Power to Witness
PLATFORM published its first essays one year ago this week, including work by Mira Rai Waits, Annmarie Adams, Joseph Heathcott, Nancy Kwak, Kishwar Rizvi, and a multi-authored article by David Ambaras, Curtis Fletcher, Eric Loyer & Kate McDonald. To mark this milestone, we planned to use this space to thank our authors (seventy-five and counting!) and readers (nearly thirty thousand!), and congratulate ourselves for the scale of PLATFORM’s success: eighty-seven articles—including three in Spanish and one each in German, Portuguese, and French, alongside English translations—and a growing audience drawn from 102 countries.
The events of the last few months—life, illness, and death under COVID-19; the brutal murder of George Floyd by a police officer and the rebellion of young Black Americans, and the interracial coalitions all across the world it inspired—have changed our plans. This is not a moment to celebrate PLATFORM’s success, but to take stock of our mission and to think about how our venue and community are positioned to effect the values of equality and justice for which we stand.
When PLATFORM launched, our goal was to fill an unsettling gap by creating a space where all those concerned with the built environment—professionals and non-professionals alike—could share, and apply, their knowledge to shed light on pressing issues, in prose that was free of jargon and accessible to a broad, general readership. Buildings and landscapes, we often said, are too important to be confined to professional silos.
Then came the novel coronavirus. Wuhan shut down. Then the universities where we (and many of our authors and readers) work and study were shuttered, followed by learning to live under quarantine. COVID-19, like other pandemics of the past, from the plague to the Spanish flu, revealed deep structural inequities. The poor, who constitute the bulk of the “essential” (but in practice, disposable) labor force, more often than not poor immigrants, migrant workers, and ethnic and racial minorities, have borne the brunt of suffering. Today, the virus is ravaging the cities of the Global South, with especially dire consequences for so-called informal settlements, from the kampung of Jakarta and favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the megaslums of Mumbai and Nairobi, where lack of access to basic services like potable water and toilets leaves millions vulnerable even at the best of times.
Figure 1. Social Distancing during COVID-19, Kalerwe Market, Kampala, Uganda, May 20, 2020. Photograph by Yasin Nsubuga, ILO / RUDMEC, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Now we are witness to rampant violation of the human (and in some cases, constitutional) right to free speech across the world—in Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Turkey, and United States. We are confronting unapologetic criminal-justice regimes that take violent repression of civilians as the rightful norm, a U.S. president threatening to deploy the military against unarmed civilian protestors, and glorying in the show of “Overwhelming force. Domination.”
Figure 2. Protest at White House, Washington, D.C., June 14, 2020. Photograph by Ted Eytan, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
What happened to the government’s obligation to serve the people? What happened to the right to peacefully protest? Thousands of people, in remarkable interracial congregations, have filled the streets of cities and towns across the United States, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and beyond, defying COVID-19, defying rubber and paint bullets, defying tear gas, defying choke holds, to show that the right to gather in public, the right to make one’s mind known, and the right to speak cannot be abrogated, even during a pandemic.
History teaches us that protest cannot be stopped by the establishment, no matter how lopsided the power imbalance, or how hard authorities try to repress rightful, righteous anger, or to co-opt demands for substantive change. This insurgency is led by youth who know that they must act now—this is the time to seize, to paraphrase Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, and dismantle institutional racism. The time isn’t tomorrow. It is now.
Where in all this does discourse on the built environment fit in? Where does PLATFORM fit in?
Figure 3. “Looted stores.” Boarded shopfronts after looting, Waukegan Township, Illinois, June 3, 2020. Photograph by *Hajee, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
With reference to the burning of buildings in Philadelphia, we read an architecture critic writing, “‘People over property’ is a great rhetorical slogan” but the destruction of downtown buildings is “devastating for the future of cities.” The editor of Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischnowski, resigned after protests against the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.” Online, the title was changed to “Damaging Buildings Disproportionately Hurts the People Protesters Are Trying to Uplift,” and the Inquirer issued an apology. But the content was allowed to stand.
The article, and this decision, demonstrate how thoroughly untutored in the fundaments of capitalism such “defenders” of architecture are. Instead we ask, when have these cities included their Black diaspora citizens, their poor, their other communities of color, their immigrants, in ways that they might find reason to defend the status quo, much less symbols of power and wealth like Main Street or the shopping mall? Who really benefits when business goes on as usual?
The built environment matters precisely because as a concretization of social relations—one that, as geographer Edward Relph points out “has required substantial investments of money, time and effort”—it demonstrates social inequity as nothing else does. Kimberly Jones, co-author of I’m Not Dying with You Tonight, drives this point home in How Can We Win: architecture matters because it embodies inequality, and it instantiates racism, and yet with it we can find the capacity to change our world, from the bottom up.
Figure 5. Boarded shopfronts, Washington, D.C., June 6 2020. Photograph by Ted Eytan, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
The transformation of the built environment we witness in the new streetscape of murals and graffiti that has emerged in Minneapolis and elsewhere, the defiant inscription of BLACK LIVES MATTER on the street that leads to the White House, or the hundreds of temporary memorials to George Floyd that now dot over a thousand U.S. cities—show that the built environment, from the humble bodegas and tenements of New York City to new-immigrant retail strips of Los Angeles to worker housing in Rustbelt Indiana, is not a backdrop for spatial practices. Memorials to confederate leaders, to slave traders, to conquistadors, to carceral-state mayors, are being toppled in the United States, Britain, and Belgium. Some are splattered with paint. Some are decapitated. Some are tossed into the harbors of port cities rendered wealthy by profits won through chattel slavery.
Figure 6. Black Lives Matter Plaza, Washington D.C., June 12, 2020. Photograph by Ted Eytan, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
Figure 7. “The empty pedestal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, the day after protesters felled the statue and rolled it into the harbour. The ground is covered with Black Lives Matter placards,” June 7, 2020. Photograph by Caitlin Hobbs. Source: Wikipedia Commons, under Creative Commons license CC BY 3.0.
These tactics, of “guerilla” or “DIY” urbanism, of graffiti-writing, of attacks on seemingly immovable representations in stone of hated authorities and despised ideologies, have a long history. Urban protests against authoritarianism in the modern era have occurred, often with success: during the American Revolution, in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and its colonies, in colonial and post-independence India, in the Civil Rights-era U.S., in apartheid-era South Africa, in twentieth-century China and Ireland, in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, during the Arab Spring, in the West Bank of Gaza, and in scores of localities, big and small.
Resistance demands that we revisit buried histories in the broader landscape as have those fighting the destruction of historically Black settlements and first-nation burial grounds threatened by the construction of oil pipelines. The Climate Strikes, which have gained traction especially among younger people across the world mostly took the form of collective actions in major cities, but their projected horizon connected the city and the country and the oceans beyond—in other words they demanded that we question and change how we collectively inhabit the planet as a species and the uneven (yet eventually dire for all) consequences of the current global order.
It is high time we re-view the everyday spaces of living and working, and place these events in the long durée of human experience. It is also imperative to recognize that this time, this moment in history, is unique.
A sign on Hennepin Avenue South in Minnesota reads: “BY READING THIS YOU AGREE TO FIGHT WHITE SUPREMACY.” It extracts a promise from the reader to take action. It elicits from the reader an acknowledgment of having witnessed that others are asking for action to be taken, are demanding justice.
Figure 8. Sign placed on storefront, Hennepin Ave S., Minneapolis. Photograph by David Schalliol, June 2020. Reproduced with permission.
Because we have the power of witness on our side, we have hope. We also have a responsibility to enlarge the public discourse about the built environment and place it on a surer footing. We hope you will help us in this endeavor by reading, sharing, and writing for PLATFORM as we embark on our second year.
Swati Chattopadhyay
Marta Gutman
Zeynep Kezer
Matthew Gordon Lasner
