thagard 2018).
2 The revolution erupted in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of monarchical oppression, and was fuelled by the poverty and sickness created in the overcrowded and unsanitary districts of Paris. Moreover, the insurgency was possible in no small part due to barricades raised in the city’s narrow and easily defendable streets and alleys (Doyle 1989, 178-191; Traugott 1993; Wilde 2018).
3 At its peak, in the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union covered a sixth of the planet’s landmass, controlled the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and dominated the Warsaw Pact military alliance. This alliance was created as a counterweight to NATO in May 1955 and consisted of the 15 Soviet Republics in the USSR as well as Albania (until 1968), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. This group of republics and countries is referred to as the Eastern Bloc.
4 The Hungarian student protests turned into a revolution and triggered a Soviet military intervention the same year, resulting in “more than 3,000 dead and 13,000 injured as well as over 4,000 destroyed buildings. Actual losses were probably higher” (Hoensch 1984, 219).
5 1968 is a year famous for the amount of urban protests worldwide. In the West, public spaces were occupied by demonstrators in London, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, Rome, West Berlin and numerous other cities; and the social movements of that year showed that even seemingly stable democracies can burst into protests, riots, and even revolutions (see Kurlansky 2005.). While people in the West were largely protesting in the name of equality and socialism, the protests in the East demanded political freedoms and increased autonomy from the Soviet Union. When the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stop the Prague government’s new reform programme, thousands of Prague-dwellers took to the streets to protest. A number of demonstrations in support of the Czechoslovaks appeared in cities across the Soviet Union, too, including at Red Square in Moscow (Wojnowski 2018, 85; Bichof, Karner, and Ruggenthaler 2010; Kondrashova 2018).
6 In Eastern Europe, the 1990s are often known by the Russian term Likhie devianostye, which can be translated into English as the Wild Nineties. The period got this label due to the chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The 15 newly born post-Soviet states had to reorient their economic models towards a new reality and create new political systems while struggling with severe scarcity of consumer goods and social security, explosive crime rates, rampant corruption, and uncontrolled privatisation. At the same time, wars and uprisings for independence broke out frequently in the Caucasus (notably in Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South-Ossetia) and in the Transnistria Region of Moldova, triggering several, often unpopular, military interventions by Russia and other countries. Just when the economic situation started to recover, the 1997 financial crisis in Asia hit the former Soviet Union hard, particularly Russia and its trade partners Ukraine and Belarus. It should be noted that the Russian authorities support the use of the term Likhie devianostye, as it focuses on the negative aspects of the unstable decade between the Soviet Union (stability) and Putin (new stability), although for many Eastern Europeans, the decade was seen as one of freedom and possibilities rather than anarchy (see for example Rusin 2016; Boldyrev 2018; Osipov-Gipsh 2019).
7 In Russia in 2000, the presidency changed from the unpopular, ageing and sickly Boris Yeltsin to the comparatively young, reasonably sober and physically very fit Vladimir Putin, who for several reasons enjoyed high levels of popularity well into the mid-to-late 2000s (9.2). In Belarus, too, the economy had been growing since the early 2000s, and mass protests were mostly ideological (driven by Belarusian nationalists) or constitutional (against the policies of President Aliaksandr Lukashėnka). Yet none of these protests resulted in a colour revolution (8.2).
8 The 2006 protests in Minsk and the 2011–2012 protest movement in Moscow were suppressed so harshly that the opposition of both countries was effectively disabled for several years to come (8.3.2, 9). In both cases, the protesters were met with violence, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and the leaders of the opposition received long prison sentences.
9 The revolution has greatly affected both regional and global power politics. Russia has accused the EU and US of orchestrating what they perceive to be a coup d’état, and the Ukrainian revolution became Russia’s pretext for occupying the Crimean Peninsula and supporting the separatist movements in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the revolution indirectly became one of the triggering events for the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West today.
10 Since 2014, protests in Ukraine have for the most part been aimed at the policies of President Petro Poroshenko (2013–2019) and President Volodymyr Zelenskyi (since 2019). In Belarus, little has changed, and protests are usually suppressed in much the same manner as before. In Russia, following the annexation of Crimea, a surge in patriotic sentiment led to members of the opposition being labelled traitors, and discontent has remained at low levels. Since 2016, there has been an upswing in public protests in the country. A variety of economic and social problems have motivated hundreds of thousands of Russians to participate in numerous collective actions in cities across the country (9.2.1).
11 The research group RSCPR (Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations) “is engaged in a multidisciplinary study of Russian attitudes to their own and other people’s/nations’ spaces […] which can provide insights into the interdependence of Russian space and Russian identity, both at an individual and a state policy level” (UiT n.d.). Ukraine and Belarus are often (and especially in Russia) perceived as integral parts of a “Russian” world.
3 Mapping the Field
The previous chapter outlined some key aspects of space and contention. Historical and contemporary examples were cited to illustrate the important psychological and practical effects of urban space on mass actions.
The aim of the current chapter is to provide a more detailed overview of academic publications concerned with space and/or protests. Starting from this proposition, two key questions may be asked: 1) What academic literature recognises and/or relates to the links between space and protests?; and 2) What approaches and concepts can be integrated into a theoretical model which examines the causal relationship between space and protest? To facilitate reading, the body of research literature is split into three main sections: literature on protests (3.1), literature on various types of space (3.2), and then a section that sums up the findings of this chapter and outlines a gap in the research literature (3.3).
3.1 Protests
Protest is a broad subject that has been approached by scholars from a range of academic disciplines. If theories on social movements are included, the amount of literature on protests becomes even greater. A good starting point to make sense of these broad categories is sociology, which is naturally concerned with the act of protest.
In Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements by the German sociologist Karl-Dieter Opp (2009), six major theoretical perspectives on protests and social movements are defined and ealizatio. These are collective action theory (CAT), resource ealization perspective (RMP), political opportunity structure theory (POS), identity theory, framing perspective, and dynamics of contention approach (DOC). Opp describes these theories particularly with a view to the degree in which they present macro (i.e. structural) and micro (i.e. psychological) perspectives on social movements and protests, and how these are interlinked. His main point of critique is that the existing theoretical frameworks do not properly combine macro and micro factors in their attempts to explain protests (2009, 349). Opp’s proposed solution is a synthesis of the major theoretical approaches, which he calls the structure-cognitive model (SCM).1
Opp analyses these models in detail, but not one of them is shown by his analysis to give specific consideration to the spatial element of protest. I would argue that all seven models, for various reasons, would benefit from applying a spatial perspective of this type.2 The model that comes closest in nature to a such a perspective is POS theory.
The aim of POS theory, as it was first developed by the US political scientist Peter Eisinger (1973), is to understand the behaviour of protests and to calculate the chance of success of protests and social movements. To do this, the theoretical model relies on the thorough examination of the political environment (i.e. the context within which politics take place). If significant changes occur to the POS (i.e. to the factors and conditions of the political environment), reasons and opportunities for political action are created. POS theory thus strives to identify various factors in the political environment and to prove each factor’s causal effect on the chances of a given action occurring and/or succeeding. What constitutes “success” needs to be defined empirically by the researcher (Opp 2009, 162).
One part of Opp’s (2009) extensive critique of this theory is that it is virtually impossible to identify all factors in the political environment (or find the ‘correct’ ones), and thus hard to calculate the “chances of success”. Opp also argues that the theory is poorly defined and not clearly distinct from RMP and rational choice theory (RCT), and he questions why POS theory ealizatio changes in the political environment rather than just opportunities (167–171; 177–178). However, in his view, the utility of the model is that it demonstrates how the political environment may affect protest behaviour. POS could also be used to identify factors in the political environment that inhibit and/or facilitate protests, even if the causal effect of each factor is difficult to assess. (200–201.)
The political environment is relevant to a theoretical model on space and protest for two reasons: 1) As I argue throughout this book, geographical space can significantly contribute to the emergence, ealization, and impact of protests, and it should thus be considered as one of the factors in the political environment. 2) In order to understand the causal relationship between space and protests, it is necessary to identify not only the effects of space, but also the other factors and conditions that have an effect on protests (the importance of mapping such rival theories is explained more thoroughly in chapter 5, 5.6). The following three subsections survey research literature that contributes to our understanding of protest, with a particular view to spatial and non-spatial factors in the political environment that make contentious politics successful or unsuccessful.
3.1.1 Repertoires
The term repertoire of contention (ROC) was initially coined by the US sociologist Charles Tilly. The concept is used as an analytical tool by sociologists and political scientists to identify tendencies in contentious politics and to explain why people choose to act the way they do. Strategies utilised during contentious collective actions are often repeated, and social groups develop traditions for methods of protest over time, affected by social, political, and cultural factors. Such repertoires include oft-repeated forms of contentious action (e.g. sit-ins, riots, and protests), and the participants’ preferred tools of choice, which develop and change over time (Tarrow 1993). 3 The activists’ choice of urban space often becomes a part of such repertoires, and an analysis of a given space should therefore also consider whether or not it is included in any ROCs (see history of protest as a spatial element, 6.1.1).
The Italian scholars Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani have written extensively on the ROCs of social movements. In one of their books, Social Movements: An Introduction (della Porta and Diani 2006), the two authors use various theoretical approaches, such as ROC, RMP, and POS, to approach social movements4 on three levels of analysis—micro levels (e.g. feelings, identity, beliefs, values, etc.), meso levels (the ittlingion, and the social networks the movements are comprised of), and macro levels (i.e. structural factors, such as economy, political system, etc.)—and the relationship between these three levels (see figure 7 for a graphical representation). Particularly relevant to this book is the authors’ overview of the literature on the policing of protests (see policeability/defensibility as a spatial quality, 6.2.1), to which della Porta has made significant contributions (della Porta and Reiter 1998; della Porta 2013; della Porta, Peterson, and Reiter 2006).
Della Porta and Diani (2006, 197) elaborate on the act of policing protests and identify three prevailing policing strategies: coercive strategies (i.e. the use of physical force); persuasive strategies (attempts to control events through contact with activists and organisers); and informative strategies (which consist of “widespread information-gathering as a preventive feature in protest control”). While choice of strategy on the part of the police has a great impact on the outcome of protests, it is not clear which of the two first strategies is most efficient in controlling events. The authors do note a tendency of coercive (repressive) strategies increasing the risk of escalation, and thus also the proportion of radical protesters.5
In addition to the police, della Porta and Diani (2006) identify other actors in opposition to or allied with the social movements, and whose structural makeup, strength, weaknesses, and other characteristics also function as POSs. These might be institutional, such as government agencies, political parties, trade unions, foundations, religious institutions, etc. Other important actors are provocateurs, used to incite violence and legitimate coercive strategies, and social countermovements that arise “as a reaction to the successes obtained by social movements”, develop in parallel to the social movements, and often use similar strategies to those of the movements they oppose (2006, 2011).6
Containment and Kettling
Some of the literature on the policing of protest is particularly concerned with the strategic aspects that space provides, both for protesters and police (e.g. Whelan and Molnar 2018, 123–153; Noakes and Gillham 2006; McCarthy and McPhail 2006). Gillham, Edwards, and Noakes (2013), for example, have analysed the mass contentious actions during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests (OWS) in New York City, and argue that OWS created a transition to a new form of police ROC, marked by a decrease in persuasive and increase in coercive strategies. During the contestations over public space in New York (notably over Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan), the authors argue, the police started using ‘strategic incapacitation’. This is a multi-method approach to the policing of protest, which includes informative strategies to survey and infiltrate the movement beforehand and the creation of zones in which different groups are contained and kept apart from each other (e.g. different protest and no-protest zones; zones for the media; and a separate zone for the financial elite).
A more confrontational form of containing people that should be mentioned specifically is ittling. The British sociologist Hilary Pilkington defines ittling as
[…] a police strategy of surrounding demonstrators at a protest in order to contain them in a particular place. The police argue it is necessary as a preventative measure to avoid violence or disorder during demonstrations, […] protest groups have argued that it is deployed to deliberately frustrate demonstrators or as a means of ascertaining personal details and photographs of protestors. (Pilkington, 2012)
Kettling should thus be defined as a coercive strategy that could be used to suppress demonstrations with physical force, escalate the conflict (by bringing the “kettle” to a boil), and/or arrest a maximum number of demonstrators.
The police’s ability to carry out such containment and/or ‘kettling’ is to a large extent affected by the urban space. See, for example, the difficulties Ukrainian police had in containing Maidan in 2014 (Hansen 2015, 36), or how easy it was for the Russian police to kettle the March of Millions gathered on Swamp Square in 2012 (chapter 9).
3.1.2 Nonviolent Contention
Thus far, the topic of this chapter has been two general approaches to understanding a broad spectrum of activities defined as social movements and protests, as well as their counteractivities. The next two subsections examine research literature aiming to identify more specific conditions and factors that determine whether or not protests occur and what makes them successful. The topic of this subsection is literature on nonviolent contentious actions, whilst the topic of the next is works about what are usually called colour revolutions (3.1.3), including the Western, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian perspectives on the phenomenon. Despite their nonviolent methods, the colour revolutions are kept as a separate category from nonviolent contention. This is because colour revolutions are perceived by some scholars and governments as covert warfare, and as a deliberate pretext to violence (see 3.1.3, below).
In research literature on nonviolent resistance and social movements, one of the earliest attempts to provide a systematic overview and analysis of nonviolent was the US political scientist Gene Sharp’s frequently cited 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The three-volume book provides the reader with a theory of political power (vol. 1); descriptions of 198 methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion (such as ‘fraternising’ and ‘student strike’) (vol. 2); and a practical guide for developing, employing, and defending nonviolent campaigns (vol. 3). (Sharp 1973). Sharp’s three volumes have formed the basis of many theories of contentious action. For instance, Ackerman and Kruegler (1994) condensed Sharp’s 198 methods into 12 principles of strategic nonviolent action. More recently, the key player behind the Resistance! (Scb.: ‘Otpor!’) student movement in Serbia (1998–2000), Srdja Popovic, together with Andrej Milivojevic and Slobodan Djinovic—two other prominent members of the opposition to Slobodan Milošević—published the book Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points (2006), based on Sharp’s 1973 work.
Popovic, Milivojevic and Djinovic (2006) is a practical step-by-step guide for protesters, divided into three parts: “Before You Start”, “Starting Out”, and “Running the Nonviolent Campaign.” Presented as an easy-to-read and richly illustrated textbook, it provides potential protest organisers with practical exercises, suggestions, and case study examples to analyse (mainly from the Yugoslavian Bulldozer Revolution of 2000). In 2015, Popovic wrote Blueprint for Revolution, another book on the same topic (Popovic and Miller 2015). Both books emphasise strength in numbers and diversity among protesters as decisive for the outcome of protests.
One of the most systematic analyses of nonviolent actions to date is provided by the US political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (2011). The authors build on statistical analysis of 323 major violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006 and four qualitative case studies, in addition to the works of other scholars, such as Sharp (1973) and Ackerman and Kruegler (1994), who are discussed above. The authors argue that nonviolent campaigns are nearly twice as likely to be successful than violent campaigns, and they emphasise the ability of campaign organisers to mobilise large and diverse segments of the population as a key condition for success (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). In a TEDx talk, Chenoweth states that the critical mass of any resistance campaign, violent or nonviolent, is as little as 3.5 % of the total population (whichever the country), stressing that nonviolent actions are much more likely to mobilise a sufficient proportion of the population (Chenoweth 2013).
A key element in virtually all existing studies on nonviolent collective actions is emphasis on the number of participants. What is surprising is that, although the majority of the research also underline the importance of planning and of developing strategies, tactics, and methods, there are almost no references to physical space, which is often of major importance to these practical aspects of collective action.
3.1.3 Colour Revolutions
We now turn to publications concerned with the colour revolutions. As described in the previous chapter, a wave of colour revolutions ousted autocratic leaders and changed the political landscape of Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 2000s (2.1.3).7 The often unforeseen protest movements and their influence on protests in other parts of the world gave rise to a host of explanations of why colour revolutions intermittently occur, and under which conditions they achieve regime change. This literature is particularly relevant to this book, since a majority of the colour revolutions were carried out as static occupations of central urban spaces, and it should therefore be possible to assess whether space is considered a factor by leading scholars within the field. Moreover, because the factors identified in the literature are based on collective actions in the post-Soviet region, they should be particularly suitable as a tool for describing the political environment of the case studies in this book.
Among the more influential publications on the subject is the US political scientist Michael McFaul’s article “Transitions from Postcommunism” (2005). Basing his argument on similarities between colour revolutions in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), and Ukraine (2004), McFaul presents seven basic factors he deems necessary for a colour revolution to occur:
1) a semi-autocratic rather than fully autocratic regime; 2) an unpopular incumbent; 3) a united and organized opposition; 4) an ability quickly to drive home the point that voting results were falsified, 5) enough independent media to inform citizens about the falsified vote, 6) a political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud, and 7) divisions among the regime’s coercive forces. (McFaul 2005, 7)
McFaul thus rganized internal macro and meso factors more than micro factors such as the motivation and psychology of the protesters. Space is also left out of the equation, although one could imagine that the protesters’ choice of space affects the sixth factor. Furthermore, McFaul discusses and eventually downplays other macro factors, such as economic trauma, ethnic tension, and Western support for rganizedonal and/or the protesters.
Several political scientists have followed McFaul’s approach in order to explain the absence or presence of colour revolutions (e.g. Marples 2006, on Belarus), which shows that there is room for such an approach. Others have strived to nuance or change McFaul’s factors, among them the British political scientist Taras Kuzio (2008), who has increased the overall number of factors to nine and included micro and macro factors:
[1] [A] competitive- (i.e. semi-) authoritarian state facilitating space for the democratic opposition; [2] “return to Europe” civic nationalism that assists in mobilizing civil society; [3] a preceding political crisis that weakened the regime’s legitimacy; [4] a pro-democratic capital city; [5] unpopular ruling elites; [6] a charismatic candidate; [7] a united opposition; [8] mobilized youths; and [9] regionalism and foreign intervention (Russia or the EU). (Kuzio 2008, 98)
Contrary to McFaul (2005) and Kuzio (2008), the US political scientist Scott Radnitz identifies the level of economic disparity as the vital condition. Drawing on successful (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) and unsuccessful colour revolutions (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan), he argues that colour revolutions only occur in countries where cooperation exists between activists and capitalists (i.e. financial supporters of the protests) (Radnitz 2010).
The problem of McFaul (2005), Kuzio (2008), Radnitz (2010), and others who create lists of such “minimum requirements” for colour revolutions to occur is that collective actions of a large magnitude—which colour revolutions surely are—are immensely complex events. They comprise a large number of aspects, and any attempt to rganized such events to a set number of factors will inevitably exclude important aspects. See for example Tucker (2007), where the author rganized the existing literature on colour revolutions (among them McFaul) for being overly elite-based and downplaying the role of the masses who participated in the colour revolutions. Tucker uses CAT to explain how major electoral fraud provides people with a focal point and a window of opportunity for mass collective action, arguing that, from the moment the falsified results are announced to the moment they are implemented, people have an extra incentive to protest.8
Tucker’s (2007) emphasis on the masses of people is corroborated by the book The Colour Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics: Successes and Failures, edited by the Irish political scientists Donnacha Ó Beacháin and Abel Polese (2010). In this book, 12 post-Soviet countries (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan) are compared in order to identify reasons for the occurrence of colour revolutions. In each of the 12 case studies, five factors are examined: 1) regime type; 2) the degree of unity in the opposition; 3) external influences; 4) the strength of civil society; and 5) the people (i.e. how they rganize and act, and how they relate to the other actors in society). The latter two factors are highlighted as particularly important (2010, 9).
Beacháin and Polese (2010) contradict the view of Canadian political scientist Lucan Way (2008), who mainly highlights macro factors such as the protesters’ geopolitical connections with the West and the structural makeup of the state, rather than internal micro factors such as the motivation and innovations of the protest movements. Way argues that scholars tend to put too much weight on the number of protesters in collective actions, illustrating this point by referring to the relatively small numbers of protesters in the Georgian (2003) and Kyrgyz (2005) revolutions. He asserts that the protesters’ external connections often are of greater importance. Just as McFaul and Kuzio, Way uses macro-level explanations for the fall of autocratic regimes:
Authoritarian stability is most affected by: 1) the strength of a country’s ties to the West; and 2) the strength of the incumbent regime’s autocratic party or state. (Way, 2008, 60)
Thus far, looking at the body of academic literature on colour revolutions in the West, no concrete references to space are evident. Regarding the factors deemed necessary for a colour revolution to occur, we can conclude that there are several and contradicting views on the phenomenon. Three major categories of factors can be identified: 1) micro factors, such as the protesters’ motivation and strategic innovation; 2) meso factors, such as the rganizedonal structure of the ruling elite and the opposition; and 3) macro factors, such as the economy and political system.
Additionally, we can add a fourth category, which consists of publications that see colour revolutions as a result of external (i.e. foreign) influences. Beacháin and Polese (2010) have identified two types of this kind of international support: 1) Western, in the form of guidance and training for NGOs and observers; and 2) the mutual “economic, political, military and diplomatic support to besieged autocrats […]” shown by other autocratic leaders in the region. The Kremlin in particular is highlighted as a key supporter of autocratic leaders. Even if external support receives considerable attention in academic literature and in media discourse, the editors go on to underline that domestic factors, such as a well-developed civil society and motivated people, are important factors for colour revolutions to occur (Beacháin and Polese 2010).
Popular Revolutions or (Geo-)Political Technologies? 9
The leading politicians of Russia and Belarus, Vladimir Putin and Aliaksandr Lukashenka, both perceive colour revolutions as affected by the latter category (external influence). In the aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine (2013–2014), which led to the ousting of Russia-leaning president Viktor Ianukovych, Putin called colour revolutions a form of extremism and “a geopolitical instrument for changing spheres of influence (BBC Russian Service 2014). Lukashenka has also blamed Western powers for attempting to topple the Belarusian state (Nersesov 2017), although in an earlier interview with Russian media outlets in 2016 he did state that, if the standard of living is high in Belarus and Russia, no destructive colour revolutions will occur (Afitsyinyi sait Respubliki Belarus’ 2016). Thus, Lukashenka also recognises the third (macro-) category.
Russian academic publications on the subject often voice views similar to those of the political leadership. The Russian political scientist Andrei Manoilo, for instance, sees only external factors. He defines colour revolutions as
[…] [political] technologies for the implementation of coups d’état and external control of the political situation in a country in conditions of artificially created political instability, during which the pressure on the government is exerted in the form of political intimidation, [by] using a youth protest movement as an instrument of such an intimidation. (Manoilo 2015)
Manoilo (2015) presents colour revolutions as a tool created by Anglo-Saxons in the US (among them Gene Sharp 1973), who have used it as a hybrid weapon in unfriendly countries: in Eastern Europe during the 2000s; in the Middle East from 2011; and in Ukraine in 2014 (the latter is presented as a “dress rehearsal” for destroying Russia with the same ‘soft power’ weaponry). Manoilo also identifies five distinct phases that colour revolutions go through: 1) A network of rganized protest movements in the target country is created; 2) Upon a signal, often after an orchestrated event, the network of people simultaneously goes out on the streets in major cities in the country; 3) Activists in the network of cells turn into catalysts of ‘singing protests’10 in order to engage large sections of the population; 4) The protesters gather in large public spaces in order to create a crowd mentality, through which new values and imperatives are given. Here, the people are reprogrammed, in much of the same way as “Protestant totalitarian sects” brainwash their followers; 5) On behalf of the crowd, ultimatums are sent to those in power under the threat of mass riots and, occasionally, physical extermination. The power holders are either swept away or a rebellion or civil war begins, followed by a military intervention. (Manoilo 2015)
Certainly, some approaches to colour revolutions in Russia are less radical than Manoilo’s (see for example Barsamov 2006), and some see geopolitical factors as less important (notably the political scientist Valerii Solovei 201611), yet variations of Manoilo’s perspective appear to be numerically the most prominent, and can be found in several publications by other Russian political scientists and sociologists (e.g. Iel’chaninov 2007; Naumov 2016). In Russian media outlets, the understanding of colour revolutions as a geopolitical tool and a threat to the sovereignty of the Russian Federation is often all too obvious (see for example TASS 2019; Krasovskaia 2019; NTV 2019).
This Cold War frame of mind stems from Russia being perceived (and perceiving itself) as the natural successor to the Soviet Union—the main adversary of the West during the Cold War. The rivalry between these two power blocks was not only fought out in proxy wars; the two also supported protest movements and insurgents in order to damage each other’s spheres of influence across the world, and especially in the former European colonies of Asia, South America, and Africa (Kanet 2006, 337; Powelson 2003). The dissent in the Eastern Bloc that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union could be seen as part of this warfare. Hence, given that a new wave of colour revolutions occurred at the same time and place as the EU and NATO were expanding—into areas seen by Russia as their sphere of influence—Russia’s hostility to mass protests becomes more understandable.
One outcome of the wave of colour revolutions is that autocratic countries have started to perceive nonviolent protest as a serious threat. Since the stakes are so high, the autocrats are readier to suppress political dissent with harassment, increased surveillance, and violence (Beacháin and Polese 2010, 238). Moreover, in Russia and Belarus, pro-governmental youth organisations have formed to counterweight foreign influence on the youth (Matchanka 2014; Hemment 2012; Atwal and Bacon 2012). This effort to combat mass demonstrations has been reinforced since the recent Ukrainian revolution, and colour revolutions are accordingly defined by the military as a threat to national sovereignty, and increasingly defined as ‘acts of war’.12
The problem with a single focus on foreign influence is that it disregards the other micro-to-macro factors and presumes that external influences alone are enough to create a popular uprising or nonviolent revolution. Ukrainian views on colour revolutions are, perhaps unsurprisingly, often more nuanced than the views held by their Russian counterparts. For example, in the Ukrainian political scientist Oleksandr Romaniuk’s (2005) assessment of the phenomenon in Yugoslavia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), internal factors—such as the decay of the political elite, a worsening of democratic standards, the poor standard of living, and a growing desire for political change among the general population—are seen as the foundation for discontent, which, triggered by election fraud, turned into colour revolutions. Romaniuk adds, however, that all the opposition forces have received moral and sometimes material support from Western democracies (2005, 24).
3.1.4 Non-spatial Factors
At the start of this chapter, two questions were outlined: 1) Which academic literature recognises and/or relates to the links between space and protests? 2) Which approaches and concepts can be integrated into a theoretical model examining the causal relationship between space and protest?
Regarding the former question, there is a tendency in several academic disciplines around protest to overlook spatial factors. For example, in the literature on nonviolent contention, tactical innovation is often isualized as important; but few if any references are made to the possibilities space provides for such innovation. A spatial perspective is also missing from the literature on colour revolutions, despite the fact that most of these mass actions have utilised a similar form of static spatial occupation.
One exception to this tendency, of course, is Manoilo (2015), who asserts that urban spaces are used to brainwash the people gathered in them. Another (perhaps more realistic) exception is the research on the repertoires of policing, which includes and accounts for space. Even so, compared to the countless examples in history of urban spaces that have played a role in contentious actions, there clearly must be a gap in the literature on protest. In the following section, the search for literature to fill this gap will continue as the focus moves from academic literature on protest to academic literature on space.
Regarding the latter question, several concepts and theories can be integrated into a theoretical model on space and protest. POS theory is particularly relevant, as it isualized the importance of the political environment, which can be used to account for and examine variables with an effect on protests. However, as noted above, it is difficult to map all factors. This problem becomes particularly apparent when a comparison is made to the wide range of arguments identified in the literature on colour revolutions.
In order to gain a better understanding of factors that may or may not be of significance in the political environment, these are isualized in the two figures provided below. The first (fig. 7) is a proposed list of micro, meso, and macro factors in the political environment. The second is a diagram in which the three levels are placed next to each other, alongside external influences (such as support for leaders or NGOs) and events (e.g. election fraud), which are added as possible outside effects (fig. 8).
Figure 7: Micro, meso, and macro factors
| Micro | Meso | Macro |
| Goals | Culture | Political system |
| Identity, feelings, beliefs, values | Organisations, networks | Economy |
| Innovation, originality | Communities | Formal organisations |
| Strategies, tactics, methods | Groups | Etc. |
| Identity, feelings, beliefs, values | Police structures | |
| Political parties | ||
| Etc. |
Figure 8: The political environment
3.2 Space
Having identified some of the main perspectives in the literature on protest, it is necessary to give an overview of the research literature on space and its function in society. This literature, of course, consists of many publications; yet only a small proportion of them is directly related to the two questions stated at the beginning of this chapter. Additionally, I have concentrated on a selection of the literature that can be used to formulate an understanding of what constitutes the nature of space.
This section starts with metaphysical and philosophical space (3.2.1). Here, discussions and understandings of space found in Arendtian and Habermasian texts are defined in reverse chronological order of development (from the least physical [Habermas] to the most physical [Arendt]), followed by various Marxian perspectives, including the terms “public space” and “the right to the city”. The next subsection (3.2.2) concerns more physical and concrete approaches found in architecture, urban planning, and human geography. This account is followed by an overview of the prospect-refuge theory, as found in landscape architecture. The final subsection (3.2.3) specifically deals with studies of protest locations. It should be noted that these three categories are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but serve as guidelines within a larger body of literature.
3.2.1 Public Space
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989), the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduces the term “public sphere”. According to Habermas, a weakening of totalitarian institutions, such as feudalism and the state church, in Western Europe in the eighteenth century enabled more representative forms of government to appear. At this time, a growing middle class had the time and energy to participate in discussions about how the public should be managed, and the public sphere became the transition point between public and private life. Habermas describes the public sphere as an ideal and abstract neutral place for which societies must strive. In this ideal place, people conduct their deliberations, and all opinions are equally valuable; there is also an absence of hierarchy. Habermas refers to coffee houses and salons as early examples of this sphere, and sees mass media as an important tool in the creation of public discourses. The threat, argues Habermas, comes from the powerful organisations that aim to control the discourse which occurs in the public sphere.
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt also stresses the importance of the public sphere in democratic societies, but in her works—and especially in The Human Condition (1958/1998)—the physicality of such spaces is strongly rbanizati. The political scientists Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Ursula Vogel (2005) elaborate on this physicality:
[One] feature stressed by Arendt has to do with the spatial quality of public life, with the fact that political activities are located in a public space where citizens are able to meet one another, exchange their opinions and debate their differences, and search for some collective solution to their problems. Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common world and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can emerge and be articulated from different perspectives. In her view, it is not enough to have a collection of private individuals voting separately and anonymously according to their private opinions. Rather, these individuals must be able to see and talk to one another in public, so that their differences as well as their commonalities can emerge and become the subject of democratic debate. (d’Entrèves and Vogel 2005, 9)
In other words, opinions are formed, and meaningful exchanges of opinions and debates occur, in physical space; thus, the presence of a location where people can meet, talk, act, and deliberate is vital for the existence and proper functioning of public life and politics. (For more on Arendt’s focus on geography, see Howell 1993, 313–316.)
In the book Democracy and Public Space (2012), the Dutch political scientist John R. Parkinson takes this argument further. Like Habermas and Arendt, he perceives a well-functioning public space as a premise for working democracy. He identifies four ways in which physical space can be considered public: It 1) “is openly accessible”; and/or 2) “uses common resources”; and/or 3) “has common effects; and/or 4) “is used for the performance of public roles.” (2012, 61). Parkinson’s definition of public space is thus broad enough to include political institutions, and he argues that the layout and structure of such public spaces affect the ways we interact (Parkinson looks specifically at the layout of parliaments and other political institutions, but also town squares). This type of perspective is concurrent with the prevailing view within the field of political geography (see for example Jones, Jones, and Woods 2004; Van Deusen 2004; and Agnew and Muscarà 2012), but I have found no political geographers who have developed a way to examine the causal relationship between urban space and contentious politics.
“Public Space” and “the Right to the City”
Political philosophy is used to explain not only why space is necessary for discussions and debate to occur, but also why urban space is contested. Such discussions about the nature of spatial contestation often take a Marxian perspective. In Marxian economic philosophy, social class struggle is sometimes seen spatially, which can generate questions such as “Who owns the city?” and “Who has the right to use it?”
The French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre raises these questions in two of his influential books on the subject, Writings on Cities (Lefebvre 1996) and The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre 1970/2003). In the former, Lefebvre discusses the capitalist accumulation of money in urban centres and how this has led to the exclusion of certain groups (ethnic or national minorities, people of certain ages, the disabled, etc.). Lefebvre establishes that all urban inhabitants have the right to use the city they live in and to participate in its creation, and he urges people to reclaim their rights over the city. In the latter book, Lefebvre describes the development and nature of the city, from the Neolithic revolution to his own day. He examines how capitalism has shaped urban space, globally, nationally, and locally. According to Lefebvre, world society is gradually (i.e., at the time of publication in 1970) going through complete rbanization. By this he means that no part of the world exists in total independence of the urban centres (Lefebvre 1970/2003; see also Lefebvre 1974/1991).
The term “right to the city” has been further developed by at least two other Marxian scholars: the British economic geographer David Harvey and the US geographer Don Mitchell. Harvey explores the relations between capital, politics, and the people (see for example Harvey 1989; 2008; 2012), and develops Lefebvre’s arguments about the increasing social and economic injustice in urban centres.
Mitchell also considers inequality in urban space. He is concerned with how contestations occur in space and about space (see for example Mitchell 1998); how wealth is produced and distributed in a city (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008); and the exclusiveness of urban public space, e.g. gated communities and how some groups, particularly the homeless, are left with fewer rights to the public space than others (Mitchell 2011; 2016). Mitchell’s recurrent argument is that space is contested by different layers of the population, who constantly negotiate and argue about how it should be used and by whom. This contestation contributes significantly to the Lefebvrian concept of production of space (i.e. how space is given meaning by the acts occurring in it). (See 3.2.3, for more on the production of space).
Public space is thus not only contested in itself, but is a contested term with a wide range of viewpoints and definitions. Interpretations of public space range from the metaphysical to the physical and include informal meeting places, such as cafés and chat rooms, formal institutions, such as parliament buildings, and urban space, such as town squares and parks. In an attempt to create a unified understanding of the concept, the US professor of public administration Charles Goodsell (2003) identifies six defining characteristics of public space, from a variety of academic disciplines:
[1] Generic definition of public space: A space-time continuum for connected and interactive political discourse. [2] Place-bound public space: The above consisting of face-to-face interaction in a single physical location. [3] Electronic public space: The above achieved at dispersed geographic locations through information technology. [4] Extended public space: The above when broadcast by television, radio, Internet, or other means. [5] Pure definition of democratic public space: The above when open to all, unrestricted as to conduct, and unconditional as to participation. [6] Practical definition of democratic public space: The above when public access is encouraged, the status of state authority is muted, barriers between governors and governed are minimized, staging is arranged by the people as well as officials, and conditions conducive to deliberation are fostered. (Goodsell 2003, 370)
The public space discussed in this book is naturally positioned within Goodsell’s second, place-bound definition. The specific definition of public space will be developed in the next chapter (4.2).
3.2.2 Physical Space
Now that we have discerned the importance of public space as the location of discussion and deliberation, as well as the place where contestations occur and meaning is created, it is time to move on to the physical aspects of space. Architecture, urban planning, urbanism, and human geography are four academic disciplines naturally concerned with physical (urban) space, and key studies from each of these can be related to collective action.
Urban Planning, Architecture, and Urban Geography
Goodsell (2003) provides some assessment of the relevant literature in architecture and urban planning. He writes, for instance, that the relationship between political power and people is often expressed in architecture, and “a common theme is how the design and symbols of physical space reinforce political power” (2003, 365). Referring to his own and others’ studies of buildings and official institutions, he explains how such places seek to evoke certain feelings, such as that of authority, monumentality, or—in the case of court rooms—legitimacy and equality (2003, 365–366). (For a similar view, see Bismarck 2014.)
In urban planning, public spaces are often seen as places for social interaction and, as in architecture, there is much focus on the perception of space. Additionally, urban planners tend to focus on the utility of spaces, and how the right planning can increase their usage. Some urbanists also frame such usage in a historical context (see US geographer and urbanist Edward Soja 2010).
The US urban theorist Kevin Lynch has influenced writing on urban planning for more than half a century. For his book The Image of the City (1960), Lynch conducted interviews with citizens about their daily travels in, and interactions with, public space. He asked the respondents to describe and draw the spaces they went through, what they remember from them, and what feelings they evoked. Lynch used the information he collected to identify five elements of urban space that dominate people’s mental perception of it: nodes (places of destination or transition points); paths (the connections to and between nodes, e.g. roads and walkways); landmarks (reference points, such as monuments and buildings); districts (areas of the city with distinct characteristics); and edges (boundaries and obstacles that hinder movement, e.g. walls and shorelines). (See chapter 6: 6.1.1, 6.1.2, and 6.1.3.)
Groups of scholars, architects, and urban planners are also concerned with identifying what makes spaces inclusive and practical to use. The Feeling of Place project (Nielsen 2017), for example, is an examination of public spaces in Southwark, London, to establish why people respond well to certain places and not to others. The researchers asked respondents in London what they felt about the spaces they were in, using 13 feelings as a framework to evaluate the positive vs. negative value of the spaces.13 As a result, nine key themes were identified that affect how people relate to space in everyday life: 1) people’s awareness of what is in the space; 2) its history and social life; 3) the presence of nature; 4) its level of accessibility for some or for all people; 5) whether or not people are visiting or living in the place; 6) how welcome people feel there; 7) the scale of buildings and activities in the space (as stated by the authors: “Locations with tall towers […] made people feel less happy and were seen as less pleasant than places with lower scale houses. Planting and activities on street level helped people feel that the […] place [was] more pleasant.”, 13); 8) complexity and confusion; and 9) changes occurring in the space (Nielsen 2017).
Similarly, the Project for Public Spaces—a cross-disciplinary platform for the promotion of sustainable urban spaces—has identified 10 principles for a successful (i.e. much-used) square: 1) it has a strong image and identity; 2) there are attractions and destinations on or around the square; 3) there is a presence of amenities, such as benches; 4) it has a flexible design, including 5) different designs for different seasons; 6) it is easy to access, preferably on foot; 7) there is a good balance between the outer (i.e. surrounding buildings, roads, amenities) and inner (centre) square; 8) its paths (roads, streets, walkways) reach out “like an octopus”; 9) it is well managed by people who are familiar with the square; and 10) it has diverse sources of funding (Project for Public Spaces 2005.)
The principles identified in the two projects outlined above provide valuable clues as to what variables create pleasant, accessible, and visible space, which are three important aspects of urban protests (see chapter 6). Yet even though the vast majority of architects perceive and utilise the feelings that space and buildings evoke, and urban planners look at the various usages of public space, neither discipline is explicitly concerned with how these qualities affect collective action. A few notable exceptions should be mentioned. One is the US landscape architect Jeffrey Hou, who has edited two books on the subject: Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Hou 2010) and City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (Hou and Knierbein 2017).
In the former book, the authors (including anthropologists, geographers, architects, urban planners, and artists) aim to understand the role of public space in the constant changes cities undergo, as well as various attempts to create and control public space: “[P]ublic space has been an important facet of cities and urban culture […] [Urban spaces] provide opportunities for gathering, riticized, recreation, festivals, as well as protests and demonstrations” (Hou 2010, 2). In the authors’ view, the city is constantly changing, both physically and in the ways it is perceived and used: city space can be contested, change meaning, be appropriated, made available or unavailable to some or all groups, new meanings can be attributed to it, and so on.
In the latter book, co-edited with the Austrian landscape architect Sabine Knierbein, the authors put contestations in urban space into the context of neoliberal economic riticizedn. As with other scholars, such as Don Mitchell (3.2.1), David Harvey (3.2.1), and the US architect and urbanist Paul Knox (2011), they see urban development as driven by global investors who gentrify urban centres and increase local and global inequalities (Hou and Knierbein 2017, 6). The authors call this tendency “shrinking democracy”. This means that, when public space is increasingly controlled by private and commercial actors, its alternative use as an outlet for public discontent against authorities (see chapter 2) is reduced (hence, the utility of space as a safety valve in societies is shrinking).
There is also an emerging interest within human geography and architecture in the physicality, riticizedn, and structure of protest camps; see for example the British human geographer Adam Ramadan on the occupation of Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring in Egypt. He argues that the protest camp is a public space which functions as a vehicle for political change (Ramadan 2013). Another prominent example is the anthology Protest Camps in International Context (Brown, Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy 2017), which sees camps as a form of riticizedn. The authors examine the symbolic value, logistics, and possibilities provided by protest camps across the world, while analysing what the editors call four ‘infrastructures’: media infrastructures, action infrastructures, riticizedn infrastructures, and re-creation infrastructures. These studies thus emphasise that static protests are important, and that they are reliant on accessibility and transport networks in order to function properly (see spatial qualities as a variable in chapter 6, 6.2.1).
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