Socializing space and politicizing financial innovation/destruction: some observations on Occupy Wall Street

• Main Author: Manuel B. Aalbers
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société Royale Belge de Géographie and the Belgian National Committee of Geography 2012-12-01
• Series: Belgeo
• Subjects: global financial crisis; public space; financialization; zoning; neoliberalism; social movements
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/6155
• ISSN: 1377-2368; 2294-9135

This short paper discusses two issues related to the Occupy Wall Street movement. First, a local urban political geography is presented in which Liberty Plaza is not the accidental place of Occupy Wall Street but a deliberate one, not only because it is located between the towers of global capital, but also because it constitutes a so-called “privately owned public space” (POPS). Second, a global financial political geography is presented in which I argue that the imprecise demands of Occupy Wall Street are a result not so much of the heterogeneous base of the movement but of the still largely unknown and “under-understood” nature of finance.