Marron - City squares: eighteen writers on the spirit and significance of squares around the world

Philip-Lorca diCorcia/Trunk Archive, Djemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakech

For my family: Don, William, and Serena

CONTENTS

1. PART ONE
   CULTURE: POWER OF THE PLACE
   1. Maidan-e-Pompa, Kabul: Resisting the Square
      Rory Stewart
   2. Place des Vosges, Paris: A Private Place
      Adam Gopnik
   3. Red Square, Moscow; Grand Market Square, Krakw: The Past Is Always Present
      Anne Applebaum
   4. Squares of Rome and Venice: The Shadow of Ideas: Circles and Squares
      Zadie Smith
   5. Djemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakech: Engaging with Complexity and Diversity
      David Adjaye
2. PART TWO
   GEOPOLITICS: STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
   1. Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square
      Jehane Noujaim
   2. Rabin Square, Tel Aviv: So Empty, So Loud
      Ari Shavit
   3. Taksim Square, Istanbul: Byzantine, Then and Now
      Elif Shafak
   4. Tiananmen Square, Beijing: In Search of Heavenly Peace
      Evan Osnos
   5. Euromaidan, Kiev: A Place Becomes a Movement
      Chrystia Freeland
3. PART THREE
   HISTORY: INFLUENCE ON HUMANITY
   1. Grand Parade, Cape Town: A Speech for the Ages
      Richard Stengel
   2. Residential Squares, London: A Meander Through Splendor and Squalor
      Andrew Roberts
   3. Zcalo, Mexico City: On Sacred Ground
      Alma Guillermoprieto
   4. Harvard Square, Boston: A City Changes, Its Heart Endures
      Ann Beattie
   5. The Virtual Square: Hacker Square
      Gillian Tett

MASSIMO VITALI

Venezia San Marco

UNTIL RECENTLY, ID NEVER THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT CITY SQUARES. Ive certainly enjoyed visiting some of the most famous, such as Place des Vosges, Piazza di Navona, and Djemaa el-Fnaa, and I have taken advantage of the ones near home in New York City. But their powerin humanity, urban life, and historyhad never fully registered with me. A few years ago, that changed.

Whenever Im in Europe, I find I feel closer to major events occurring on the continent. On a family holiday in Rome in 2013, we stayed around the corner from the Piazza del Popolo, which we often passed through during our stay. Every morning in the hotel, I read all the newspapers and accounts I could find on the mass uprising in the main square of Kiev. The insurgence was quickly coined the Euromaidan, maidan being the word for square in several languages, including Ukrainian.

Commentators compared the Euromaidan protests to those in Istanbuls Taksim Square two years earlier. Id spent an hour there just three months before the protests. As it was commuter time, people were on the move; an old-fashioned cable car passed by. I never could have guessed that very site, like the Euromaidan, would soon become the headquarters for masses of citizens who put their lives on the line in protest against their governments. Suddenly, I thought about the stark contrasts among the spaces: the everyday bustle of Taksim Square, and its political unrest; the classic, peaceful beauty of the grand Roman squares; and the revolt erupting in Kievs Maidan, another square of Old World character.

I explored further, which led me to putting together this collection: a series of essays created for this book, which considers the square from different points of view, from the intensely personal to the expansively global. Each square stands for a larger theme in history, culture, and geopolitics.

This deeply free and public space plays a vital role in our world, equally important in our digital age as in Greco-Roman times, when they were marketplaces for goods and ideas. As common ground, squares are equitable and democratic; they have played a fundamental role in the development of free speech. When citizens wanted to convey their message to those in chargein Euromaidan, Tahrir, Taksim, and Tiananmen squares, as well as many othersthey flocked to their square. As David Remnick noted, authoritarians dont realize what a dangerous thing it is to have a city square.

Each writer was chosen with thought and care. Each writer has contributed his or her own special mix of innate talent, prodigious research, and local knowledge. Rory Stewart tells the story of a square in Kabul, which has come and gone several times over five centuries, due to both the local culture and, equally, the will of one individual, the latest iteration involving Rory himself in the leadership role. Ari Shavit describes the changes of central Tel Avivs Rabin Square, which began as a forum for rallies and assemblies, then became the symbolic site of a national tragedy, and is now an almost empty void, even as hectic urban life bustles with energy around its edges. Rick Stengel recounts Nelson Mandelas choice of the Grand Parade, Cape Town, a huge market square that was transformed into a public space of historic magnitude when he spoke to the world right after his release from twenty-seven years in prison. In Euromaidan, Tahrir, and Taksim squares, social mediathe new virtual squaresummoned people to the physical square. Gillian Tett delves into social medias growing significance and the way the physical and virtual meet.

If theres one essential urban space, it is the square. Michael Kimmelman describes the construction of a new square in a Palestinian refugee camp, first questioned, then embraced. It is now where children play, young couples marry, and women feel free to socialize. Everyone uses this newly created public space just as people did the agoras of ancient Greece. Squares have stood the test of time. After all, squares are all about, and for, people.

THOMAS STRUTH

Times Square Billboard, New York City

OBERTO GILI

ON MOST MORNINGS, THE CAMPO DE FIORI COMES AWAKE TO the shuffle of the fruit, spice, and vegetable merchants setting up open-air stalls under ranks of white umbrellas and the gloomy gaze of Giordano Bruno. Bruno, the Renaissance friar-philosopher-cosmologist, was burned at the stake in the campo in 1600, a heretic according to the Roman Inquisition. Now a martyr to science, he has been memorialized in the middle of the square with a somber monument by Ettore Ferrari, the nineteenth-century sculptor. It is only a little bit of a stretch to see the blessed Bruno in the busy market as a metaphor for Romes long-standing church-state standoff, as well as speaking to the heterogeneous and serendipitous quality of public life in a great square. The campo is common ground.

What do we mean by a public square? For starters, it is rarely square, like the Place des Vosges in Paris, a Platonic version of the genre. It may be a quadrangle or rectangle or circle or pretty much any other shape, and it can be open or closed. It might even be a park, like Washington Square or Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, but if so, it tends to be a park through which people pass, going from one place to another, not simply a retreat. A square is porous, balancing its porousness with some focal point, like a fountain or a reliable patch of sun with some benches that marks a break from the cars and streets and invites people to stop, look, exhale, find one another. People escape the city by retreating into Central Park or the Tiergarten in Berlin or the Buen Retiro in Madrid. A square may be a haunting and magical place when empty, like a ghost-lighted theater. But it is often less a retreat than a magnet or a pause or a perch in the midst of things.