Years ago, on a visit to Isfahan, a magical excursion was drawing to a close. It was late night and we were people-watching in the teahouses under the city’s famous bridge — entire families hung about getting their portraits drawn, smoking water pipes and inhaling the cool breeze after what had been a hot summer’s day.
The power of a squareAs we pulled ourselves away and got into a taxi to get back to our hotel, it soon became evident that we were headed in the wrong direction. Panic in a new city carries a particularly infectious edge. The initially cheerful taxi driver caught it from us, his panic fed ours, and we all began yelling at each other — and the car appeared to be getting out of control. He clearly needed somebody to interpret this cacophony, and the next thing we knew we were in the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, renamed Imam Square after the 1979 Revolution.
The taxi driver pulled over along a bunch of taxis parked in the middle of that grand space, and we, strangers in this city deemed to be “half the world”, instinctively recovered our bearings, and with proper directions were soon back safely in the hotel.
I always think back to that night and how the extraordinary power exuded by the Square made us all intelligible to each other again.
A physical pauseMaidan-e Naqsh-e Jahan finds only passing reference in City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World (edited by Catie Marron, published by Harper), but the wonderful collection of essays examines different aspects of a peculiar form of civic engagement. Obviously, the city square is not necessarily shaped so, and you only have to think about Tahrir Square, which is more a traffic roundabout. Michael Kimmelman, David Remnick and George Packer write introductions to three sets of essays on particular “squares” around the world, and amid their experiences they sprinkle so many definitions of a city square that you could possibly roam all of the world’s urban spaces and know there are specific descriptions that can be aptly tick-marked.
But if there’s a takeaway from these essays on gathering places from Kabul to New York City, Baghdad to Paris, Tel Aviv to Beijing, Cape Town to Moscow, Cairo to Kiev, it is that to count, a square must be experientially vivid. And in its civic function of encouraging sociability, perhaps Packer’s definition fits well: “A city square is a physical pause in the urban landscape. It is a deliberate gap that interrupts the mass and clamour of buildings and streets, breaking up the flow of daily business and creating a space where people can come together, by design or happenstance… Squares, unlike parks, do not take you out of the city.” Later, in the course of inquiring into the theatrical quality of squares, and how many of the great squares have come to stand out because of the political context of the gatherings they hosted, he considers how in some cities the old bazaar is the “pounding heart”, not the modern square, but it’s a line of thought insufficiently explored in the book.
Rory Stewart does tangentially illuminate the comparison by sharing his experience in trying to develop a square in post-American-invasion Kabul. A big square had been developed in this city of bazaars in the 17th century — but it was levelled 200 years later by the British as reprisal for Kabulis exhibiting the dismembered body of the British resident. Stewart’s square was the size of two house lots that remained in a residential area from an abandoned plan dating back to the 1970s. And for all the good work, including a school and a clinic, he brought to the cleaned-up square’s perimeter, he soon found these establishments politely relocated elsewhere. In contrast, an effort to clear up a square in a decades-old camp for Palestinian refugees south of Hebron transformed social and political life.
Occupy movementsSquares in recent years have come to be synonymous with Occupy movements — though the writers do dwell on the wave of mobilisations of 1989, from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to Eastern Europe’s Velvet revolutions. “Does Hosni Mubarak regret not having run a highway through Tahrir Square?” wonders Remnick. “How long before Recep Tayyip Erdogan builds the Taksim Mall in Istanbul?… Isn’t it possible that, during Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, the mayor may have wished he’d built an arts centre in Zuccotti Park?” Packer reminds us of the spectacle of U.S. marines, not Iraqis, struggling to pull down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square soon after the invasion: it was indication enough that this was an “invasion, not a revolution”. Indeed, revolution came to Iran in 1979 with a swelling crowd at Tehran’s Azadi Square — the symbolism of which the Green movement framed by staging protests there in 2009.
Mostly, however, squares are places of “physical pause”, and the campos and places of Italy and France are idyllically described. Yet there is nothing idyllic about Cape Town Grand Parade described by Richard Stengel one vivid day in 1991 when Nelson Mandela got there straight from prison to tell the world, “Our march to freedom is irreversible.”
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
