Introduction

No stable ground In early summer 2012, I arrived in Oakland with my pocket recorder and a set of spare batteries. I wanted to check where the people from Occupy were at, participate in whatever actions I could, hear some of their stories, share mine and depart with a well-intentioned but still pretty obscure promise that we will all benefit from the experience. As a perpetual immigrant, I could not offer anything more than that. Back in Ireland, months flew by while I was trying to code the interviews and decipher pages filled with miniature worm-like zigzags.1 One evening as I was turning a loose page in my Oakland notebook, an emphatic arrow with the word ‘research’ next to it stood out. It was pointing to a little note that said: ‘City Hall and amphitheatre in front’. That was it. I went back to my photos from Oakland. It turned out that when I had been scanning them, I mechanically skipped over ones with no ‘action’ in them. I glanced over the photos of an empty Oscar Grant Plaza where Occupy Oakland used to have its main encampment. Now displaying them on a computer screen, I smiled at the sight of the unpretentious amphitheatre at the foot of the magnificent construction of City Hall. The structure of the amphitheatre looks relatively new and consists of four levels of concrete benches that encircle a light blue and greyish dais of six half-round steps. The terrazzo features Lake Merritt, City Hall and the Jack London oak tree as its central images. This was the place where numerous Occupy Oakland assemblies were held and it is the exact spot where on the night of 26 October 2011 Occupy Oakland reached an agreement to hold a general strike a week after. The action on 2 November 2011 was the first general strike in Oakland and the entire United States since 1946. What was so special about the amphitheatre? Perhaps, as one of the occupiers told me, his voice raising and becoming subdued from excitement: ‘It was like it was made for it!’ I started remembering that I had talked about this peculiar structure with other people in Oakland and how they were laughingly encouraging me to ‘research’ the history of that place. At the time, I did not make much of these suggestions although I did think that it was a great stroke of ironic luck to have the amphitheatre in such a symbolic place. Much the same way as it was

ironic to be able to stage a five-month occupation in the spacious Central Bank plaza, located amidst an otherwise crowded and densely interlaced Temple Bar area in Dublin. We know for certain that the Central Bank plaza was not meant to be a place for airing public grievances and sustained civil disobedience. The ‘big bank’ was finished in 1980. It is a suspended structure which means that it was literally built from the top down, because each floor was assembled at the ground level and then hoisted up, with the top floor going up first, to be suspended from two tall concrete towers that constitute the core of the construction. Originally, the plaza did not have a fence around the grand stairs leading to the entrance of the building but the sole function of the inviting benches and granite pavement with fan-shaped patterns was to balance the sharp and austere curvature of the great building (‘1980 – Central Bank of Ireland, Dame Street, Dublin’, 2010). Interestingly, the construction history of the Central Bank parallels the symbolism behind the story of Oakland City Hall. Was the amphitheatre in front of Oakland City Hall made for public assemblies of self-governing communities? I knew that tracing the original intentions of planners and investors might prove an utterly futile exercise but I decided to try anyway. And I am glad that I did – however briefly – because there is an illuminating story behind it. When the City Hall at 14th Street and Broadway (Oakland’s fifth city hall) was built in 1914, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi and considered to be cutting edge – built in Beaux Arts-style, setting new trends by combining traditional civic roles with a high rise office building. It had 14 floors and accommodated a city jail, police and fire stations and even a hospital (Ward, 2011). The plans to renovate the plaza began in the 1960s and by 1984 the intention was to make it into a symbolic civic and ceremonial centre. It was proposed that one of the objectives of the square should be ‘a performance space with both stage and audience areas, holding rallies and demonstrations, formal City Hall arrivals and departures’ (Oakland History Room, personal communication, 17 March 2013). As the design efforts were shaping up in the 1980s, nobody foresaw that they would be brought to an abrupt halt. The Loma Prieta earthquake that struck Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area in October 1989 left City Hall severely damaged. From the outside it might not have seem like much –the clock tower hovering over the massive structure suffered the most. But had the shaking continued, it would have been only a matter of seconds before it collapsed. The structural core of the building was also severely damaged. The amount of resources needed to fix it was immense and the city needed to decide what to do with the evacuated building. Thanks to money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency and local bond issue, the building was completely restored (‘Post-earthquake building restoration wins award’, 1997). As part of the $85 million deal, the building received a significant earthquake retrofitting. The new base isolation system required that 90 steel structural columns be cut off from the concrete foundation of the building, lifted up, placed upon a platform made of concrete and steel, which in turn would rest on 113 steel-encased rubber

bearings bolted to the foundation. That essentially means that the building itself is not attached to its foundation, so that in the case of an earthquake, it can move up to 18-20 inches laterally (Burt, 2009). The building is rootless; it does not have a stable foundation. In 1994 a decision was made to rename City Hall Plaza ‘Frank H. Ogawa Plaza’ after a Japanese-Amer ican Oakland City Councilman who served for 28 years and died of lung cancer (Obituary Mercury News Wire Services, 1994). A year after, in 1995, Oakland City Council voted to spend $102 million of the city’s redevelopment agency money on a project to restore downtown. This antiblight push to counteract the results of the earthquake and the 1980s recession identified the local stores and artists as potential losers of the new project (DelVecchio, 1995a). Who was to gain from it? Well, it was going to provide space for hundreds of City workers and boost property values in the abandoned urban core. In the mid-1990s, the local media also unashamedly declared that the redevelopment project would help the plaza in front of City Hall to ‘become the public ground it was meant to be’ and even assist in ‘reaffirm[ing] the democratic tradition of the civic plaza’ (DelVecchio, 1995b). When completed in 1998, the project – together with its restoration of Frank Ogawa Plaza – was to encourage street life (DelVecchio, 1995b, 1995c). Most likely, the city advisers did not even imagine the kind of street life that Occupy Oakland brought to this place in October 2011. The movement renamed the square ‘Oscar Grant Plaza’ after a black man shot dead by a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police officer on 1 January 2009, in recognition of the ongoing struggle for justice for Oscar Grant. At the press conference a day after the (first) eviction of the Occupy encampment, carried out for variously defined ‘safety reasons’, Mayor Quan said that the city agencies were trying to ‘restore the park as a free speech area’ (‘Occupy Oakland Media Update – October 26, 2011’, 2011). Oscar Grant Plaza was to remain a place for democratic and free debate only on the condition that there would be no tents, tarps and sleeping bags! In other words, in a building unattached to its foundation, we were told that the plaza could only function as a democratic and public space if the very activity of democratic conversation and radical protest – now suspended – remained an abstract possibility; a possibility that stays unrealised. Some may claim that the protest could have been more successful, or continued, if the participants had not insisted on the occupation as their main strategy, and/or it could ensure the safety of all. In other words, maybe Occupy would have been allowed to stay or come back if it could guarantee that there would be no injuries, knife-pulling, drug dealing, sexual harassment and homelessness. If the city officials were pressed further for their ideal notions of exercising the right to free speech, we would soon discover that the City’s idea of protest does not amount to much that could really bear its name. Occupying and trying to practise real democracy in the here and now is frequently a messy and challenging endeavour with its own inconsistencies, deformations and problems. But this is exactly why it is called real democracy. If we were to get rid of all

messiness, we would be left with an empty egg shell that might be perfectly round and smooth but has not a trace of a potential for life in it. Democracy, in the end, is about the notion that no idea for governing ourselves is good enough to last for ever. No idea can be that universal. Funnily enough, it seems that sometimes we need a quake to realise that the ground under our ways of governing is not that stable after all.