I WAS STANDING OUTSIDE City College (CCNY) on 139th and Amsterdam with a small crowd, faced down by thirty or so cops, on the night of the big raids on both the Columbia and CCNY Palestine solidarity encampments. The area around the campus had been sealed off, and with the clearing of tents already underway, there wasn’t much we could do besides berate the police and let out cries of support for the detained students being hauled onto MTA buses. Residents of the nearby apartments were on their fire escapes or stoops or leaning out their windows watching the protest, sometimes joining in.
The blockade and the late hour meant that most of the businesses on Amsterdam were shut and the street was dark, save for a gentle light that emanated from a Dominican barbershop. Three men were inside drinking beer and listening to the radio, apparently unbothered by the scene just outside. At one point, finally curious, one of the men stepped out, looked around, and began chanting “NYPD, suck my dick!” The crowd quickly followed suit. The barbershop crew struck up conversations with the protesters and let us in to use their bathroom. The chanting grew louder, even joyous. People thrust their phones in the air to capture the moment. It felt like a public was being forged in real time, through the very force of our opposition to the present order.
Thousands of miles away, a genocidal war in Gaza has rendered all space public in exactly the opposite fashion. Every building has become rubble. Tent encampments proliferate and are bombed in turn. University students in New York who stood in solidarity with the victims were assaulted for the crime of having convictions; those arrested at City College faced charges far more severe than their counterparts at Columbia, a discrepancy that reflects the class composition of the two campuses. Meanwhile, every university in Gaza has been destroyed.
The violence inflicted upon protesting students at US schools has served as a symbolic stand-in for the violence wrought by Israel upon Palestinians. That they are entirely different in kind and magnitude is a given, but this surrogacy is a necessary shortcut in an American political culture that largely still refuses to treat Palestinians as people. To see this violence inflicted on people with whom empathy is more immediately possible provides a means of conceptualizing—albeit from an extreme distance—the slaughter that police violence is intended to protect.
If even so-called public space is privately owned, or managed by a government and police force unresponsive to their constituents but hyperresponsive to capital and real estate interests, then it is incorrect to think that you have a right to assembly. No, you have permission.
Universities indirectly profiteer from the Gaza genocide while actively colluding in Israel’s reputation-laundering. The encampments sought to apply pressure on these institutions to boycott and divest from Israel. Some were crushed by police violence or, in the case of UCLA, by a combination of police violence and bat-swinging vigilantism. But the carrot approach favored by other university administrators—promises to undertake discussions, disclosures, and divestment votes, or to fund scholarships for Palestinian students and Palestinian studies programs in exchange for the encampments’ disbandment—proved efficacious as well.
It’s telling that the prevailing sentiment among even well-meaning political pundits is that the solidarity encampments were counterproductive, distracting from conditions in Gaza and diverting attention toward the students themselves. But within such dismissals one can find evidence of the students’ success. Conservative and liberal apologists for the war who would sooner forget all about Palestine were forced to wrestle with its actuality; the word Gaza had to cross their lips if they were to condemn the encampments at all. Indeed, the corporate media’s grip on American politics was weakened by its inability to effectively chastise the students who, despite being subjected to vicious slander in the mainstream press, established their own rules of discourse and engagement. (Opinion columnists loudly complained that students at various encampments refused to respond to their inquiries and in some cases directed them toward designated media liaisons.) In their moral clarity and bravery, the students rewired the coordinates of campus politics—that great bugbear of the American psyche—all while keeping their eyes on the task at hand: ending the genocide.
LIKE ALL GOOD SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, though, the student Palestine solidarity movement exceeded itself in unintended ways. In its adoption of the encampment as its chief tactic, the movement also revealed both the true meaning of “public space” and the genuine lack of such spaces in this city.
New York is awash in privately owned public spaces, over 590 of them. In the POPS scheme—introduced in 1961 when the zoning resolution last underwent a major revision—property owners are granted zoning variances (such as an increase in usable floor area) in exchange for a commitment to maintain certain spaces on their holdings for public use and enjoyment. This is mostly a bad deal for the city. As a Gothamist report explains, there is little public oversight over POPS; a 2017 audit by the Comptroller’s Office found over half them to be “out of compliance with applicable agreements”—lobbies, plazas, and parks, ostensibly open to all, were, in reality, held under lock and key by private owners. (According to a 2023 report by the New York Times, not much has changed since then.)
In effect, a city is a million-island archipelago of private fiefdoms, and it is only in their interstices that the quickly vanishing “public” survives.
One of the newest POPS is New York University’s Greene Street Walk, a sliver of space that runs along the mirrory cliff face of the John A. Paulson Center and the eastern edge of I. M. Pei and James Ingo Freed’s brutalist Silver Towers complex. A limp olive branch extended to the community in recompense for the glass-clad clunker on Mercer Street, the pedestrian promenade was created, per the university’s intuitional boilerplate, “not only [to] foster connection amongst our NYU community but to allow intersection with our neighbors.” Student protesters occupied part of the walkway in late April; in early May, the NYU administration called the NYPD to break up the encampment, citing, among other things, “several calls from the encampment” inviting “outside actors” to join their movement. Administrators made recourse to a section of their agreement with the city that allows them to close down the POPS in the event of “actual or imminent emergency situations, including but not limited to security alerts, riots, casualties, disasters, or other events endangering public safety or property.” At 6:00 a.m. on May 3, a riot-ready NYPD contingent arrived while the protestors were sleeping and cleared the encampment, arresting fourteen students.
The week prior, the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, acting at the behest of NYU president Linda Mills, had descended on the university’s first student encampment at the nearby Gould Plaza, on West 4th Street, swinging batons at demonstrators, indiscriminately pepper spraying the crowd, and zip-tying faculty who had formed a protective circle around praying Muslim students. More than 130 protestors were arrested in a raid condemned by the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors as “capricious, unwarranted, and without justification.” Refuting the administration’s allegations that there had been “intimidating chants” and “antisemitic incidents” at the protest, the AAUP also contested Mills’s claim that outside agitators had “breached the barriers” erected to cordon the students off from supporters and counterprotesters. Meanwhile, NYU’s expedient closure of the Paulson Center lobby to the public came under the scrutiny of Jerold Kayden, the urban planner who wrote the book on POPS in 2000. Restricting access to the lobby (a POPS in essence, he said, if not in name) to those with NYU IDs violated the terms the university agreed to when the city approved the Paulson Center’s construction in 2012. “If it’s temporarily closed for security reasons,” Kayden reasoned, “it has to be closed to everybody.”
IF A NOMINALLY PUBLIC SPACE CAN, at the whim of its private owners or public stewards, be shut down by the police for fulfilling a manifestly public function, is it really a public space? Common sense says no; the city, police, real estate interests, and many self-described defenders of free speech have a different view on the matter. When pressed, members of the last group in particular often fall back on the idea that one is entitled to protest while remaining bound by the rules set by property owners regarding types of assembly or, now, the permissibility of the assembly’s cause. Tempting as it may be to charge these people with hypocrisy, there is in fact an internal consistency to their position, a special glue holding this seemingly incoherent worldview together: the right of private property, which, in its essence, is the right to exclude.
Under relations of private property, your presence is merely tolerated, and that toleration can be stripped away at the owner’s discretion. If even so-called public space is privately owned, or managed by a government and police force unresponsive to their constituents but hyperresponsive to capital and real estate interests, then it is incorrect to think that you have a right to assembly. No, you have permission.
The moment the permission to assemble was revoked for the NYU encampment (and all the others as well) and the private asserted itself upon the public, the encampment entered into a dialectical relation with the law. The encampment reveals itself as more than just a tactic: It is also a means of creating the precondition for the exercise of supposedly guaranteed rights. In order to vindicate the promise of the law and the premise of equality on which it rests, the law must be broken and the terrain on which it claims to operate must be seized.
We conceive of the city as a unitary entity, a bounded-but-open space in which our lives take place. But that is merely a fantasy of a city, a fantasy generated by capital. In effect, a city is a million-island archipelago of private fiefdoms, and it is only in their interstices that the quickly vanishing “public” survives. As I wrote in a previous essay for this magazine, New York is increasingly becoming a “non-place,” a term coined by anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to an environment “surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral.” Non-places do not have inhabitants per se; they have users. “The user of the non-place,” Augé writes, “is always required to prove his innocence” with validation that he belongs in a given space: a credit card, a wristband, a university ID. And so, the concept of “outsiders” in public space, otherwise nonsensical, enters the scene. At Gould Plaza, students and faculty held their campus IDs in the air while protesting, to show that that they were not trespassing on their own campus. After the NYPD dismantled the encampment, the school, which touts itself as a “campus without walls,” erected a seven-foot-high plywood wall around the plaza, making physical what had until then been implicit: Your ID may let you pass, but still you pass only by our grace. This is our property, and, in the last analysis, that is the only thing that matters.
BARRICADES HAVE BEEN ERECTED at Sciences Po; students in Amsterdam have started ripping up the cobblestones; American students are occupying buildings and squaring off with the police; the cops are beating people in the streets; the Democratic National Convention is in Chicago; one old ghoul with a D next to his name is likely to be beaten by another with an R in the upcoming election.
We are haunted by the restive spirit of May 1968, and the analysis of the Situationist International that informed the protests and encampments of that era still has a lot to say about ours. Don’t judge the book by its iconic, if misleading, American cover—Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) is as percipient a study of space as it is of images. The first thesis in that text: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Thesis 2: “Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation.” Thesis 4: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Fast-forward to Thesis 169: “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar décor.”
If we understand private property as itself a conversion of place into an abstraction that turns the physical world into a “pseudo-world apart,” one that can be contemplated, parceled, traded, and dominated in purely virtual space (as it so often is), then we can see how the turning over of the city, both in terms of space and governance, to private interests transforms it into a mere representation of a city. It becomes that peculiar décor of capital. The campus suffers the same fate. As Samuel Catlin recently wrote in Parapraxis, the college campus suffuses American life as media trope and a fantasy. In particular:
The campus is the fantasy of an inside. There is the campus, and then there is the outside. On campus/off campus. But the boundary between the campus and its outside is a permeable membrane.… An enclosure, the campus is never quite closed enough. For this reason it must be policed. There lurks always the possibility that the real world will penetrate the campus, violate the campus.
The quad—that neatly bounded grassy space, like the one on which Columbia’s encampment took place—is “the aesthetic ideal of the campus”; it “articulates the campus as a bounded zone” and so “limns the fantasy’s contours.” Even when, as Catlin writes of the University of Pennsylvania, a campus would be “better represented by the shiny new buildings it erects atop the ruins of the neighborhood it rapaciously consumes,” the image of the quad stands in for the campus writ large. But what happens when there is no quad, as in the case of NYU? The “pedestrian passageway” of Greene Street Walk (pedestrian in both senses of the word) purports to be a “physical and visual link” between the university and its adjoining neighborhoods. Insofar as it embodies any fantasy at all, it is one of frictionless connectivity rather than enclosure. In fact, the role of NYU’s quad is played with style by the green and gray eminence of Washington Square Park, its mature trees and marmoreal arch proliferating across the institution’s website and branding—public goods symbolically annexed by a private PR machine. Whether real or illusory, the image of the campus overlays the actual campus such that the latter is occluded by the former in the popular perception, smoothing the gears of domination and property acquisition in the process.
The encampment, on the other hand, is antispectacular theory in action. It is a constant thrum of protestation and disobedience, ebbing and flowing; it is a site of repetition and gathering, the connective tissue for each protest around it, a place of return. More so than the demonstration march, the encampment prefigures the abolition of property relations. It restores “property”—which is not the land or the building itself but rather the land or building qua asset, qua abstraction, a legal relation colored by the violence of its origin—back into “place.” In the case of NYU, it reveals the incoherence of privately owned public space—as long as a space is, in any sense, private, it cannot be truly public.
The encampment reveals itself as more than just a tactic: It is also a means of creating the precondition for the exercise of supposedly guaranteed rights.
Instead of the administered usage of private property, public place allows space to be used according to the needs of a given population—needs that are constantly evolving in much the same way people do. Which is to say, it begins to fashion a public as such—a political grouping of people, yes, but, crucially, a spatial one as well. One that determines its own political and spatial bounds. Self-determination is another way of saying directly living, a fashioning of one’s reality that puts one in opposition to spectacular society.
The occupiers of the encampment retain the right of exclusion, but insofar as the encampment is itself public, that right is also exercised by a self-constituting public and can be said to reflect a communal consensus in a way that its exercise by the hired guns of property or the state cannot. This expands the notion of who may use and belong in a given space. Thus, even though the right of exclusion is retained, it is ultimately exercised in order to explode the separation between inside and outside.
The invocation of the “outside agitator” is not just a tactic to strip protesters of agency and thus delegitimize protest (as Eric Adams said in early May, in his characteristic circumlocutory syntax, “This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children”) but also to reassert the relation whereby inside/outside is determined by private ownership and not public use. This relation has, in the case of Columbia, manifested itself in the gobbling up of Harlem real estate (Columbia is the largest private landowner in New York City) and the forced conversion of Harlemites into outsiders in their own neighborhoods. The reification of relations of domination in the figure of private property is what the campus occupiers explicitly rejected and, in their occupation, demonstrated to be mere ideology rather than natural law. As the occupiers of Hind’s Hall recently stated in the New Inquiry: “To liberate the building was to tear down the artificial border between ‘student’ and ‘non-student’.… In the eyes of this occupying force on stolen land, we are all outside agitators. We wear this as a badge of honor.” Such statements may not do much to break down prevailing ideas about “outside agitators” and the lurid fantasies of violence to “innocents” the trope entails—but they point the way. An idea can only become hegemonic if it is articulated forcefully, clearly, and repeatedly.
Hinds Hall f.k.a. Hamilton Hall Kristin Tata
A COUPLE MONTHS AGO at a used bookstore, I bought a slightly abused copy of a little book called Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (1970). As I read through the contents—which span from 1903 to 1963—a theme began to emerge. Coursing through the pages was a desire for an urban environment that is not only beautiful and functional but dynamic as well—a city that responds in real time to the desires of the publics who inhabit it. To take one comically strange example, architect and Pratt educator William Katavolos imagined, in his manifesto “Organics,” furniture and homes and entire cities composed of organic, quasi-animate materials: “exploding patterns of an instantaneous architecture of transformations, into desired densities, into known directions, for calculated durations.” In this groovy fairytale, suburbs “in the morning might come together to create cities, and at night move like music to other moorings for cultural needs or to produce the socio-political items that the new life demands.” In another manifesto, architect Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz conceived of “The Space City,” playfully and paradoxically, as “a discontinuous continuum, discontinuous through the demarcation between the part and the whole, continuous through the unalterable possibilities of alteration.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that architects largely conceive of society in architectural terms. If only, they all seem to fantasize, we could build our way into the future. That is not how history works. The built environment shapes our desires and political horizons—how could it not?—but the causal relation primarily flows in the other direction. Architecture may play a role in the ongoing disintegration of the social fabric, but it remains nonetheless a symptom of private property—and no amount of forward-thinking urban design will change that aspect of our social order.
Of all the groups represented in the book, it was only the Situationists who grasped the inadequacy of architecture to the task of human liberation. “Alienation and oppression in this society,” the group wrote in 1960, “cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society.” The encampment is that rejection given form—let them bloom wherever private property still exists. That is, everywhere.