This Space Is Occupied!: The Politics of Occupy Wall Street’s Expeditionary Architecture and De-gentrifying Urbanism

Abstract

On their first day, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrators marched past a group of individuals, dressed up and drinking champagne, gathered on the balcony of the Merchant’s Exchange building at 55 Wall Street. Footage shows the celebrants adjacent to, but securely removed from the street, mockingly toasting the protesters, photographing them, chanting “pay your share.”1 This widely disseminated video provided a convenient visualization of the Occupy Movement’s assertions: a privileged 1%, safely elevated from the tumult of the 99% struggling below, engaging in activities completely discordant with the circumstances surrounding them. But the event also illustrates how the built environment frames and mediates social interactions, how space can be inscribed with political significance and structure social interaction. Through architectural intervention—a private space elevated above the public street—antithetical activities each retained their integrity. The building operated as a “technology of separation.”2 Spatial politics underpin the Occupy Movement and have shaped its unfolding. By locating itself in an urban context contingent on a unique confluence of architectural, political, and economic factors, OWS engaged with the complex forces that produce and inscribe space, that engender, shape, and circumscribe the polis.