Public spaces whose roles few typically question have all suddenly become sites of protest: shopping malls, underpasses, bridges, freeway columns, tram stops, and even roadway medians. Bricks and bamboo poles, typically used on construction sites and for scaffolding, have been fashioned into makeshift barricades by protesters.

The reconfiguration of these mundane sites into spaces of political expression show how Hong Kong’s public space “is clearly made by the people, not something simply given by the state, and certainly not to be taken for granted,” said Jeff Hou, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington and the co-editor of City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy.

....

For now, the protests continue, and so does the reconfiguration of urban space—and memory. Moments of protest are now recalled as city “landmarks”: here’s where a protester was shot, here’s where someone stood with an iconic banner, and over there is ...
For now, the protests continue, and so does the reconfiguration of urban space—and memory. Moments of protest are now recalled as city “landmarks”: here’s where a protester was shot, here’s where someone stood with an iconic banner, and over there is ... - Even if the protests retreat from the streets, they will have etched indelible marks on the city’s landscape. On one sidewalk in the city’s business area, fresh cement had been poured to fill holes where protesters had dug up bricks, only for someone to scrawl “Free HK” before it set, immortalizing an act of resistance that the government tried to cover it up. “At the end of the day, the protests change the narration of the city,” said Tali Hatuka, director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University and the author of The Design of Protest. “They are aiming at reconstructing the story of the place by adding missing components and emphasizing neglected parts. Even after the events the images of the events will remain in the collective memory of the society.”