Spatial Protest in the Era of Fast Capital

　　A video by Iva Radivojevic and Martyna Starosta exploring how Liberty Plaza is being inhabited by the Occupy Wall Street movement. "This space is our sonogram of potential."
On May 6, 2010, trillions of dollars — about 9 percent of the total world market — sloshed in and out of existence like a clumsy child carrying an over-flowing milk pail. The celebrated capital liquidity that is the hallmark of the wide spreads and cheap trades associated with High Frequency Trading (HFT) turned into hot lava as a result of the automated programming of a few trading algorithms. Traders the world over watched open-mouthed as the second-largest point swing (1,010 points) and the biggest one-day point decline (998.5 points) in the 114-year history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average unfolded over the course of 30 minutes.
Especially jarring for those who pay attention to the world's financial ecology was how the Flash Crash seemed to defy traditional conventions of space and time. Even the traders on the floor were confounded: Their bodies, the frantic voice of the announcer and the space of the stock exchange itself seemed pitifully quaint in comparison to the typhoon of 0's and 1's rocketing back and forth.
The “flash” was no more than a horrific blip only because the Chicago Mercantile Exchange​ was eventually able to pull the plug on the algorithms that were playing hot potato. But it became apparent that capital is hanging by a thread, as lightning-fast trades circle the globe continuously, beyond the average person’s understanding.
Traditionally, trades were executed by humans in close physical contact with each other. Hand gestures, emotional vibes and verbal outbursts ricocheted in the chambers of the Chicago, New York and Tokyo stock exchanges. Capital was moving, but within the context of humans communicating with other humans — even a day trader was in close contact with his or her clients over a phone line. The rapidity of HFT leaves human perspective in the dust, as market trends fall increasingly into an endless loop of responding to their own responses before the human world has a chance to catch up.
But there is another event unfolding that also pushes the boundaries of speed and unpredictability. While millions of trades are executed every second with little human oversight, the world is collectively witnessing — if not participating in — a rapidly evolving gesture that solidifies the power of a particular body in a particular place.
Today's globalized market place and the decentralized claiming of public space through protest are both powerful examples of how unpredictable flow — the gyrations of capital, the rhizomatic distribution of bodies – dictate and restructure ecologies. The collective gathering of human bodies is a different sort of liquid force, one that has the power to dissolve the traditional boundaries of territory and of how community is usually imagined under the umbrella of capitalism. One could see the emphasis on direct action through spatial occupation as a direct response to the mercurial unpredictability of today's robotized financial systems.
As Yves Smith wrote on the blog Naked Capitalism:
“There is nothing to oversee the hyper growth of derivatives or high frequency trading or endless debt games, because there is no global institution that equates with the global markets. It is a clash of the market state and the nation state … The market state is winning, which is probably why we are all on the brink of losing everything."

　　The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that manifested on Sept. 17, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, recognizes the failures of our current systems of government and market-capital. There is a critical misunderstanding on the part of the mainstream media that the people who gather in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Stockholm and hundreds of other cities are a disparate mob of disaffected and powerless individuals.
Instead, what I saw (and participated in) at Liberty Plaza was a quick adaption to change through the decentralized organization of a constellation of groups created on a need-by-need basis. Being able to change quickly, a trait lauded in the financial world, is generating new forms of conversation and possibility within the human network of the OWS movement. Basic needs are attended to by dedicated committees that distribute good food and sleeping bags. The very ground of the plaza is mapped by new territorial alignments, dictated by the overlapping and connected needs of people in close contact and constant communication with each other.
Painting the protesters as directionless individuals becomes a manufactured problem of spatial isolation. We are taught to be bodies that need to be clothed, fed and entertained so that we can function as productive workers, rather than bodies who can move together into a larger network of physical possibilities. The power of this movement lies in the fact that the gatherings of people represent themselves not as consumers, or even as voters, but as bodies in communication with other bodies, actively participating in the creation of a new horizontal community.
The importance of representation by physicality came to a head in the wee hours of the morning of Oct. 14 at Liberty Plaza. Brookfield Properties, the plaza's owner, had expressed worry about the “sanitation conditions” of the park, and a vacate order was issued for that Friday morning. In response, protesters took about $3,000 out of their OWS fund, bought cleaning supplies and washed every inch of the contested space. As of that Thursday, the vacate order remained in effect. It was not until thousands of bodies streamed into the park, despite a torrential rainfall, that the vacate order was “postponed.”

　　Liberty Plaza is a POPS — a Privately Owned Public Space. In return for tax abatements or increased building height, a developer can construct a space that must be available for public use 24/7. Developers construct these spaces with the intention that they are used by a passive public to eat lunch or as a resting place for a peripatetic tourist. OWS has forced both Brookfield Properties and the Bloomberg administration to examine what it means to create a space for the use of actual people, and not just as a decorative piece for “city beautification.”
The protesters who literally got down on their knees to scrub the plaza clean (which had been maintained from the beginning of the occupation by a dedicated OWS Sanitation Crew) became a powerful example of swiftly enacting ownership by taking responsibility. Brookfield Properties will now have to come up with a stronger pretense for enacting private rules in a public space.
This movement is exciting because it is in a constant flux. This flux is always mediated by the fact that groups of humans are working with the physical limitations of occupying an urban space built with a consumer in mind. This is a movement of anti-stasis through redrawing boundaries and expectations. This is a movement of bodily articulation over the cold manipulations of code attempting to generate capital for capital's sake.
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Searching for Our Metropolitan President

　　
　　In 1967, Carl Stokes​ and Richard Hatcher​ became the first African-American mayors elected to head large American cities, part of a wave of African-American urban leadership that would sweep the North and South alike over the course of the next three decades. African Americans would be elected to head famously black cities like Chicago and Atlanta, famously white cities like Spokane and Seattle, and famously Latino cities like Los Angeles. Since Stokes and Hatcher, African Americans have been elected to head virtually every major city in the United States.
It has not always been an easy ride. African-American leadership has come under fire over the past forty years as cities struggled. Inner-city poverty, much of it African-American, worsened in many places, even as core parts of many cities gentrified with public support that seemed to benefit the growth machine as a whole but not many of its poorest citizens. What we tend to forget is that African Americans won the battle for urban leadership just as the abandonment and denigration of American cities was reaching its apex. The cities they took over were wracked by abandonment, stripped of their power and populace by federally subsidized suburbanization, and ripped apart by the modernist folly of slum clearance and freeway building. Undoubtedly mistakes were made, often in the name of maintaining power rather than using it for the public good, but this merely continued an American political tradition dating back to Tammany Hall and beyond.

　　As protesters occupy the centers of American cities from coast to coast, President Obama would be wise to remember this history — not simply because he shares a skin color with his urban predecessors, or because of any debt Obama owes to African American leaders, but because the story of pioneering African American mayors parallel his current situation in more ways than one. He too broke through one of human history's most famous barriers to take the helm of a polis just as it has reached its nadir; he too has fallen into sad traditions of maintaining power by kowtowing to the powerful rather than using power to reduce suffering or raise up the powerless; he too has taken over a debt-ridden economy beset by rising inequality and redevelopment for profit rather than people, all while under-invested infrastructure crumbles and the core reproductive functions of mobility and education remain inadequate.
In the aftermath of the election, as the full weight of decades of neoliberal economic policy and two generations of terrible or nonexistent urban policy came crashing down on President Obama, I remained more sympathetic than most, in part because of the clear parallels between his situation and that of many of his trail-blazing predecessors. For all the talk in the post-election excitement about Dr. King, my mind was squarely on the bravery and tragedy of Harold Washington​, Chicago's first African-American mayor. He bore the brunt of an obstinate city machine and a brutal urban history and paid the ultimate price. This was going to be exceptionally difficult, and any progressive who felt otherwise was simply blind.
But now the time for empathy has passed, and it is time for President Obama to remember that he was elected by many of us not to be the first black president but to be the first truly urban president in American history. Part of the legacy of the past forty years is that the overblown line between city and suburb has been blurred. When we speak of urban America what we really mean is metropolitan America — those amorphous regions at the heart of our economic innovation and the overwhelming majority of our populace. Eighty-five percent of Americans live in the 376 metropolitan areas in the country, more than half in the top 50 alone. The New York, Chicago and Los Angeles regions account for more than one in ten Americans.

　　But President Obama should not only pay attention to the metropolis because we are the overwhelming majority, but because some of the often-ignored roots of our problems lie in our tragic lack of true urban policy, as do many of our solutions. While Wall Street greed undoubtedly fueled the financial crisis, let us not forget that this whole mess could not have been built on any other commodity than the American home — the only product essential and ubiquitous enough to carry the debt load needed by Wall Street to fuel its speculation. We bought into it because we wanted the American Dream, not realizing that during the past 30 years more and more of that risk was placed on us as individual consumers and citizens rather than backed by the full weight of the country itself. Whereas prior generations could count on federally-backed mortgages and transportation, the past 30 years were built more and more on sub-prime loans, unequally divided local tax dollars and a fragile and ineffective patchwork of assessment districts and impact fees — a splintered urbanism built in reaction to the sins of the postwar suburban boom, which actually made things much worse.
The true tragedy of the past 35 years is that, rather than correcting the true problems of post-war urban development — racism, an emphasis on auto-dependent development, political fragmentation, etc. — we laid blame on federal involvement in this process, crippling its critical role in urban development. We then opened up suburbia to everyone who was denied the first bite at the apple. Except this time, suburbia was being built on bad debt while the gentry slowly reclaimed the core of the city — in part through high incomes generated by a global Wall Street. Now there are more poor folks in suburbs than cities, a foreclosure problem in some of the deepest exurbs you can find, and many of the same people who got screwed by urban abandonment are getting screwed by the new struggles of suburban America.

　　More than ever, we need an Urbanist-in-Chief unafraid to look to the metropolis for solutions to the problems of the 99 percent. Obama needs to channel his memories as an organizer in Harold Washington's Chicago and develop and articulate a true metropolitan vision for America. We need to invest from the federal level, as we once did, in the transportation infrastructure of our nation: everything from inter-metropolitan, high-speed rail to bike lanes, from car-sharing facilities to Bus Rapid Transit, from aging roads to crumbling bridges. We need to invest in housing our working and middle classes and providing the secure tenure that is such a part of the American dream, but this time under the rubric of a retrofitted, denser and more equitable suburbia and a healthier and more affordable city.
And we must build — using the carrot and stick of federal monies — a regional fiscal infrastructure that can sustain future generations of American schools, roads, police officers, parks and social programs. These three actions alone can help put millions of Americans back to work in jobs that can not be outsourced, restore faith in the possibility of government at all levels, break the ridiculous political dichotomy of city versus suburb (which fuels our red versus blue mentality) and undermine the grip of Wall Street on both our wallets and our soul. We now live in an urban and metropolitan world, a world in which urban development drives industry and economy and not the other way around, and we must recognize that economy, community and politics revolve around the spaces and places we occupy.

Florence is a city of wonderment

Do you want to visit a city rich in architectural and artistic masterpieces? If yes then you should visit Florence. It is a city of wonderment where you can find a number of places of visitors’ interest. If you are planning a tour to Florence then make sure that you have included the following attractions in your list of attractions to see.
The Uffizi Gallery
It is one of the world’s great museums and a home to paintings made by renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. This building was formerly used to house administrative offices but later it turned into a museum. This museum is actually divided into two wings named East Gallery and West Gallery. Both of galleries have 45 rooms altogether which are filled with art collections which are about 1600 in number. The paintings which are kept in Uffizi Museum are from 14th and 15th century. Besides paintings, the Uffizi also boasts of having 16th century sculptures. True art lovers must see this museum at least twice as it has a lot more things to see.

Piazzale Michelangelo
It is the city’s best known attraction and it is recognized easily by the bronze replica of David. It was designed in 1869 by Florentine architect named Giuseppe Poggi and provides magnificent views of the whole city so the best time to visit this place is in evening when it offers elegant views in bright lights.

Santa Croce
Located in Piazza Santa Croce, it is a church having a statue of Dante. This church is home of tombs of Italian innovators including Michelangelo and Galileo thus it is also known as Temple of the Italian Glories. The most notable features of this church are its 16 chapels which are decorated by Giotto and his pupils. Some of the other artists whose work has been displayed in church are:
Antonio Canova
Luca della Robbia
Masso di Banco
Giorgio Vasari
Antonio Rossellino
Taddeo Gaddi
Henry Moore
Andrea Orcagna
Santi di Tito
Donatello

Giotto’s Bell Tower
Giotto’s Bell Tower is 84.7 meters high and 15 meters wide tower which is one of the four principal components of Piazza del Duomo. It stands next to Santa Maria del Fiore and also known as Campanile. It is featured with different colored marble layers making it a worth-seeing place to see. This attraction is not only known for its architecture but also it is featured with work of arts which is incorporated to both outer walls and interior of the tower. If you want to see a grand view of city, you can climb the 414 steps after paying a nominal fee.

Ponte Vecchio
Ponte Vecchio which is also known as Old Bridge is located near Mercato Nuevo and offers an opportunity to see Florentine view. It is a medieval bridge dating back to 1345. It is an arch bridge which houses several shops including that of jewelry traders who have been working here since 17th century. This stone-made bridge has been destroyed and rebuilt several times but now, it is among one of the great places for tourists.

These were some of the major attractions of Florence. Visit these and have a wonderful and enjoyable time.