In the wake of the Occupy movement, leading planners and social scientists examine public space today and freedom to assemble.

With urgency and clarity, Noam Chomsky speaks with the movement as it transitions from occupying tent camps to occupying the national conscience

The fight for a $15 minimum wage. Nationwide teacher strikes. Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and the rise of AOC. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Read how the Occupy movement helped reshape American politics, culture and the groundbreaking movements to follow. "Fluidly written . . . Levitin’s enthusiasm is infectious . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots changed a good deal more of the landscape than Zuccotti Park’s three-quarters of an acre in New York’s financial district." —Tod Gitlin, The New York Times Book Review On the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, Generation Occupy sets the historical record straight about the movement’s lasting impacts. Far from a passing phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of social and political transformation, reigniting the labor movement, remaking the Democratic Party and reviving a culture of protest that has put the fight for social, economic, environmental and racial justice at the forefront of a generation. The movement changed the way Americans see themselves and their role in the economy through the language of the 99 versus the 1 percent. But beyond that, in its demands for fairness and equality, Occupy reinvigorated grassroots activism, inaugurating a decade of youth-led resistance movements that have altered the social fabric, from Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock to March for Our Lives, the Global Climate Strikes and #MeToo. Bookended by the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Generation Occupy attempts to help us understand how we got to where we are today and how to draw on lessons from Occupy in the future.

In the fall of 2011, protestors gathered among the stone benches and neatly lined trees of an open plaza set between high-rise office towers in lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street movement would make international headlines and the world soon learned that plaza's name-Zuccotti Park. Frank Scala served as a police officer for twenty-three years, but decides to retire after the death of his wife. As the protests heat up, Frank sees a world changing before his eyes and struggles to hold on to the things he holds dear. Though Jen Scala is mourning the loss of her mother, she has found solace in a budding relationship with her classmate, Jamal. Jen's world is expanding and she sees her father Frank as nothing but a painful reminder of the past. She wants to move forward and the Occupy Wall Street movement provides a perfect place to start. Frank and Jamal each discover that searching for Jen leads them to uncomfortable truths about themselves. As a large group of protestors gathers to march across the Brooklyn Bridge, city officials scramble to keep order. A showdown is inevitable, with Jen caught in the middle. What proves to be a pivotal moment in the Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to be a turning point in their lives. Zuccotti Park is a moving story of ordinary New Yorkers caught up in social upheaval, personal grief, and the search for renewal.

Examines the Occupy Wall Street Movement in its first year in New York City, discussing its origins, organizers, beliefs that inspired its formation, and its impact on the media and the political status quo.

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.