Our cities are places of conditional liberty

"The relationship between the Occupy movement and the city is intense. The taking of Zuccotti Park, as well as St Paul’s churchyard in London, revealed the secret dangers of allowing public spaces to be privately owned to this extent. Our cities have increasingly become places of conditional liberty –where you can be stopped from taking photographs, where legitimate gatherings are bustled off the pavement, where you can be thrown out of the shopping mall for wearing a baseball cap, where private companies are collecting data about you without you knowing.

By taking land back – even for a few weeks – the Occupy movement has changed the way we encounter every part of the city, not just where the tents once stood. The protest has become a defence of the whole public realm and is not just about preserving the memory of what happened at Zuccotti Park or St Paul’s churchyard alone."

Leo Hollis in the New Statesman