conflict occurs because “the inherently contested nature of public space reveals that it is never free from the risk of disorder, an observation that places democracy in conflict with the need for ‘order’ so that the capital should flow smoothly.”13 This struggle between democratic vibrancy and sovereign order is central to Margaret Kohn’s typology that divides space into the two categories of sovereign and populist space.14 Kohn’s conception of space, I argue, does not capture the significance of a third type of space—autonomous populist space – that represents a militant counter to non-autonomous populist space that I identify as representative populist space.

Types of Space: Sovereign, Populist, and Autonomous

There are those that oppose a grass-roots democratic understanding of public space, they argue that the chaotic nature of this type of space is a threat to order and stability, and as such the state must step in to regulate and control it, for the public good. Kohn defines this view of space as “sovereign.”15 According to Don Mitchell, this approach is

…one of open space for recreation and entertainment, subject to usage by an appropriate public that is allowed in. Public space thus constituted a controlled and orderly retreat where a properly behaved public might experience the spectacle of the City.16

This perspective accepts the Hobbesian conception of unitary sovereignty to assert “something is public if it is authorized by legitimate state institutions.”17 From the sovereign view, public space only exists as a construct of the state, and, therefore, only the state has absolute sovereignty in regulating and managing it. The sovereign view of public space has two features. “First,” according to Kohn,

it takes for granted the separation between the rulers and the ruled. Even when sovereignty is vested in representative assembly rather than a monarch, there is still a sense that public power is something distinct from the aggregate of citizen- subjects. The second feature is a consequence of the first. The state has a monopoly over legislating and enforcing the law and citizens have a responsibility to comply.18

The sovereign view, by framing the state’s monopoly over public space in combination with neoliberal dictates that support corporate economic power, tends toward a conception of the ordered City that, as Henri Lefebvre famously argued, values space with respect to its “exchange” rather than its “use-value.”19

13 “Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence,” Antipode 43:2 (2010), pp. 526, 528.

14 “Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space,” Perspective on Politics 11:1 (2013), pp. 99–110.

15 Ibid.

16 Don Mitchell, “The End of Public Space?: People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy,” Annuls of the Association of American Geographers 85:1 (1995), p. 115.

17 Margaret Kohn, “Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space,” Perspective on Politics 11:1 (2013), p. 101.

18 Ibid, 102.

19 The Production of Space (New York City: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992). [because you use direct quotes above include page numbers here.]

In effect, the sovereign view in most US cities means that the state orders public space for the benefit of economic interests and not for public good or resident use. The contemporary sovereign view pushes the City to develop as a sanitized City preferred by tourists, wealthy residents, and corporate interests. There are many examples of protests against the consumer city such as those by anti-gentrification activists against Google buses in San Francisco. These activists assert that San Francisco has embraced the tech-industry and transformed the City in a way that excludes poor, working class, and immigrant communities. Protests like this show a substantial resistance to the sovereign conception of the City, and to corporate controlled public space more generally. The tension between democratic and top- down understandings of space regularly leads to conflicts and contention.

Margaret Kohn and Don Mitchell, amongst others, have noted that the restrictive vision of sovereign space often provides an impetus for oppositional movements such as Food Not Bombs. To participants in resistance movements, reclaiming public space allows for contesting the political exclusions that plague the political system. When the order of sovereign space breaks down, what erupts is, according to Kohn, “populist” space that “signals the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state.”20 This conception of space is collectively constructed and extra-parliamentary; “because aggrieved citizens can express the intensity of their discontent through protest and non-compliance, the government is forced to negotiate and compromise, thereby incorporating the people’s desires into the law.”21 In effect, to Kohn, populist space exists whenever a power from below reclaims public space and turns that space into a form of what Don Mitchell calls representational space. The defining feature of populist space then is its ability to make visible the excluded views and perspectives of the populace. An example of populist space is described in Mitchell’s work on the protests over Berkeley, California’s People’s Park. He asserts that the protests forced the University administrators and City officials to include the homeless in their political calculations and pressured the City to engage in negotiation with the activists in the park. While not all populist claims to space are the same, there is a fundamental difference between anarchistic occupations of a park and permitted rallies on a street corner.

Without an account of the tension between permitted and not permitted public protests, scholars such as Kohn and Mitchell miss the importance of autonomous claims in providing the militant edge to populist space. Jenny Pickerill and Paul Chatterton define autonomous spaces as, “those spaces where people desire to constitute non-capitalist, egalitarian, and solidaristic forms of political, social, and economic organization through a combination of resistance and creation.”22 Autonomous space, here, is inherently anti-capitalist, radically democratic, and resistant.23 The confrontational nature of autonomous space makes it different

20 “Privatization and Protest,” Perspective on Politics 11:1 (2013), p. 102.

21 Ibid, 103.

22“Notes Towards Autonomous Geographies: Creation, Resistance and Self-

management as Survival,” Progress in Human Geography 30:6 (2006), p. 1.

23

While to many this autonomous desire might be seen as utopian and inherently problematic—echoing Simon Springer’s reminder that democratically controlled public space is always on the precipice of disorder—it is an essential component of anarchist and radical homelessness politics. The desire for self-management is central to contemporary from traditional representational populist space, which is not inherently anti- capitalist or democratic, merely dissident. Autonomous populist space rejects the state’s authority to monopolize control over public space and is thus a direct refusal of the logic inherent in the sovereign definition of space. An autonomous view of space, unlike the representational populist conception, is not primarily concerned with appealing to governing elites, but in generating non-hierarchical, non-capitalist, user-based democratic spaces that serve as a counter institution to the state. Occupy Wall Street, for these reasons, created counter-institutions such as peoples’ assemblies, free schools, free libraries, and free medical clinics that represented anarchistic public space occupations as experiments in direct democracy. While political claims or demands are made during such occupations, the goal is not to get a seat at the decision table, but to reject the idea that decisions should be made behind closed doors. Overall then, autonomous claims should not be seen as separate from populist space. Because autonomous politics embraces the anarchist idea of “propaganda by the deed,” these actions are meant to represent the anarchist vision and while utopian, they also are intended to communicate the needs, wants, and demands, of the people involved. In order to account for these additional dynamics of public space, a third category needs to be added to Kohn’s typology to include sovereigntist, representational populist, and autonomous populist.

Creating this separation between representational and autonomous forms of populist space is important in order to develop a more complete understanding of how political resistance operates. This separation is increasingly needed because the majority of populist protests accept protest permits that tie them to the logic of sovereign space, complicating their claims to public space. In doing so, the goal of populist space collapses into merely being a space for representation; its political demand becomes simply a call for political acceptance and inclusion. This view, however, is problematic for protest movements because state agencies and police forces desire negotiation and inclusion as clearly illustrated by police forces usage of “negotiated management” in the USA and Europe. Negotiated management seeks to create ties between police and protest groups, commonly through a lengthy permitting process in which representatives from the police and activists negotiate time, place, and restrictions for actions.24 The police rely on direct communication with protestors as a means of collecting information about protesters, and use the negotiation to tailor protests (in terms of location, size, etc.) to better ensure social control and stability. For groups that negotiate with them, police commonly provide concessions. “When they properly apply the model,” Luis Fernandez explains, “police offer movement leaders concessions in exchange for an agreement to self-police and to outline the scale, route, and timing of demonstrations.”25 The goal of negotiated management then is to delimit the space for protestors to engage in symbolic political protest, which limits Footnote 23 continued anarchist politics, as seen by contemporary anarchism’s push for participatory workplaces, direct democratic political organizing, and cooperative living. 24 John McCarthy and Clark McPhail, “The Institutionalization of Protest in the United States,” in Sidney Tarrow (ed.) The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 83–110. 25 Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-Globalization Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p, 13. disruption to social, political, and economic sites. Negotiated management seeks to incorporate and institutionalize protesters as a way to pacify and regulate them. In effect, negotiated management is a form of interaction between protesters and the state that does not question the unequal power relations between the two sides. When protesters negotiate on the state’s terms, they do so from a very disadvantaged position because they lack political leverage with which to pressure the state. Instead of being fair and equal negotiations in which the protest movement makes demands of the state, this situation is more commonly defined by protest movements conceding to the demands and interests of the state for fear of government repression. I argue that successful autonomous populist movements threaten the state and, therefore, when they negotiate or interact with the state, they do so from a better political position and, therefore, can make strong political demands. Now, we turn to how San Francisco Food Not Bombs, an autonomous political movement, conflicted with the Art Agnos administration in San Francisco. This narrative highlights three issues: the role of permits and negotiated management by the City as an attempt to control and regulate public space, the power of autonomous movements to open up political space that would otherwise be closed, and the political impact of contested space on local urban politics. Setting the Scene: Agnos and the State of Politics in San Francisco 1988–1991 Art Agnos, a former California Assembly member, entered the 1987 San Francisco mayoral campaign as the most progressive candidate in the race. He ran on his longstanding support of women’s, labor, and environmental rights as a progressive California Assembly member. During the 1987 campaign, Richard Deleon claimed that Agnos appealed directly to the three segments of the political left in San Francisco: social liberals, environmentalists, and political populists.26 Agnos was elected mayor on his progressive credentials, but the realities of San Francisco municipal politics strained his progressive coalition. Under the previous mayor Diane Feinstein, San Francisco had experienced ten years of pro- growth urban development, which had rendered San Francisco one of the most thoroughly gentrified cities in the country by the mid-1980s.27 As an example of gentrification privileging the requirements of the urban elite over the needs of low-income people, the number of single occupancy hotel rooms Citywide was cut nearly in half from 1975 to 1988, while the number of upscale hotel rooms nearly doubled.28 Likewise, urban redevelopment at the Yerba Buena Center and in the Mission district expanded office space and new middle- class condos while destroying over 10,000 low-income apartments and single occupancy rooms.29 The low-income units were never rebuilt and the condos that 26 Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco 1975–1991 (Wichita: University of Kansas Press, 1992), p. 91. 27 Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (1987), pp. 129–147. 28 Chester Hartman and Sarah Carnochan, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 368. 29 The Yerba Buena Center and the A-1and A-2 redevelopment plans of the 1970s radically altered the landscape of the City. These two plans changed the Mission district community by displacing thousands of Filipinos as well as other immigrant communities in replaced them are deeply implicated in the exponential rent increases in San Francisco. Feinstein’s neoliberal policies not only shrunk the availability of low- income housing, but also seriously stressed the City’s coffers, leaving Agnos to inherit a budget shortfall of $172 million.30 Even though these problems were not his doing, Agnos was unable to deflect blame for the City’s budget problems. San Francisco Examiner columnist Bill Mandel named Agnos “the Velcro mayor” because everything stuck to him.31

The Agnos administration’s Beyond Shelters proposal was one of its most ambitious programs to deal with the City’s homeless. Agnos had campaigned to address structural causes of homelessness humanely by shifting away from the shelter system model toward developing low-income housing. The program would have also expanded the availability of job training, mental health services, and addiction recovery programs. By the end of his term, the only major development for the City’s homeless was, ironically, the development of two new shelters. Agnos also spearheaded several punitive policing campaigns against the homeless. In 1988, he revived a 1972 City ordinance against “car camping” in an attempt to remove homeless people from the Haight district. He also revived a forgotten nineteenth-century City ordinance against “lodging,” (known as section 647[i]), which made lying down with “gear” illegal. Under this ordinance, falling asleep under blankets or sleeping bags could result in citation and arrest for illegally “lodging” in public. Finally, toward the end of his term, Agnos began using the police to sweep City parks of homeless.32 Agnos, as Richard DeLeon suggests, had neither the patience nor the power to enact his progressive agenda, pursuing instead “the path of least resistance.”33 Instead of listening to and working with the City’s grass-roots sectors as promised, Agnos continued Feinstein’s neoliberal development policies and gentrification projects. Presuming that urban development easily created jobs and increased revenue to the City, Agnos abandoned his platform of neighborhood and community diversity and respect, as well as his promises to reform the City’s homelessness policies. This led to Agnos being viewed “as a bait-and-switch political con artist who got himself elected as a slow-growth progressive but then governed the City as a pro-growth liberal.”34 Agnos saw his coalition fall apart as two members of his former coalition ran against him in 1991, and neither candidate endorsed him in his run-off election against conservative Democrat Frank Jordan. Progressives in San Francisco saw Jordan, the former police chief running as a pro-business, pro-development candidate, as no worse than their former “golden boy” Art Agnos. Footnote 29 continued order to build a new business center and shopping area. During the 1970s these plans were front and center in the struggle over gentrification in the City. 30 Hartman and Carnochan, City for Sale, p. 256. 31 Quoted from Ibid, p. 257.

32 Hartman and Carnochan. City for Sale, p. 378. 33 Left Coast City, p. 159. 34 Ibid, 158.