Mama, save our cities
America’s streets and parks are revealing our best and worst futures
When the self-titled Wall of Moms came out to protect protesters in Portland, prompted by the increasing violence of the federal paramilitary forces shoving young people into unmarked vans, it was abundantly clear that the other shoe had dropped.
Our country loves to hate Portland for their bike lanes and sidewalk cafes selling locally sourced salads. How do we square that ridiculous cuteness with the teargassed scenes unfolding there now?
The country is facing a triple threat of woes that have shaken our American sense of self to its core. As an urban designer, I’ve seen how they have transformed tranquil public spaces and introduced competing aesthetics in our parks and streets. Pedestrianbike renaissance faces off with police barricades. Sunny recreation versus red-faced confrontation. Crisp, picturesque skies contrast with pungent tear gas clouds.
First, there is a pandemic and all the isolation, joblessness and upheaval it entails. At the same time, we are facing a national moment of racial unrest, wholly justified, that feels like the beginning of a new era born of the third challenge: the hostility of a militarized police force, triggered into action by a presidential administration seemingly bent on absolute power.
On the one hand, mothers — and dads — pushing strollers in parks across the country — including in Houston, where outdoor life was once considered prohibitive in our hot climate. On the other hand, we see mothers in clouds of tear gas and pepper spray in many of those same public places.
The mothers facing off with federal troops are a siren call for the United States, a warning of how close we are to falling off a cliff. The precedent for this sort of thing is nothing short of illustrious — or, perhaps, infamous.
The best-known example is the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Starting in 1977, women who had their adult and teenage children abducted by the government met every Thursday at the aforementioned plaza, across from the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. In a 1999 interview, Nora Cortiñas, one of the mothers, related: “This plaza in Buenos Aires was chosen because it was the historical site of protest by the people and of multitudinous mass demonstrations in Argentina. We could express our pain there, our anguish, and when people saw us they began to find out what was happening. Since the military wouldn’t let people gather in the streets, we decided to walk around in the plaza.”
Soon afterwards, they began to wear white handkerchiefs over their heads, embroidered with the names of the missing. The hand
kerchiefs were a symbol of the diapers their children wore. The gatherings continued for nearly 30 years and inspired similar movements.
One of these is the Saturday Mothers, from Istanbul, Turkey. Since 1995, the women have met at noon, for half an hour, in the central neighborhood of Galatasaray, to gather in silent protest over the disappearance of their relatives and loved ones. Living under a wholly totalitarian regime, the mothers faced harsh police attacks that forced them to suspend their demonstrations for some time. However, in 2005, the group resumed their weekly gathering and continues to be active today. Following this example are numerous others, including the Mourning Mothers of Iran, the Women In Black from Israel, the Tiananmen Mothers of China, and the Ladies in White of Cuba.
The United States does not have the violent severity of the circumstances of these historic precedents. Portland’s protesters may be improperly detained, but they are still alive. The Oregon attorney general is challenging the federal government in court, and we still have a judicial system that still appears independent. However, the federal government’s intention is still the same: to let the public know that anyone who continues to protest will suffer a similar fate. It is an aesthetic operation — a visual performance — that works in a gendered way designed to instill fear: an image of armed soldiers in riot gear, with little to no jurisdictional identification. Fear is the weapon most readily wielded by tyrants, effective in its ability to divide us as we worry for ourselves, prompting our survival instinct. In the face of this wholly manipulative tactic emerges the one group that is best equipped to handle unwarranted male aggression: mothers.
Once again, it is an aesthetic battle that takes place, one that deploys the stereotypes of motherhood and the feminine. As Louise Mozingo points out in “Women In Downtown Open Spaces,” the American city, since the 1950s, has historically been sexually segregated, with women sequestered into the safety of the domestic suburbia, while men have projected their masculinity onto the downtown business district. This division, of course, was entirely contrived by men, who may have wished it to be this way forever. Clearly, this is not our reality now, although the pains of gender inequality remain with us. Nonetheless, the Wall of Moms knows full well that they are performing the safety of the domestic environment in a public space where the rights of citizens are being openly violated. It is like a play, and the city streets are the stage. The women identified themselves, specifically, as mothers. Dressed in all white, all yellow or all black, they created an image of feminine unity, a blanket of motherhood that no apple pie-loving American would dare harm.
An even better example, also from Portland, is the so-called Naked Athena protester — a woman who strolled out in front of a line of police completely nude, save for a face mask and a stocking cap, then did a series of ballet poses, kicks, yoga positions, etc. Completely silent, her body was entirely exposed to the potential violence of the assembled police force. Her improvised choreography caused bewilderment and momentary pause in aggression.
Of course, such performances need not be gendered to be powerful. Think of the violin vigil for Elijah McClain in Colorado, where musicians played Pachelbel’s Canon in front of approaching police. Art deployed in this manner has the ability to disarm, to shift the frame of reference, and it speaks to everyone present.
Here in Houston, we’ve seen Black Lives Matter activists attempt to block highways, prompting police to push them back. Let’s remember that many of our highways demolished and divided Black neighborhoods. Houston has seen police donning military gear in the streets and the arrests of hundreds, though our city’s protests — drawing tens of thousands of people — have largely been peaceful.
At the same time, our new trails along the bayou are filled with people, with families — parents pushing strollers, couples on picnic blankets, kids on bikes. This is the result of a carefully planned city initiative to create more open spaces for people. It is the result of a deliberate transformation of the city.
Over the past decade, Houston has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the design and construction of its public parks.
The city has changed its image of a concrete-laden metropolis into a lush Bayou City with linear parks. The opening of Discovery Green in 2008 kicked into high gear investment in public spaces. Most recently, the city has moved forward with the promotion of bicycle lanes and trails that would have seemed anathema previously. On any given weekend, the number of bodies in Houston parks is impressive.
If there was any doubt that Houstonians want these investments, the surge of use during the pandemic has crushed it. If anything, we need to speed up the transformation.
But in the course of creating these new park spaces, an interesting thing happens. The same parks and plazas which offer recreation and respite also double as the arena for our public political lives. In Houston, there isn’t a central gathering area in which Houstonians can voice their public grievances. Hermann Square, the plaza in front of City Hall, has a long fountain located along its central axis that physically divides the potential gathering space. It makes the square too small and uncomfortable for large groups. But curiously enough, Houstonians don’t care. This same public plaza plays a central role in two of our more notable public spectacles, the Art Car Parade, and the Pride Parade, the latter of which manages to join the political and performative in a unique and efficient way. Protests that march from Buffalo Bayou Park, along Memorial Drive, and into downtown, end up spilling out of Hermann Square, into Tranquillity Park, creating a sprawling, rather anti-climactic terminus to the protests.
Discovery Green, with its hyper -division of spaces — every area of the park is named for a different corporate sponsor — also has a sprawling feel. The recent redesign of the Avenida de las Americas has extended that patchwork into the very front porch of the George R. Brown Convention Center. Even this space is Janus-like, double faced — capable of being a site of recreation or oppression as we saw when police conducted mass arrests there during George
Floyd protests. The malleability of urban open space is both a blessing and a curse.
In Oregon, a moment of clarity came when the Wall of Moms emerged in a show of performative protection. Organizing via social media and connecting with locked arms, lullaby-style chants, color-coordinated clothes, they proclaimed their own motherhood as a kind of shield, a higher authority.
Their mass presence was a way of telling the would-be oppressors: enough. As an American and as an urban designer who thinks about the power of space, form and beauty, the mothers’ event gave me hope. We have an opportunity now to think of spaces that can allow for the voice of the people to be heard.
Does it mean that we need uninterrupted plazas, like Mexico City’s Zocalo? Or a grand setting like the National Mall in Washington, D.C.? No, those spaces belong to the past, to earlier forms of design thinking.
What we need now, we have not yet seen. My sense is that they will be spaces that perform multiple roles at the same time: working in terms of ecology, community engagement, walkability, or as a backdrop for safe political gatherings, of varying scales. One thing is certain: We cannot go back to earlier ideas of parks and plazas as sites of recreation only. Of course they perform that work, but as we have seen, they can do much more. They are places of meaning, of historic significance, of political life, and profoundly, of movement.