The Eventful Places of Occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square: Cosmopolitan Imagination and Social Movements

In 2011, social movements occupied parks and squares around the world. Occupy Wall Street and the Egyptian uprising were among the most spectacular. In this article, I investigate the physical, symbolic, and performed relationship between these social movements and their occupied places. I claim that these movements (re-)created their occupied places as eventful places where cosmopolitan (re-)creations of collective identity and social relations were imagined, enacted, and became prefigurative microcosms of an alternative communal world. First, based on a critique of mainstream social movement studies, I develop the concept of eventful place and link this to cosmopolitanism. The bulk of the article then examines the eventful (re-)creations that took place in Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park through first-hand accounts. A critical discussion of the reproduction of conflict in the eventful places then follows. I conclude by suggesting that the eventful and cosmopolitan imagination may live on and inspire future mobilisation.