Tahrir Square in Egypt. Pearl Square in Bahrain. Green Square in Libya. May First Square in Algeria.
Dictators have always loved squares. They’re good for big military parades, shows of national unity, triumphalist architecture, and statues of you riding a horse. You can’t be a good dictatorship without a proper square; if you can, you co-opt a pre-existing square and rename it, adding horse statues and massive flags to taste. If no appropriate square exists, you’d better get building one quickly, or all the other dictators will look down on you.
Revolutionaries have always loved squares. They’re good for large gatherings, shows of defiance, and are usually handy for burning down nearby government buildings. Squares have so often been the focus of mass protest, successful or otherwise: Trafalgar Square in London; Tiananmen Square in Beijing; Azadi Square in Tehran. They’re well suited to symbolic purposes, providing the focal point and defining iconography of the movement; they’re good for sustaining the narrative of a drawn out revolutionary movement, as with Tahrir and currently with Pearl (as long as we hold the square, the revolution lives); and possibly above all, they’re good for pragmatic purposes (when communication is cut off, a simple message – head for the square – is the easiest to spread and to follow). If you want to have a revolution, a proper square can be invaluable.
Of course, everyone else loves squares as well. Capitalists like them because they attract commerce; communists like them because they emphasise collectivity; monarchs like them because they’re monuments to nobility; republicans like them because they belong to the people; tourists like them because they’re good for sightseeing; locals like them because they keep all the bloody tourists in one place. There’s nothing about any one group or ideology that seems inherently more pro-square than any other; humans just seem to really dig a good square, from the tribal village to the post-industrial megacity.
But it makes you wonder: is there an architecture of revolution? Are there styles of urban planning that are inherently pro-democracy, built – deliberately, or unconsciously – to empower the expression of mass protest? Conversely, how would you design a city if you wanted it to be best suited to suppressing uprisings, to give the secret police and the elite presidential guards the run of the streets? Do dictators like squares mostly for style points, not realising they might hold they key to their ultimate undoing? Could there be an evolutionary process of architecture at work, whereby urban layouts that help build better societies become desirable and spread for that very reason? I’ve checked, and BLDGBLOG doesn’t seem to have written anything on this recently, so that’s pretty much me left flailing. But the thought occurred, so it seemed worthwhile to put it out there in case anybody smarter or more up to date with this field than me wants to drop some knowledge…
