Street Protest Architecture - Dissent Space in Australia

Hey Dave,
I've found a good article on street protest architecture which if worth having a look at. I've summarised some of the points the article raises below.

PROTEST STRUCTURES

- Protest structures help to bring human and domestic elements into public and political life.
- Protest structures are frequently misunderstood as the antithesis of architecture, but on the contrary, their architectural role in democratic cities is significant.
- In the avant guarde traditions of art, the case of experimental protest constructions is of interest because its suggests where our unsettled society may be going, rather that only where it has been.
-Protest architecture is not so much driven by the construction of materials and shelter as it is by the relations and tectonics of people and ideas. 


COLLAPSIBLE ARCHITECTURE

-The notion that architecture might be collapsible , tentative, and ephemeral (my new favourite word) developed especially in the political climate of the 1960s.
-In Paris in 1968, inflatables played a key role as architecture for protest
-The structure were theatrical, colourful and transportable, well suited to a new culture of mobile and global people's movements that came to a flashpoint in Paris in May 1968.

PROTEST ARCHITECTURE AS A DEMOCRATIC TOOL

-Hundreds of citizen of the comparatively affluent community of Perth had responded to a campaign including email and text-message communications to join the spontaneous protect march, only hours after the new allied bombing had started (IRAQ PROTEST)
-At the street level there are allegiances built by social justice communities and activist groups, coming together at meetings and rallies, supported by an enormous internet network available to the ubiquitous middle classes

Reclaim The Streets, King Street, Perth — 31 August 2002 (photos D Narbett/Perth Indymedia, copyleft, compiled by Gregory Cowan -- Perth's first Reclaim the Streets, marking and protesting Australia's non-participation in the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.)

RECONCILIATION PLACE AND PROTEST SPACE

- The Government of the time reacted quickly to pass new legislation to prevent camping in public space.....allowing the government to evict the peaceful protesters  (in response to aboriginal tent embassies)
-When in 2003, electrical power was cut off to the information office- one of the oldest parts of the tent embassy, the environmental group Greenpeace supplied Photovoltaic Panels to provide adequate energy. 
- Globaal activist groups such as reclaim the streets, critical mass, and space hijackers continue this idea, with ideas emanating from their ideological and activist centres through networks of virtual solidarity to the corners of the globe.
-The notion of justice both locally and globally is of interest to a large number of citizens in the modern city, despite the apparent lack of a place for these issues to be aired.

RECONCILING NOMADIC AND SEDENTARY CIVIC ARCHITECTURES

- activist spatial occupations of the city can be seen as attempts for the New Word city to reclaim the citizen expression of the freedom of the peripatetic and peregrine in the classical city.
-For there to be a freedom to walk (let alone dwell and protest) in a public space, there must be public spaces in which to wander, and a social belief in their importance.  
- Australian architecture is developing as an agency of protest occupations in public space. this model suggests a potentially valuable strategy for building the city by addressing the equilibrium of forces of the sedentary and the nomadic


SOURCE:
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2004/65/cowan.html