Catie Marron

Is there a civic purpose for city squares where people are already free? Hannah Arendt described freedom not as individual free will but in terms of acting and associating with others. This kind of freedom requires public space. In What Is Freedom?, Arendt likened politics to the performing arts, for "both need a publicly organized space for their 'work,' and both depend upon others for the performance itself" [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"].

The square is a treasure precisely because it doesn't masquerade as an outdoor museum. It's a living place, jammed with people, changeable, democratic, urbane. [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

Feeling in the middle of things, at the place to and from which streets flow, where people come not to escape the city but to be inside it: This us usually what defines a successful square. It is a space around which the rest of a neighborhood or town or city tends to be organized [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

The protestors feel that the elections have been hijacked and the choices are between two corrupt parties—that when the power structure no longer represents the people, the vote is no longer a tool for change [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].

(One difference between old-style autocrats, such as Caesar, Louis XIV, or Napoleon, and their totalitarian successors is the replacement of the marble statue in the middle of the square with an embalmed corpse.) [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"].

As the number and the size of cities keep growing across the world, changing conditions bring shifts in language and vocabulary. Despite the social and linguistic complexity, however, there are only two types of cities: those where a woman can walk after dark relatively freely and those where she possibly cannot. — Elif Shafak, Taksim Square, Istanbul: Byzantine, Then and Now,

a square is also an organism, not just a work of art and architecture [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. From the start, the public square has been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

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 the great sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan would start building a new mosque, he would make sure both the design and the project were in harmony with the city's history and the city's spirit [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].