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In January 2012, after months of trying to repress a vibrant and militant Occupy Oakland, city officials and the Alameda County District Attorney (DA) adopted a new tactic: they sought stay-away orders against a number of Occupiers at arraignment as a condition of pretrial release. These stay-away orders prohibited individual Occupiers from the plaza in front of City Hall, which Occupy Oakland had (re)claimed as a site of protest and democratic possibility, and were intended to force individuals out of the movement, the movement out of the plaza, or both. The stay-away orders did not go uncontested, as both the movement and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took action, and officials were compelled to justify the tactic to their progressive Bay Area constituencies. This paper examines the public discourse around the stay-away orders that these three sets of actors generated to trace how different notions of politics and the political were fleshed out in and through contestation.
Neither the stay-away orders nor Occupy Oakland can be fully understood without situating both within the broader transformations of urban life that have been ongoing since the late 1970s. As neoliberalism spurred the redevelopment of cities as sites of consumption, tourism, and financial investment, the management of (dis)order became a central preoccupation of municipal governments, and the latent but unrealized promise of cities as spaces of community, creativity, and democracy was further constricted (Davis 2006, Ferrell 2001, Harcourt 2001, Smith 1996). In downtown cores and other areas being similarly refashioned, quality-of-life policing targeted the homeless and other marginalized people, rendering them disreputable and disorderly (Amster 2008, Vitale 2008); stay-away orders criminalized their very presence (Beckett & Herbert 2010); and defensive architecture and environmental design further foreclosed space (Davis 2006, Ferrell 2001, see also Bickford 2000). The public came to be ever more narrowly defined, a sterile agglomeration of affluent consumers rather than an interactive, dynamic, agonal community-in-formation. As Mitchell (2003, 52) reminds us, however, the public has always been a contested category, and "excluded groups-women, workers, political dissidents, sexual minorities, and all those deemed by dominant society to be disorderly or unruly-have had to fight their way into public if they wanted to be heard (or sometimes even seen)." In order to vitalize and actualize a more...