ABSTRACT
From Tahrir Square in Cairo to Zuccotti Park in New York City, and from Athens, Greece, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, public spaces have in recent years ignited the imagination of millions of people worldwide through their capacity to enable forms of democratic public discourse and transformative political action that had seemed forgotten, and more so increasingly hindered and outlawed. May and June 2020 demonstrations on the streets of Hong Kong and of major American cities—ongoing at the time of this writing—unequivocally argue for the significance of physical presence in specific sites of publicness where diverse publics come together to voice their dissatisfaction with governance at all levels, police brutality, systemic racism, outrageous degrees of social and economic inequality, environmental destruction, and much more. Zuccotti Park is different from the other three public spaces in that it is not public property. Namely, it was constructed in 1968 by United States Steel under the auspices of the 1961 Incentive Zoning resolution.
