On Public Spaces

My new home faces a very public square. On one of the trust lots facing Lafayette Square sits The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, its twin spires two talisman guiding my return home when I venture out. The Andrew Low house faces from another trust lot, as does the Hamilton-Turner Inn at the opposite end.

On my first Saturday afternoon, as we returned from a walk city officials were busy unloading a truck full of folding chairs in preparation for a wedding on the public square. Later than evening, we shared a bottle of wine while sitting on one of the park benches under a moss draped live oak. Passersby stopped and spoke with us, sharing a joke or observation as they walked dogs or just strolled on a warm early summer evening. Although it was still fairly early after sundown, there were parties well underway in two houses also facing Lafayette square. I watched as three young women clad in attire appropriate for the season parked their (or more likely, their parents’) Mercedes SUV and scampered up steep steps to the parlor floor apartment.

Clearly, Savannahians live life in and within sight of the public square.

In Turkey this week Istanbulites have been doing the same in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, one of the last bits of green space in the great modern and Byzantine city of Istanbul. There have been piano concerts and tango competitions and tear gas attacks and water canon blasts and fireworks as the government of Turkey tries to push out a group of protestors who originally simply didn’t want the trees razed to build an Ottoman inspired shopping mall. Since that first group was tear-gassed and pummeled with high pressure water, the entire country has erupted into mass protests that go beyond the building of yet another mall by the mercantile Islamist governing majority. That public square is now a daily battleground between the forces of modernity and the Ottoman past. Just today, the Istanbul governnor called on mothers to pick up their sons and bring them home. They didn’t. Instead, a parade of middle-aged women showed up and arm in arm encircled the protestors, daring the police to gas and water blast them away.

For me, this is personal. My baby brother is one of the protestors, at the square by night and at work by day, pushing back against the slide into the past.

Public spaces are crucial to democracy’s survival. Eliminate the square and you eliminate visible opposition.