Occupation, Cooperation and Public Space became grounds for combative police response in New York City, even though they were once a method for providing an art and leisure buffer for rich developers.

We could vilify Brookfield Properties and other real estate developers all we like, but we urban dwellers have to admit that we sold our commons for a neat way to increase tax revenue and "protect" art funding in the process, neither of which occurred. Where we do have green "open space," it is tied up with ordinances designed to vilify the precursor to the "99%:" the so-called homeless. The clearing away of the OccupyWall St. encampment showcases our fears at their worst and makes it difficult to point fingers.

Our fears from decades past, in the form of zoning laws and ordinances, made it possible to attack the citizens in every major city where an  Occupy___ is occurring. Though some of the spaces were in fact clearly still "in the commons," a number of others ride in a nebulous zone buttressed one side by civic pride, and on the other by a gambling mentality. In the 1980s, when the last big economic bust dramatically increased the number of people who were finding it challenging to pay rent, eat, and meet other obligations, once pity ran out city ordinances cropped up around the country virtually making it illegal to be without a home inside the boundaries of a municipality. Tied as these rules were to crime and "blight" reduction, they met weak challenge and, in numerous cases, such challenge was mollified by the promise of eventual economic and cultural improvements. Each city fancied itself a "world class destination" in the making, thus entering into deals with major national and transnational real estate developers.

Enter Redevelopment Agencies.

In the state of California, the Redevelopment Agency was founded in 1945, however, the full force of Redevelopment Agencies as weapons of mass construction was not fully realized until the 1990s. Cities desperate to keep their streets clean, beautiful, and without provisional human housing on them instituted policies to encourage either homeownership (cheap exotic loans anyone) or strengthen the use of imminent domain. Police departments were instructed to enforce obscure laws like jay walking and public nuisance with a vengeance in a hope to stabilize communities that typically surrounded city halls across America.To prepare the way for wealthy new neighbors, indigent denizens were pressured to move on or be moved deeper into poverty while forced to wade through the red tape of incessant "lifestyle" tickets.

Redevelopment Agencies were heroic. Creating enterprise zones to salvage inner city communities, they also championed draconian public use ordinances that were meant to bring peace and quiet to otherwise terrorized zones of the metropolis. These same rules were eventually enlisted to support major developments in the exact same areas, pushing mostly low income residents out with increases in noise, pollution, and property tax hikes during unimaginable building booms.

This was a good thing, remember?

Those ordinances and tax breaks and redevelopment zones generated cultural caché and became tied to art funding. In some cities, it is known as the 1% tax, or a percent-for-art ordinance. In others, the money comes from something called the Hotel Tax. In all cases, overdevelopment of public lands (even the Broad Museum is being developed on city-owned land and its sidewalks were funded with Redevelopment money meant for housing) is presumed to be offset by providing funds for art and leisure to the citizens of the affected area in the city.

Those funds are typically tied to the zip code in which the damage/redevelopment is occurring, so very quickly huge disparities in art funding develop since not all areas of the city are under development. Further, in the affected areas, major swaths of common space used for art making disappear or come under control of a developer--like walls for murals, plazas for music and dancing, or empty lots for pop-up street theater. Street performances are more easily policed, when cities partner with developers to create faux promenades where licensed "street art" can occur between specific hours. The process for receiving the permit to perform insures that the art supports the retail spaces which surround it.

Pedestrians and now, ironically, car users also loose out on these deals. Streets are wider, sidewalks are not, and now storing a car on a city street in a redeveloped zone is more likely to cost three times as much as it does to store same car in a residential area. Regulation increases as people seek ways to continue having and using public space in these zones where public/private endeavors have hybridized the value of space.

Art Walks and Art Districts are faring no better. Wonderful DIY demonstrations of fiscal ingenuity, the Art Walk is eventually overtaken by developers simply by affording artists hungry for space a locale in which to showcase, make, or perform their art during the evening. These nights create a certain type of freedom for certain socioeconomic swaths of the citizenry, but for others, the early police sweeps and parking closures spell havoc.

In this complex mix--of pedestrians, art makers, real estate developers, civic pride cheerleaders, marketing mavens, art funders and consumers, people looking for low-cost leisure/entertainment, business owners, and residents (housed and without)--"public space" is populated with conflicting motivations, giving an aura of a semi-private event that has been crashed by undesirables. Add public protest, the right of every citizen of the United States, to this social conflagration and the need to exact swift and uneven application of the civil code becomes apparent from a law and order perspective.

The 99 percenters are nothing if not a conflation of competing roles and assumptions that have finally coalesced around a single proposition: occupy together. And since this has been roundly rejected as a "real" platform, a "real" reason to exist, this makes them nothing better than a mob, if perceived through the appropriate set of ordinances and Redevelopment postures of decorum.

In 19th Century Bahia, Brazil, slaves were not permitted to make Carnaval with everyone else. There were very stringent rules about who could go where and at what time. There were also rules about who could "play" together and under what circumstances. Old style Carnaval in those days included tossing perfume filled wax fruit at people, or shit-filled cow and pig bladders. Artisans of any ethnicity could throw fruit at each other, but not at plantation owners. It was considered in bad form for an upper class man to throw fruit at another, but quite alright for them to toss at unmarried upperclass women. Children could toss among themselves. Kitchen help could not toss at Artisans, but could pummel slaves, as could Artisans and upperclass children. Day laborers and vagabonds were more likely to participate in entrudo in their slum, tossing those bladders as pranks. The African population could make Carnaval in their own shanty areas, on rickety small streets, tossing fruit and other items at each other. But they were forbidden from parading.

The planter class deemed it too confusing to have a mass of Africans and "mulattos" being loud, moving their bodies in unison to percussion on the main avenue. There was no way to insure that the revelry was not rivalry waiting for a signal to become an uprising, sparking a revolution. No small wonder that Africans developed pretty sophisticated and unique styles of playing Carnaval which eventually became more popular than the highly controlled one. Styles that always already include protest and political action.

Flimsy laws that most of us consider "rules of decorum" were the basis for attacking people who were legally exercising their right to free speech, albeit in a way that had not been seen since anti-Apartheid movement (and even then, those were mostly relegated to college campuses). Under different circumstances, spitting on the sidewalk, scratching your butt in public, even tucking your shirt into your pants would not get tickets. Eating food on sidewalks is a culturally acceptable action in NYC, though food preparation on a street or in a park requires a permit. Many of us have eaten at non-permitted food stands across the country, even recommended them to friends.

Playing music, singing, and even dancing on occasion in public is nothing special in NYC. Busking is celebrated in the subway system and parks. Standing on a street corner and preaching is also not all that unusual, and rarely gets the person a ticket if they stay on that soap box and don't gesticulate too wildly. Reading a book in public, no problem. Talking in groups, no problem if you are not a young person of color under a gang injunction zone (quite the topic for another article). But all of these things typically do not happen on the wide avenue known as Wall Street at the same time, among different classes of people, practically in unison. That coordination provoked another, perhaps more insidious one: mayors across the US meeting and strategizing with Homeland Security to develop "best practices" for dealing with the Occupy Movement.

Because when the public shows up and actually uses its portion of a public/private space, it is very hard to tell the difference between an uprising and a mob.

Oakland Mayor Kwan has been put on the hot seat as she let slip that she has participated in these conference calls. That a division of the federal government has provided guidance is disturbing, but not chilling. Instead, it is more likely that Occupy will disperse into smaller networked groups, still functioning in public. It would be a disaster to take these conversations "underground," since Homeland Security is obviously looking for ways to declare participants of the Occupy Movement as domestic terrorists. The NYPD eviction did not happen until their fear of actual action was triggered by a call on November 14th to disrupt business as usual.

Brookfield Properties has finally inserted some of their own security into Zuccoti Park. This has interesting ramifications for Redevelopment Agencies across the country and is particularly of interest to Public Art funding. Among developers, Brookfield is a leader in public art and public performance art support. Artists of public performance can expect some rough riding ahead as more developers in early stages of planning opt out of providing uncontrolled space and perhaps opt into buying fixed pieces that can only be viewed inside buildings. Just as the plastic arts are enjoying a surge in value right now due to the "1%" investing in art rather than the stock markets, it would seem likely that developers of large multi-use real estate projects would opt into tangible, fixed art work.

It could also be possible that a barrage of lawyers will descend on city councils nationwide demanding that certain funding schemas be removed from development licensing. Art funding suffered when states saw their Hotel Occupancy Tax revenues severely decrease due to discount brokerage firms like Hotwire and Expedia selling hotel rooms but not paying the tax on the exchange. They claimed that the hotels were responsible for paying the tax. The hotels hired lawyers. State Attorney Generals brought suit. Some won (like San Antonio, TX), but a particular loss in Anaheim, CA gave pause to both industries and municipal governments. Everyone "kinda sorta" lost; the law is still in flux. Right now, hotels do not pay that tax when we, the consumers, buy a discounted hotel room; and art funding shrinks, too. 

It is time to Occupy Ordinances. For too long the majority of citizens in urban areas have pushed the difficult work of managing our public spaces onto the shoulders of a few. If we want to use it, then we have to take responsibility for making rules about what to do to enjoy a public space. For too long public space has been put in the service of upselling, turning everyone into a consumer at the moment we least expect it or want it. Yes, we cannot play samba at all hours of the night, but we can engage each other in public about what justice means, what democracy means without being accused of dumping shit all over each other and turning the main avenue into a slum.

In response, #OccupyLA asks: How Clean Do You Want It?

Get your buckets ready.

update 11/17/2011 9:51 AM: the time for the action has been changed to 4 PM to insure daylight and to participate in the scheduled cleaning of the occupyLA site.