Metropolitics

Occupy Mall Street?

Anthony Maniscalco — 2015-04-21T04:50:00Z

The quintessential suburb is home to the shopping mall, an indoor space of anchor departments stores, small specialty shops and food courts. This multi-tiered site of commerce is sometimes repurposed as a senior exercise track, a meeting place for holiday festivities, or YouTube-inspired flash mobs. However, as Tony Maniscalco explains, coordinated efforts and legal precedents have curbed the possibility of freedom of expression and assembly at shopping malls.
When the suburban shopping mall

- Debates / consumption, public space, United States, property, suburbs, retail, commerce, shopping mall, First Amendment, assembly, supreme court

A Right to the Suburb? New Urbanism, Public Space, and the Law

Anthony Maniscalco — 2014-12-08T05:50:00Z

The American suburb is changing. It is racially and economically diverse. Its sterile spaces are being redesigned for more community life. And yet, even in the community spaces in redesigned suburbs, rights to free speech and protest are legally denied, as the spaces are still private. As our suburbs become more like cities, can we create genuine public spaces for politics?
No longer homogeneous bedroom communities or exclusively white, middle-class commuter enclaves, America's suburbs are

- Essays / public space, placemaking, United States, social justice, suburbs, New Urbanism, edge cities, protest