Author: Minu Tharoor
“Things do not happen in cities: they happen to a significant extent because of cities.”
Edward Soja
“At a specific, technical level urban space is deemed to be the spaces that are created via the imposition of buildings and other material structures. These structures are not inserted into space; spaces are created and configured by the structures that frame them.”
Andrew Smith, Events in the City: Using Public Spaces as Event Venues, 13)
Andrew Smith argues further that the structures of urban spaces represent the social and cultural relations installed in them, and realized through them, by their users. Urban spaces are thus “conceived” by their designers, but available to be “perceived” and “imagined” by occupants in ways that may consolidate the original purposes, or, more compellingly, disrupt and dismantle them. “Users of cities,” contends Smith, “help to create the spaces they inhabit” (14).
In my Global Women’s Rights course, urban spaces often appear – configured, refigured, even disfigured, by the presence of women’s bodies. Specific spatial structures of particular cities – and their attendant social and political systems – are the scenes of important occurrences in the women’s struggles that we discuss. The female victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 actively occupied the immigrant and industrial spaces of New York City, marching on its streets and falling aflame on its sidewalk. Since 1977, the now-famous Madres have challenged the Argentine military dictatorship that had “disappeared” their children, by silently walking around Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, the city’s center of power and governance. Their white scarf-headed, placard-holding, unwavering presence every Thursday redefined the architecture: maternal bodies (and their missing children’s photos) confronting edifices of predominantly male authority, yet appropriating their masonry and majesty. In 2012, New Delhi’s urban geography framed an appalling assault on a young woman in a bus that circled its forlorn, nighttime streets; subsequently, huge masses protested during the day and lit candles by night in its most prestigious urban locations. Recently in Beijing, a Chinese feminist group, forbidden to demonstrate, performed street theater, wearing bridal gowns splattered with fake blood to publicize and protest domestic violence. In Jerusalem, Israeli Women of the Wall scuffle with the police and Ultra-Orthodox male opponents to contest gendered discrimination and religious beliefs in the already conflicted urban space of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
These diverse women’s bodies are constituted, sometimes abused, by the contingencies of specific urban spaces, but also imprint them with their moral and political claims. In class, we consider how the insistent presence of protesting women in open urban public space intervenes critically in the private/public gender division by which spaces and women’s roles have been traditionally regulated. But these actions by women also allow critical enquiry into the broader “right to the city” discourse generated by French Marxist, social theorist Henri Lefebvre. While all the examples cited above offer important insights, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s resolute oppositional movement in the urban center will be analyzed in detail.
In Building a Spatial Theory of Justice, Edward Soja argues that from its inception the city has been the “privileged space” for the determination of its citizens’ political rights: “Justice, democracy and citizenship came to be defined as rights to participate in politics of the city-space” (74). Public urban spaces also render real the abstract notions of politics and democracy, according to theorists such as Soja and David Harvey: they embody the existing power (and resources) imbalances in Harvey’s formulation of “unjust urban geographies,” and reveal the mutually constitutive role of social and spatial factors. Most crucially, the public spaces – streets, squares, parks – are the physical and symbolic staging ground for contestation of spatial/social control between the powerful and the disadvantaged.
This partly corresponds with Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” that envisions the city ideally as a continuous, unfinished “oeuvre,” a work in which all citizens can participate and compete. However, urban theorists also acknowledge the tension between positing urban spaces as always already open, or contested and fluid, and the tenacious efforts of ruling elites to impose physical control and transmit their values.
Thus, at most of the women’s protests in different parts of the world, massive security arrangements were visible and ominous. Even democratic systems that respect public freedoms can make the urban space restrictive or dangerous for demonstrations, both small and large. On New York streets the striking Shirtwaist Factory workers were violently suppressed by police action endorsed by sections of the general public. A century later, in New Delhi, as public outrage over government indifference to women’s vulnerabilities swelled into huge gatherings, barricades protected the bulky sandstone government buildings and elegant official residences.
Authoritarian regimes can, of course, flagrantly deny rights to public access or assembly: therefore, Chinese women activists’ need to disguise protest as performance art. The Argentine junta’s draconian laws obliged the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to navigate urban public space with subterfuge and caution. On April 30, 1977, when the dictatorship was at its most repressive, a small group of just fourteen mothers gathered for the first time in the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina’s center of political power, to demand answers regarding the disappearance of their sons and daughters. The mothers did not know each other but shrewdly and spontaneously arrived at that first meeting without bags so that nobody would think they could be armed.
A reporter observed: “during the first meetings, small groups of two or three took turns sitting on the plaza’s benches to talk, always under surveillance. There were soldiers with long guns and people who photographed them.” They switched to walking when the police prohibited their conversing, “linking arms in groups of two or three and walking as they had been ordered,” and often they were thrown out. “We learned to dodge and feint,” one mother remembered, leaving along one street, circling around and returning to the square from another.
A particularly pertinent feature of this description is that the women always contrived to never leave the Plaza de Mayo. To locate themselves consummately into the city’s official public heart, they walked around the Pirámide de Mayo, a monument in the absolute center of the square. Their action, I would argue, affirmed the Plaza’s immense state power, residing in the surrounding government buildings; but it also challenged and redefined the limits of the power, and vitiated the grand buildings’ pretensions to serve the people.
“City squares,” writes Andrew Smith, “are often designated to accentuate the symbolic impact of adjacent buildings,” and reinforce the values of the ruling elites (19). The Plaza de Mayo’s three important historic buildings – the Cabildo, the former seat of the Colonial government, the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, and the government house, the Casa Rosada – signify a formidable confluence of historical, religious and state authority with domineering facades meant to humble and alienate the marginalized, and those whom the state disdains or condemns. Before their possession of the Plaza’s open spaces, the Mothers had encountered frustration, obfuscation and falsehoods regarding their missing/abducted children in the interior spaces of the Plaza’s offices – the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights and the Interior Ministry. In these offices, each mother was a stranger to other mothers engaged in the same solitary, agonizing and ultimately futile quest.
The Mothers’ initial rebuff from the city’s unresponsive power structures and eventual appropriation of the urban center for their insurgent energies (to the extent that today the Plaza de Mayo is almost inseparable from the Mothers movement) has important implications for the “right to the city”. Arguably Lefebvre and others advanced such a right for broad social and economic equity in areas of housing, education, recreational facilities, health, etc., and these do not apply to the narrower “right to the city” achieved by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Their experience perhaps aligns with David Harvey’s reflections on an attainable glimmer of social/spatial/geographical justice in urban spaces devoured by the machinations of industrial capital: “Cities are marked and marred by inequality, alienation and injustice…A different right to the city must be asserted.” He warns that “those that now have the rights will not surrender them willingly” and the desired right should not be “merely a right to access but to make the city different, to shape it more in accord with our heart’s desire and to remake ourselves, thereby in a different image” (Soja, 94).
It’s necessary to point out that the Mothers didn’t initially seek to shape the city nor to remake themselves. They emphatically embraced their normatively-gendered, even essentialized, identity as mothers anguished about missing children, and later as grandmothers demanding information about grandchildren born in detentive captivity: “We joined to search for our sons and daughters; we did not decide to form an organization with a specific agenda. We were born on the march,” said one.
Nevertheless, their indefatigable presence in the Plaza (they still appear every Thursday) disrupted the gendered disposition of public space that in past centuries had been considered a male preserve. The Mothers in their white scarves understood and deployed the power of their unprecedented visibility in the city – as did all women who marched, picketed and performed their subjectivities and rights in the other cities, commanding a reconceptualization of the urban space.