The question of what a community wants is at the heart of the Monument Project, but where does one find that data? In 2017, Farber and Lum worked with Sue Mobley, an organizer and researcher, and Bryan Lee, Jr., an architect and design activist, on Paper Monuments, a participatory design project in New Orleans. The people of New Orleans, Mobley explained, have a tendency to see themselves and their city as exceptional, overlooking the way that New Orleans reflects the same inequalities felt acutely throughout the American South. Mobley and her team posed similar questions to the ones that Farber and Lum had asked Philadelphians, about what new monuments people wanted to see. Predictably, many of the proposals were about culture—jazz, the Mardi Gras Indians, and other vestiges of New Orleans’s identity that are increasingly imperilled by gentrification. But many answers engaged with the deeper structures of civic life, Mobley said: “People were suggesting, ‘Tear down the statues. . . . but what I need is a police budget that’s half what it is.’ ‘What we need is health care, what we need are protections to voting rights.’ ‘What I actually need is a living wage for all. That’s my monument. That’s what I would propose.’ ”
Mobley was also in the midst of a separate research project that mapped the locations of protests in New Orleans. In the mid-nineteenth century, protests would take place at the headquarters of local political parties, the docks, or trade institutions. In the twentieth century, they took place in city squares and plazas. More recently, they’ve moved to the elevated highways. The two projects orbited the same set of questions about the politics of shared space. “What does it mean to try and create a demos that has room for all if inclusion is defined by ‘I get a statue, so you get a statue’ that breaks into further constituent parts?” asked Mobley. “Is there a way in which we can weave together and lift up what it means to occupy space together?”
From the perspective of the establishment, it would actually be easier to simply give everyone their own statue than to reckon with what it might mean to constitute a “demos that has room for all.” On June 5th, photos circulated of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted in fifty-foot-tall yellow capital letters along Sixteenth Street N.W., in Washington, D.C., near the White House. For many, this was a stunning and brazen rebuke of President Trump’s violent response to the Black Lives Matter protests. It turned out that Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., had commissioned it. The gesture came to seem hollow when D.C. activists pointed out that Bowser hadn’t cut the police budget at all. Within days, activists had added their own fugitive addendum, which would be harder to coöpt by the establishment: “DEFUND THE POLICE.”