Sorry for the infrequent posting these days, just extremely busy right now but will have some exciting announcements in the coming days. In the meantime there is an exhibition showing right now at the Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis that I wouldn’t mind checking out if by some random fortune I found myself bumbling around the streets over there any time soon. It is unlikely, in fact - it won't happen, but I will pass it on here nonetheless in case any of you readers out there do happen to find yourself bumbling around over there with nothing to do one day and find yourself overcome by some need to ponder the meaning of walls, as we like to try and do here on Subtopes.


“Dialogue on the Wall” is a project that’s been produced by architect Jay Isenberg who wanted to explore the separate yet intermingled narratives of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as told through the architectural dimensions of walls. Excellent.

From this magazine in St. Paul who spoke with Isenberg:

The idea of a wall as something other than a barrier springs from what Isenberg calls the “collision of two iconic architectures,” namely the separation wall between Israel and Palestine and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. “As an architect, the separation wall is a powerful and physical metaphor for so many issues of this conflict,” says Isenberg. “It serves as a visceral reminder of the power of ‘architecture’ to affect people’s lives.”
Here is the official Project Description:

Dialogue on the Wall, an architectural installation that incorporates multi-media and performance elements, explores the issues and competing narratives of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The centerpiece of the installation is a 10 foot high concrete-like wall built inside the gallery. Representing a portion of the controversial "Separation Wall" between Israel and the West Bank/Palestine/Occupied territories, this wall dramatically separates the gallery into two spaces, which are used for display, presentation, and performance. The installation is intended to question ideologies, challenge preconceptions, provoke thought and conversation and to demonstrate in a personal manner the nature of this intractable conflict. By hearing the voice and giving credence to the narrative and reality of the "other" there is hope for small steps toward reconciliation.
However, more interesting is what is revealed in this little blurb on Architect Magazine which mentions how Isenberg’s concept decidedly changed as the clashes and violence increased in Gaza. Forgive all of the quotations here, but as I have not seen this exhibit myself I will let others who have do the talking:

The concept was relatively simple for representing a region so inflamed: The gallery would be split into two spaces, with the voice and story of each group on its own side.

Then a clash among Palestinians in Gaza added a third dynamic. Isenberg shifted from symmetry and the “equal presentation of views” to an asymmetrical setup in which the wall becomes a dividing line between cacophony and contemplation, regardless of one's point of view. “Design always changes,” he says. “It becomes a collage of both sides intermingled.”
The same Architect mag article closes on a sentiment I myself share ironically enough given my apparent opposition to political walls and barriers of exclusions, architectures of control, walls of inexcusable division, etc. etc. etc.

Barriers, whether built by the Chinese, dedicated to the emperor Hadrian, or considered to block illegal immigration in the American Southwest, are paradoxical, Isenberg argues. They create likable serpentine patterns. “Visually, if you pull out the political connotation, these things in the landscape are quite beautiful,” he says.
Okay, now that I have essentially copied and pasted every bit of info practically I could find out there written about this exhibition, if you have the opportunity go check it out, and yup, let us know what you think! (Man, I am waiting for someone to take me up on that challenge one day).

Links:
Dialogue on the Wall - Aug. 16–Sept. 15, at the Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis.
Review by Architect Magazine, Aug. 1, 2007.
Review by MSPMag, If These Walls Could Talk, Aug 2007.
The Architecture of Occupation / Dialogued Out (Thoughts by participating photographer Dennis Fox).

It's like one crazy word: ICON-ON-POSTOPOLIS! I like saying it, what can I say? So I finally got my hands on a copy of the current issue of ICON magazine that includes a sweet review of Postopolis! It’s hard to believe it’s already been three months since we converged at the Storefront in Manhattan, having pulled off one of the most exciting weeks of my life.


Lamenting as I may be, it was a great rush of reminders and recollections to read this piece written by Bill Millard, who did indeed (as the article states) “lurk for a hot, noisy week” – so much so you could have easily mistaken him for an inside organizer of the whole thing. Seriously, Bill didn’t miss a beat, he was on it the entire time with his notepad and sidebar inquiries, and I truly enjoyed talking with you Bill!
Definitely check out the article if you get the chance, it not only captures the essence of the tonality of Postopolis!, for which he writes, “is an assertion: it claims territory to organize, while democratizing an often jargon-plagued conversation,” but also the way it all went down.

“Appropriately, the pivoting perforations of Storefront’s façade brought Manhattan’s noise, grit and punishing heat directly into the pie-slice-shaped gallery, making Postopolis! the anti-thesis of an academic conference in an antiseptic hotel ballroom. Hearing speakers over vehicle noise was daunting the first day, an acceptable nuisance by the second and an enjoyable bit of local colour by mid-conference.”

No question, the Storefront was the perfect place for Postopolis! and any architectural blogosphere’s Woodstock part two will have a tough act to follow in any other location. That said, wherever ‘Blogstock II’ takes place I know you will be there Bill and so I will see you then!

(Oh, and don't miss while you are browsing the mag, which is a landmark 50th issue edition, a mini-manifesto written by Geoff, one of our co-conspirators from BLDGBLOG. And, incidentally, the Storefront is preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary, so if you are in NYC towards the end of September, go go go! Thanks again Bill!)

[Image: Photo: LATWIDNO (Land access to which is denied no one) / Sarah Lewison and Erin McGonigle, from Just Space(s), 2007.]

My friend Nick Brown along with Ava Bromberg is organizing what's going to be one of the coolest exhibitions in Los Angeles, as in there could be very few other events that would be able to rival this one in terms of relevance to our very own little project here on Subtopia.
Framed by a concept of Just Space(s) the show is an attempt to unravel how injustice is inbred in space and where activist and artistic practices can intersect in the social production of just spaces instead. Taking its cue from a special volume of Critical Planning (UCLA Journal of Urban Planning, volume 14, summer 2007) the exhibition “aims not merely to show what is unjust about our world, but to inspire visitors to consider what the active production of just space(s) might look like. Most importantly, it asks a crucial question: How do we move from injustice to justice exactly where we stand – in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond?”

Just check out this list of Exhibition Projects >>>

The Corrections Documentary Project (Ashley Hunt) /// Million Dollar Blocks (Spatial Information Design Lab) /// However Unspectacular: A New Suburbanism (The Center for Urban Pedagogy) /// Detroit's Underdevelopment (Adrian Blackwell) /// The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy) /// Syracuse City Hunger Project Maps (Syracuse Community Geography) /// LATWIDNO - Land access to which is denied no one (Sarah Lewison and Erin McGonigle) /// The Black Sea Files (Ursula Biemann) /// Political Equator (Teddy Cruz) /// Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity (CampBaltimore) /// Invisible5 (Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, and Kim Stringfellow) /// Public Green (Lize Mogel) /// UTOPIA-dystopia (Los Angeles Poverty Department) /// disOrientation Guide (Counter-Cartographies Collective) /// Public Access 101 - Malibu Public Beaches (Los Angeles Urban Rangers) /// Spatial Justice for Ayn Hawd (Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens) /// M* of Bethlehem (Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri ) /// The New Yorkers' Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs (Friends of William Blake) /// Secret Military Landscapes and the Pentagon's "Black World" (Trevor Paglen) /// Water Station Maps and Warning Posters (Humane Borders and No More Deaths) /// Spiral Lands (Andrea Geyer) /// Host Not Found: A Traveling Monument of the Suppression of Search (Markus Miessen and Patricia Reed) /// A People's Guide to Los Angeles (Laura Pulido) /// Spatializing Labor Campaigns (Service Employees International Union) /// Up the Ridge (Appalshop's Holler to the Hood) /// Best Not to Be Here? (Marie Cieri) /// Principles of Unity (Right to the City Alliance) /// RFK in EKY (Appalshop and John Malpede) /// A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience (Rosemary Gibbons and Dax Thomas - Boarding School Healing Project) /// Dakota Commemorative March (Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and David Miller)

Just Space(s) exhibition and symposia starts next month on September 26 at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and will continue to November 18, 2007.
If you get the chance, you know what to do. This looks Awesome. I’m going to try and swing through at some point. Congrats Nick!

A few days ago I came across an AP news piece with a headline that read some 30 Iraqi judges have been killed in Iraq, underscoring need for tight security. The solution, we read, is a “new heavily secured justice complex in eastern Baghdad” better known as The Rule of Law Complex “that began operating last month” and is further described as a “mini-Green Zone” for judges, investigators and their families who are trying to avoid being the target of violence.


[Image: The Rule of Law Complex in Baghdad, photo by Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times.]

But, if the new U.S. Embassy Compound (or, “Fortress Baghdad” as it’s been called) and the massive urban squat that is the real Green Zone hunkered in the heart of Iraq’s capital city isn’t symbolic enough already of how the super-imposition of democracy and a “rule of law” is failing in the region, then should this new justice compound in the neighborhood of Rusafa really give us any confidence?
I mean, how can we not be skeptical of any measure of justice in Iraq right now? The fact that it declares itself the “The Rule of Law Complex” makes me even more curious about the ironic mechanisms of justice that are being practiced there. How is it being administered, from what political vantage?


[Image: The Rule of Law Complex in Baghdad, photo by Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times.]

Looking at the place we are reminded of how prototypical it appears of the kinds of militarized installations that have emerged from the war on terror. Who wouldn't easily mistake this place for Guantánamo Bay, or even one of those tented immigration facilities along the border in Arizona or Texas? Could Giorgio Agamben have been any more accurate when he said the camp has become the definitive spatialization of contemporary politics today?
Given the rampant sprawl of global squatter settlements, refugee communities, homeless encampments, illegal immigration detention facilities, and various other nomadic urbanisms associated with the hyper flows of mass migration, it would appear the world’s counter to rapid urbanization is one of informal and reciprocal campification.
I found a great reading of the above photo by John Lucaites, a professor of rhetoric, culture and American studies at Indiana University, who posted this to his website No Caption Needed (forgive the massive quote here):
The real question posed by the photograph is who is doing the watching? And what are they seeing—what exactly does the rule of law look like? What does it envision? For the rule of law to gain the traction necessary to a functioning constitutional democracy in Iraq, one might imagine that the most important viewers here would be Iraqi citizens, though what exactly they might need to see in order to coach their trust in an imperial and imposed legal system is not easy to know from our ethnocentric, Judeo-Christian, judicial world view. But this photograph seems to tell a different story, with a different purpose in mind. The viewer is decidedly western, not Iraqi, and the goal has less to do with creating identification with the rule of law than with reinforcing western attitudes concerning the uncivilized and threatening conditions of a world “plagued by suicide bombers and renegade militias.” Note, for example, that the camera is positioned along a west-to-east axis, with Central Baghdad sitting to the west of the complex (a point emphasized by the NYT reporter). The viewer is thus literally situated to see from a western perspective. But more, the viewer is framed figuratively by a modernist aesthetic that incorporates many of the conventions that anthropologist James C. Scott affiliates with “seeing like a state.” The image is shot from a high angle and at some distance from the event, thus encouraging the perspective of a neutral spectator who can neither be harmed by nor affect the action unfolding below. Such distancing separates the viewer from the scene both physically and emotionally, substituting a topographical perspective that encourages the rational and strategic calculation of actions and events, rather than an emotional identification with either. The appeal to a strict, instrumental rationality is further invoked by the functionalist and stark geometrical design of the complex, underscored by the trajectory and perspective of the fence as it draws our line of sight to the distant and barely visible Baghdad.
The photograph thus locates the “rule of law” within a western perspective for modern eyes. One might even imagine the nineteenth-century American frontier with military forts used to protect “settlers” from the threat of indigenous forces in the “march of the flag” ever westward. The flag now marches in a different direction, but the conclusion seems obvious: Their present is our past! We can only wonder how far the analogy will extend.
More recently the New York Times (referred to in the above excerpt) ran a good story describing this new legal enclave set up to propel the process of trying Iraqi criminals, which at the time the story was run housed 12 Iraqi judges and 4 police investigators with their families, while also storing close to 5,000 detainees (15 to a cell) – that is already double its intended capacity due to increased apprehensions from the surge. The article also tells us how most rulings are based on confessions alone usually with little evidence, while the administration itself is even racked by internal sectarian riffs amongst investigators and judges. Nevertheless, skepticism of actual justice seems to run all the way through this legal enclave.


[Image: The Rule of Law Complex in Baghdad, photo by Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times.]

However, from my measly perspective here, beginning to truly understand how politics and space are inseparably linked and together embody both spaces of actual built environment as well as political agency, what do installations like this one suggest about the political architecture at work in Iraq? How can we gage the efficacy or ethical value of the juridical logic that is building upon itself and whose aim is ostensibly to unite Iraq when looking at such structures? If these sites are any indication of the governing logic what is the nature of justice the American project is trying to hatch in the Middle East?


[Image: The Rule of Law Complex in Baghdad, photo by Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times.]

While I certainly don't pretend to have any resolutions, for the purposes of this blog I am merely interested in the ways structure, architecture, and spatial practice can provide a prismatic glimpse into the political logic of those authoritarian forces that produce such spaces. So far, in this scenario it looks like “justice” can only be delivered from behind the blast proof walls of a kind of futuristic retro-medieval fortress that is constantly under attack, ultimately out of place and suspended in a sea of political violence for which itself seems to instigate. Or, “justice” is met through these other types of swift and hidden canopies that are guarded by buffers of razor wire fencing and armed guards where the judges themselves are the ones in the crosshairs. Either way, the overarching logic seems desperate at best.
This Rule of Law Complex, according to the piece in the New York Times, is part of an effort to establish “a network of legal complexes” through out Iraq – a kind of hidden archipelago of judicial enclaves. There is currently a new complex being built in the capital of Anbar Province in Ramadi, a new Central Criminal Court in Baghdad which “is expected to conduct about 5,000 trials this year”, and a new courthouse compound is being built in Rustafa in addition to the Rule of Law Complex which will remain in use funded by $49 million dollars in American support.


[Image: The Rule of Law Complex in Baghdad, photo by Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times.]

I honestly don’t know what to make of this place. On one hand I try to see it as a legitimate attempt for the Iraqi government itself to bring justice to one of the most tragic places on earth. But, in my own cynical distortions I can’t help to imagine a future global landscape slowly becoming more and more populated by this roving network of militarized tent cities, rounding up thousands of assorted “terrorist suspects” every day – linking them through some minimally publicized court system within a larger fragmented geography of “mini-Green Zones” and armored ‘Rule of Law Complexes’ perpetually on the prowl. Prodded by a so-called 'Long War (On Terror)' they become increasingly autonomous and less tethered over time, meandering in complete disregard for national and political boundaries, stealthily ballooning on strategic hilltops, in secret valleys, catching, detaining and sentencing terrorists over night. Altogether, expanding this greater amorphous Green Zone of spatial exception that creeps along in a spotty connection of spawned fortresses, temporary courtrooms, and nomadic detention sites, fanning out towards an elusive geopolitical border.

Also:
carceral urbanism: CMU and the Arab round up
A Mini-city for Trying Terror
Guantánamo and the Border Exodus

This is way over due, but - like most of this stuff, never too late. Here is a quick and dirty visual guide to the militarization that was practiced at the recent G8 Summit in Germany earlier this year, with some grafted captions.


Martin Krenn took this photo and tells us,“For the Group of Eight summit, Heiligendamm was turned into a high-security fortress. 7.5 miles long and 8 feet tall, a fence was designed to protect the leaders of the world’s eight richest countries. The G8 summit in Heiligendamm costed a round 92 million euros just for security.”

Angela adds: “Heiligendamm takes its name – “holy dam” – from parables which seek to mark the victoriousness of Christianity and, it might be added, do so as the theological rendition of borders, specifically the borders of a Western, Christian Europe. Depending upon which legend one prefers, a shepherd triumphed over the devil in a wager, or the dam miraculously rose up against floods through the prayer of monks. Much more remains to be said here, not least about the theologisation of the political. But, in turning over these confluences and their significance, the most obvious question is of the continuing expression of an ostensibly ‘European’ politics in anti-summit discourses.”


[Image: Workers clean the security fence in the sea near Heiligendamm. The fence was 12 kilometers long and 2.5 meters high, surrounding the whole village and sealing off the beach of the Baltic Sea. (AP Photo/Thomas Haentzschel)]







Here are even some maps of how the area was ringed off with walls, coastal patrols, buffer zones, armored personnel carriers, trucks with water-cannons and police helicopters.




For lots of good coverage, see these resources:
Fence, heavy security at G8 summit in Germany evokes memories of Iron Curtain
The Blockade of Heiligendamm by Boris Kagarlitsky
G8, Heiligendamm 2007 - A flickr stream by djcampfighter
G8 Protest: Summit Blockaded From All Sides - Indymedia UK
G8 Blockade Occupies Road - (Gate 2 Shut Down!) - Indymedia UK
Final demo in Rostock.- Indymedia UK
Tons of YouTube videos here including this one.

[Image: Artist Tirzo Martha in the NY Arts Mag.]

A LITTLE GEOPOLITICAL MIXOLOGY

Beyond Moses and Jacobs // Sorry, Thomas Friedman, the World Is Round // Poor people are not a threat to social order : The real threat comes from attempts to expel them from the city // Squatter War a comin' in Metro Manila? // Brazil: the shadow of urban war // °Objects of aid // The Pentagon as Global Landlord (Nick Turse) // When Anthropologists Go to War // In the Lawless Post-Katrina Cleanup, Construction Companies Are Preying on Workers // FEMA Knew Of Toxic Gas In Trailers // Can The Corps Correct Its Mistakes? // Engineers to Test Flood Defenses In New Orleans // Disaster Planning Is Critical, but Pick a Reasonable Disaster // Israeli Apartheid // Maquilapolis (A Review) (Previously) // Responsibility and neo-liberalism // Arctic Warfare Heats Up: Canadians Step In (Updated)



[Image: Ironic Sans has a roundup of logos for terrorist groups, clustered into graphic categories: Stars, One Gun, Two Guns Crossed, Other Weapons Crossed, Crossbones, Animals with Multiple Heads, and Other. (via Boing Boing).]

IRAQ, THE WAR ON TERROR (and a few things in between)

Iraq's Long, Winding Supply Lines; Crisis Looms for Iraq's Grid, Water Systems // Video Tours of Baghdad // Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More? // Iraq Is About to Become a Lot Worse // 1000 contractors 'reported' dead in Iraq // A U.S. Planner's Experience In Iraq // Basra Doctors Strike Demanding Protection for Their Families and Themselves // Carnage from the Air and the Washington Consensus // Airship vs. A-bomb // Lebanon's Compounded Tragedy // In pictures: Rebuilding Lebanon // Terrorist logos: graphic design // Oklahoma offers Global War on Terrorism license plates // Good intro to Swarm Theory // Agent-Based Modeling of Irregular Warfare (ABMIW) // Knowing the Enemy // The Twelve Step Program for Terrorists (Updated) // The Pentagon Sends Messengers of Apocalypse to Convert Soldiers in Iraq // I Guess the War on Terror Is Indeed Eternal // On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism // A very private war // Terrorism on the Rise (NYT Maps) // Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities //



[Image: Camera Silens.]

TOWARDS A PERPETUAL SURVEILLATOPIA

New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown (Schneier) // Newark Unveils New Surveillance Program // S.F. public housing cameras no help in homicide arrests // Watching cities in 4D // Global Biometric Border Checks // Pentagon Plots Digital "Crystal Ball" to "See the Future" in Battle // Dual Use // °Morale // Five Ways Bush's Era of Repression Has Stolen Your Liberties Since 9/11 // Camera Silens // Security firms working on devices to spot would-be terrorists in crowd // Interest in Post-9/11 Security Technology Diminishes // DARPA Vision: "Unblinking" Spy Drones, Veggie-Powered Killer Bots // Radar Bankshots for All-City Surveillance // Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime? // In China, a high-tech plan to track people // US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists // How Bush Gained the Power to Spy on You without Security Justifications // Privatized Panopticon



[Image: Arms Control Wonk diagnoses the secret nuclear infrastructure in Iran.]

FURTHERMORE, MILIT_URB(S)

Army Energy Answer: Inflatable Domes (also) // The Precision Container Air Delivery System (PCADS) // Tunnels Near Natanz (Iran) // Vaux-le-Vicomte in the DMZ // 10-foot-deep trench will protect Iraqi city of Karbala (more) // Hizballah lays cable to own local comm network // Sentinels at Sea // Squirrel Spies: a Nutty Story // Airport lines for security even longer // SFO to add airport security express lane for approved travelers // Half Billion Dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad 'Not Big Enough'?; Video: Slave Labor Builds U.S. Embassy? // Groom Lake Expands...and Prepares for UFOs (a related video) // Prora. // Stasi smell museum // Scar Tissue // The Island of Forgotten Diseases.

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[Mike Davis’ recent book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (which I relayed a bit several months ago when some extracts were published on the web) has been out for a while now. I still haven't read it, sadly - I still don't even own it. But, on Verso’s website (publisher) I came across this video interview with Davis which is worth the watch. (Check these links out for some more: (Two Parts of the Book Published on TomDispatch & Henry Ford Never Envisioned This: A Review by Ron Jacobs).]

The investigations of geographer and writer Stephen Graham show us a city not only caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual war between international military coalitions and their swarming counterparts, but a city that’s been reframed, re-imaged, as a strategic site in a larger geo-economic scheme for engineering the urban machinations of control that are necessary to secure the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the globe.
Absolutely critical research, as far as I am concerned.
Back in April, just a few months after Subtopia launched and began to pick up steam, Steve and I quickly made contact at which time he told me he was working on a new book titled Cities Under Siege: the “new” military urbanism.
Needless to say, I was sold on the title alone, but as a prelude, I read a brilliant book he edited a couple of years ago – Cities, War, and Terrorism – and was blown away by its framework for observing modern conflict in the context of urbanization, and how frictions in global politics are turning cities into stages for warfare and geopolitical struggle – towards an urban geopolitics as he aptly subtitled the book. It’s a seminal read for anyone interested in conflict as a kind of spatial system.
Of a handful of people we might consider to be the true thinkers around a military urbanism Steve is certainly one of the most important. With a dual background in urban technology and city planning his range of research is diverse and daring, utterly contemporary, and he has a fierce list of publications deconstructing the hyper-landscape of this subject – a great inspiration for our endeavors here, to be sure.
So, continuing my conversation with bad-ass geographers and picking up perhaps where Neil Smith and I left off, Steve and I shared this exchange over the last few weeks. This is the first of two parts that explores a spectrum of militarization and the nature of urban space as a product of war and political violence. He also traces for us some of the evolution of this “new” military urbanism that he's developing further in his book Cities Under Siege due out sometime next year.
I have to say I am really psyched about this and want to thank Steve again for having taken such time and for all his continued support of Subtopia.


• • •
[Bryan Finoki] To begin, I am wondering how you conceptualize the Global City and its military role in expanding global capital. I am also interested in the opposite notion, of how cities can be inherently resistant to imperialism rather than acting as mere pistons for the expansion of capitalist development.

[Stephen Graham] Global cities, as the key nodes in the transnational architectures of neoliberal capitalism, are vitally important militarily. They organize the financialization and production of space (London, for example, basically controls the financial architectures of large swathes of Africa and the Middle East). They orchestrate the extending dominance of neoliberalism. They serve as key hubs in the lacing of the world through transnational control, transport and logistics infrastructures. And, they are of course preeminent symbolic spaces for transnational capitalism, making them vulnerable as symbolic targets.

But, as you say, global cities, like all cities, are porous and mixed up spaces, and amount to an infinite variety of space-times way beyond those of the financial core, the logistics function, or the power of the state. The diasporic communities and social movements that are most actively contesting neoliberal capitalism all work through, and within, what geographer Peter Taylor has called, the ‘World City Network.” This is the idea that it is an integrated network of world or global cities that together orchestrates the geographies and political economies of neoliberal capitalism (see GaWC: Globalization and World Cities).

[Bryan Finoki] And, of course, with a network of global cities comes a corresponding expansion of militarism. Much of your work deconstructs the ways and processes that militarism has become increasingly blurred in the heightened security of the western city. How does this domestic militarization of space mirror that occurring in the bombastic urban sprawl of the underdeveloped world? Aren’t both of these geographies exhibiting more and more similar urban complexions that would suggest no place in this century is exempt from being readied for war?

[Stephen Graham] I think so. The global mixing in today’s world renders any simple dualism between North and South, or Developed and Developing, very unhelpful. Instead, it’s more useful to think of transnational architectures of control, wealth and power, as passing through and inhabiting all of these zones but in a wide variety of ways. Extreme poverty exists in many ‘developed cities’ while enclaves of supermodern and high-tech wealth pepper the cities on South East, Southern and Eastern Asia.


[Image: A map of IDF checkpoints that extend a matrix of control through out the West Bank.]

Militarised geographies of (attempted) control are fully inscribed into the construction, maintenance and extension of these archipelago geographies. Take, for example, the militarized borders and surveillance systems which organize the relationship between foreign, ‘free’ trade and export processing zones and the ‘outside’. Or the relationship between gated communities, privatized public plazas, ‘security’ zones or airports, and the ‘normal city ‘outside’. In all these cases we see the emergence of new urban borders where control architectures and technologies are used to try and force the flows of the city through ‘obligatory passage points’ where they can be scrutinized and, if possible, identified.

[Bryan Finoki] Even though perhaps these ‘obligatory passage points’ have always been a part of capital’s fabric and are now just fulfilling their role at a time of hyper-urbanization and migration through an embedded pattern of urban bordering, I feel like we have entered the age of the checkpoint, both symbolically with the mechanisms monitoring the global flows of capital but also literally with the proliferation of military checkpoints.
Which sort of leads me to my next question: I’m fascinated by how your work traces a spatial narrative of conflict and the morphology of the city as a kind of fossilization of political violence over time. Could you enlighten us with a brief history of the city in the context of violence?

[Stephen Graham] The histories of the city and of political violence are, of course, inseparably linked. As Lewis Mumford teaches us, security is, of course, one of the very reasons for the very origins of urbanization. The evolution of urban morphology, as you say, is closely connected to the evolution of the geographies and technologies of war and political violence: fortification and the bounding of urban space through defensive and aggressive architecture are especially central to this long and complex story. So, too, is the fortification of cities to the symbolic demonstration of wealth, power and aggression, and as the commercial demarcation of territorialities. The elaborate histories of siege craft, atrocity, the symbolic sacking and erasure of urban space, and cat and mouse interplay of tactics and strategies of attack and tactics and strategies of defence, are all central here. Much of the Old Testament, in fact, is made up of fables of attempted and successful urban annihilation. As Marshall Berman has argued, “Myths of urban ruin grow at our culture’s root.” Important, here, are the symbolic roles of urban sites as icons of victory, domination and political or religious regime change.


[Image: The remains of Cologne, Germany, the heart of Rhineland, after the bombing during WWII.]

All of this is fairly obvious. What fascinates me is that the histories of modern and late capitalist urban development tend to retreat from and obfuscate the continued centrality of cities as strategic sites within war and political violence. The obvious, physical, architectures of fortification have clearly left the city as it becomes ‘over-exposed’ – in Virilio’s terms – to the new optics and technics of transnational and Total War. Remaining fortifications, at that point, are reinscribed as tourist sites: reminders of a simple relationship between architecture and violence. And – at least until recently – nation states have clearly worked to construct and maintain their monopolies on political violence in a way that rendered cities as mere targets. This reached its apogee within the Cold War imaginaries of full scale nuclear Armageddon.

Partly because of these changes, the more stealthy and subtle relationships between modern urbanism and war, when discussed at all, now lurk more in the interstices of urban debate. Who recalls the obsession of CIAM and Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Radieuse’ with building ‘towers in the park’ not just as generators of a new machinic urbanism, or of the interplay of light and air, but as buildings that were both difficult to hit through aerial bombing and which would raise their inhabitants up above expected aerial gas attacks? Who remembers the role of nuclear paranoia in adding further momentum to the racialised politics of ‘White Flight’ in the USA during the 1950s? And who, in their architecture or planning training, are treated to courses on the roles of these disciplines as engines of destruction, annihilation, and politicised violence against those people and places deemed to be anti-modern, backward, unclean, or dangerous to the state, or the fetishised image of the emergent ‘global’ city?

These obfuscations mean that architecture and critical urbanism remain ill-equipped to deal with the way in which war and political violence are re-entering the city in the post Cold War world.


[Image: This is a cross-section of La Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier, one of his schemes for an Ideal City.]

[Bryan Finoki] Is it a general lack of awareness in academia and other fields of urban practice that prevents understanding these very types of repercussions inherent within the practice of the built environment? Or, is it emblematic of a deeper pervasive ignorance amongst architects and planners that don’t care to understand how the intrinsic political nature of their work may serve to hasten the racialization of the landscape, or the negative pathological effects of frenzied securitization? I mean, is it just a blatant refusal on the part of urban practitioners today to have a political conscience?

[Stephen Graham] Architects and planners are often still wedded to a heroic and positive self-image where their efforts necessarily work to render the world a better place. Construction and regeneration are the watch words: the inevitable destruction, erasure and political violence involved are obfuscated or taboo. This is linked to a poor understanding of the politics of urban space and their roles within projects of militarism and political violence.

Critical theorists Ryan Bishop and Gregory Clancey (2002, 64), recently suggested that modern urban social science in general has shown marked tendencies since World War II to directly avoid tropes of catastrophism (especially in the west). They argue that this is because the complete annihilation of urban places conflicted with its underlying, enlightenment-tinged notions of progress, order and modernisation. In the post-war, Cold War, period, especially, “The City”, they write, had a “heroic status in both capitalist and socialist storytelling” (66). This worked against an analysis of the city as a scene of catastrophic death. “The city-as-target” remained, therefore, “a reading long buried under layers of academic Modernism” (ibid. 67).


[Image: The Atomic Bombardment of New York, a painting by Chesley Bonestell.]

Bishop and Clancey also believe that this “absence of death within The City also reflected the larger economy of death within the academy: its studied absence from some disciplines [urban social science] and compensatory over-compensation in others [history]” (ibid.). In disciplinary terms, the result of this was that the ‘urban’ tended to remain hermetically separated from the ‘strategic’. ‘Military’ issues were carefully demarcated from ‘civil’ ones. And the overwhelmingly ‘local’ concerns of modern urban social science were kept rigidly apart from (inter)national ones. This left urban social science to address the local, civil, and domestic rather than the (inter)national, the military or the strategic. Such concerns were the preserve of history, as well as the fast-emerging disciplines of international politics and international relations. In the dominant hubs of English-speaking urban social science – North America and the UK -- these two intellectual worlds virtually never crossed, separated as they were by disciplinary boundaries, scalar orientations, and theoretical traditions. (see Bishop, R. and Clancey, G. (2003), “The city as target, or perpetuation and death”. In R. Bishop, J. Phillips and W.W. Yeo (eds.), Postcolonial Urbanism, New York : Routledge, 63-86.)


[Image: Ground view of Nagasaki before and after the bombing; 1,000 foot circles are shown. (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-MDH).]

[Bryan Finoki] Also, it seems the military itself is the quickest to make use of the connections between war and space, or even architectural theory, not only as a means for better strategizing their campaigns of urbicide and creative destruction, but perhaps also as a way to gain further legitimacy to their planning – hijacking the discourse of architectural urban theory to bolster the technical approvals of their surgical destruction of the built environment, no?

[Stephen Graham] Whilst Israeli military theorists have appropriated Deleuze and Guattari (see Eyal Weizman’s new book Hollow Land), most of the US military material about cities looks more like a high school urban geography class. (Even in Israel, this approach is now out of favour).

The level of debate here is very simplistic and recycles old stereotypes from Orientalist urban books like Spiro Kostof’s ‘City assembled’ (eg. Islamic cities have no real structure etc.). As far as I can see, there is a strong disconnect between the more theoretical treatments of military transformation and the challenges of ‘urban operations’.


[Bryan Finoki] Is the type of defensive urbanism we see today that attempts to bomb proof our skyscrapers and wall off different enclaves in Baghdad, merely a new iteration of an ancient strategy to fortify sovereignty – a postmodern medievalism, if you will – or, have we reached a completely new definition of ‘military urbanism’?
How do you distinguish ‘military urbanism’ from the “new” ‘military urbanism’?

[Stephen Graham] The ‘postmodern medievalism’ is a fascinating argument, I think. There is certainly a sense amongst military theorists of scrambling to look back at the proxy urban wars of colonialism – and elsewhere – to learn lessons that might help inform tactics in places like Baghdad.

However, I don’t think we really are going ‘back to the future’ in some simplistic way. Rather, political violence and war are being re-inscribed into the micro-geographies and architectures of cities in ways that, whilst superficially similar to historic defensive urbanism, inevitably reflect contemporary conditions. Important here, at the very least, are some important distinctions:
• The constant real-time transmission of video, images and text via TV and the ‘Net;
• The increasingly seamless merging between security, corrections, surveillance, military and entertainment industries who work continually to supply, generate, fetishise, and profit from urban targeting, war and securitisation;
• A proliferating range of private, public and private-public bodies legitimised to act violently on behalf of capital, the state, or ‘the international system’;
• The mass and repeated simulacral participation of citizens within spaces of digitised war, especially Orientalised video games produced by the military;
• The particular vulnerabilities of contemporary capitalist cities to the disruption or appropriation of the technical systems on which urban life relies. (These are caused by the proliferation, extension and acceleration of all manner of mobilities, the tight space-time coupling of the technical infrastructural flows that sustain ‘globalization’, and, more prosaically, the fact that modern urbanites have few if any alternatives when the fuel stops, the electricity is down, the water ceases, or the food and communication stops; or the waste is not removed);
• The ways in which borders and bordering technologies are emerging as global assemblages continually linking sensors, databases, defensive and security architectures and the scanning of bodies;
• The centrality of urbicidal violence or neglect to the new geographies of ‘primitive accumulation’ through which private military corporations and ‘reconstruction coalitions’ produce, and benefit from, what ‘disaster capitalism’ (Naomi Klein’s term) or “accumulation by dispossession” (David Harvey’s phrase) – whether in Baghdad or New Orleans; and
• The growing importance of roaming circuits of temporary securitised zones, set up and policed by cosmopolitan roaming armies of specialists, to encompass G8 summits, Olympics, World Cups, etc.
Added to this, we have new relationships emerging in the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced on the populations of colonised cities and lands, and appropriated back by States and elites to develop architectures of control in the cities at the “heart of empire.” Thus, biometric borders emerge around Fallujah before being inscribed into the world’s airline systems. The complex legal and architectural geographies of extra-territoriality, permanent exception, and privatised political violence are set out through the global system of establishing and securitizing off-shore trading and manufacturing enclaves before being implanted into the Palestine territories of the “war on terror’s” “archipelago of enclaves.” Israeli practice of ‘shoot on sight’ is directly imitated, following advice from the IDF, by UK counter-terrorist operations on the London tube after 7/7. And the Pentagon’s experiments in the tracking of entire urban traffic systems provide an input into the shift to ‘smart’ or ‘algorithmic’ CCTV in western cities.

All these connections, of course, are lubricated by the fact that it is the same corporate bodies that are driving forward both the new strategies of urban warfare in the Middle East and the ‘surveillance surge’ as part of the Homeland Security’s drive in the global North.


[Image: A photo prepared by U.S. Air Intelligence for analytical work on destructiveness of atomic weapons. The total area devastated by the atomic strike on Hiroshima is shown in the darkened area (within the circle) of the photo. The numbered items are military and industrial installations with the percentages of total destruction. (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-AEC).]

[Bryan Finoki] And I think that gets at the biggest important distinction between then and now. That is, the sheer capitalist industrial-complex nature of the defense economy that doesn’t just fortify the city to protect it from violence and war, but the global scale arming of nations and geo-economic restructuring of conflict zones that insure conflict will always exist, in order to profit off of the modern defensive measures that go into regulating these conflict zones. What do you think?

[Stephen Graham] I completely agree: these complexes don’t just celebrate and fetishise war and wholesale securitisation -- they need it. The deepening cross-overs between war industries and policing, event management, border control, urban security and entertainment work to permeate and normalize cultures of war and militarism in a way where traditional separations between the ‘inside’ of nations and the ‘outside’ increasingly fall away.

[Bryan Finoki] I know you have a new book you are working on (or a couple of new books actually), one of which is entitled Cities Under Siege. Could you tell us about that and how it departs from your previous work in your book Cities, War, and Terrorism?

[Stephen Graham] Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism will be a sole-authored book, published through a non-academic press (Verso), rather than, as with Cities, War, and Terrorism, an edited, academic text. I hope, therefore, to make it more coherent and accessible to the proverbial ‘lay’ audience that Verso can reach.

The book aims to expose the complex processes and politics through which western military doctrine is increasingly preoccupied with the micro-geographies, architectures and cultures of urban sites. In this sense, it is a further attempt in my effort to develop an explicitly urban rendition of critical geopolitical analysis that commenced within Cities, War, and Terrorism.


[Image: Israel hollows Lebanon with bombs in 2006.]

The main body of Cities Under Siege will raise a key set of dimensions to the urban ‘turn’ within western military doctrine, thinking and practice. It will address the powerful anti-urban imaginative geographies which tend to essentialize cities as Hobbesian sites of decay, hyper-violence and threats to political establishments. The book will also link this to a discussion of how ideologies of ‘battlespace’ within contemporary military doctrine -- whether it be the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA), ‘asymmetric warfare’, the ideas of ‘effects-based operations’ and ‘fourth generation warfare’, or, the Pentagon’s new obsession with the ‘Long war’ – which essentially amounts to the rendering of all terrain as a persistently militarised zone without limits of time and space. The other five chapters in the book will explore:
• The technophiliac dreams of omniscience and total surveillance that are so powerful within U.S. military discourse about cities;
• The ways in which state militaries like the U.S. and Israel routinely target essential urban infrastructures;
• The role of digital play and physical urban simulation within the ‘media-industrial-military-entertainment’ network;
• The importance of fantasies of erasing particular places through urbicidal warfare’, and
• The relationship between war and the increasingly militarised design and semiotics of automobiles.[Bryan Finoki] Wow, that sounds fascinating. What can I say, I can’t wait. I’m reminded of the work of Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets who describe in a recent book ‘City of Collision’ a ‘conflict urbanism’ as a diagnosis of Jerusalem and the types of flexible spatial configurations that have produced, in their words, “a city in a permanent state of destruction and reinvention, hostage to political planning, collective fear and physical and mental walls.” But, clearly this speaks more widely about the urban transformations that are happening in regions all over (as it sounds like Cities Under Siege also gets at) including the capitalist sanctums of the Northern hemisphere.
How has the military always exercised both a direct and indirect role in the urban design of cities? How can we gage the relationship between urban planners and military strategists today in the transformation of the contemporary western city?

[Stephen Graham] The Israeli experience, in terms of reorganizing the architectures of control in the colonised West Bank, launching permanent and’ preemptive’ military strikes against Palestinian and other cities, and in the intense securitizing of it’s own cities, is clearly the paradigmatic case of contemporary military urbanism. So, the constantly morphing geographies of Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, as important studies by people like Eyal Weizman, Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets and have demonstrated, are vitally important.

But these cases are much more than mere paradigmatic examples: they are exemplars that are being actively imitated and exported around the world. To a large degree, Israel’s economy is now a service-security economy which relies very much on selling its products, weapons and what we might call ‘military urbanism services’ to all comers. The shooting of the Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, on the London Underground on July 22nd, 2005, was the result of a direct imitation of Israeli ‘shoot to kill’ policy against suspected suicide bombers. The U.S.’s use of biometric borders, targeted assassinations, and D9 caterpillar bulldozers in Iraq were all directly brought in from Israel. And U.S. forces are working very closely with the Israeli military in undertaking their own urban warfare and training doctrine.

Regarding the military in exercising a direct or indirect role in the urban design of cities, the role has more often been indirect than direct. But a key trend now is for the U.S. military to become much more actively involved within ‘urban operations’ in U.S. cities, a trend which undermines the rulings of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which was designed to inhibit military operations within the continental USA. Now, U.S. forces have a strategic command for North America (Northcom). They regularly undertake urban warfare exercises and simulations in real U.S. cities, and they are increasingly blurring with the more militarized ends of the law enforcement agencies, creating a military-civil continuum rather than a binary separation. It is this continuum that directs the shaping of security zones, new checkpoints, and other defensive architectures in U.S. cities, along with major inputs from building regulation changes. This is happening along with important participation from architects, landscape architects, geographers, planners and urban designers on the contemporary challenges of urban securitisation. Added to this, though, are major coalitions of commercial actors such as insurance, real estate bodies, and what the ACLU has called the "Surveillance Industrial Complex." Also involved are transnational players like the organisers of major sporting events and political meetings who are keen to use each event as roaming experiments in state-of-the-art urban securitisation.

[Bryan Finoki] In a previous article of yours, From Space to Street Corners: Global South Cities and US Military Technophilia, you talk about how western post Cold War military analysis has depicted the processes of urbanization in the global south as “essentialized spaces” which are meant to undermine the high-technology of U.S. military power. Partially because western strategists had neglected urban warfare through out the Cold War in favor of a heavy reliance on the Air Force which had to essentialize another projection about ‘enemy space’, where cities weren’t battlefields but rather large scale targets – treating the battle space as object, if you will. But, I’m hoping you could further explain how the process of urbanization in the Global South is being recharacterized by the west in such a way that has allowed the U.S. military to retool their doctrine for greater technomilitarism and its use in guerilla warfare. Is it fair to say that the poor cities of the world are being re-imaged by the west specifically to justify a shift in military strategy and to legitimate a ‘Long War’?

[Stephen Graham] This is certainly a very important shift. Along with the portrayal of the ‘internal colonies’ of inner urban cores in U.S. or UK cities, or the Parisian banlieus, as Hobbesian spaces housing the dangerous, racialised other, military and security discourses about global south cities depict such places as essentialised, Hobbesian places of anarchy. One influential article by Richard Norton, for example, calls such places “feral cities” which threaten global capitalist order because they house massive populations, create social and political unrest, are often not governed in any formal sense, and provide breeding grounds for extreme ideologies. Fear of ‘failed cities’ thus seems to be even more powerful than fear of ‘failed states.’

A key writer in this vein is New York Times columnist, and self-styled urban warfare commentator, Ralph Peters. Peters’ military mind recoils in horror at the prospect of U.S. forces habitually fighting in the majority world’s burgeoning megacities and urbanizing corridors. To him, these are spaces where “human waste goes undisposed, the air is appalling, and mankind is rotting” (1996, 2). Here cities and urbanisation represent decay, anarchy, disorder and the post-Cold War collapse of ‘failed’ nation states. “Boom cities pay for failed states, post-modern dispersed cities pay for failed states, and failed cities turn into killing grounds and reservoirs for humanity’s surplus and discards (guess where we will fight)” (1996, 3).

Peters highlights the key geo-strategic role of urban regions within the post-Cold War period starkly: “Who cares about Upper Egypt if Cairo is calm? We do not deal with Indonesia – we deal with Jakarta. In our [then] recent evacuation of Sierra Leone Freetown was all that mattered” (1997, 5). Peters also candidly characterises the role of the U.S. military within the emerging neoliberal ‘empire’ with the USA as the central military enforcer (although he obviously doesn’t use these words – see Hardt and Negri, 2000). “Our future military expeditions will increasingly defend our foreign investments”, he writes, “rather than defending [the home nation] against foreign invasions. And we will fight to subdue anarchy and violent ‘isms’ because disorder is bad for business. All of this activity will focus on cities”.


[Image: An ironic symbol remains in tact in Saddam's crumbled palace just after the American Invasion following the aftermath of 9/11.]

Again, in synchrony with his colleagues, Peters sees the deliberate exploitation of urban terrain by opponents of U.S. hegemony to be a key likely feature of future war. Here, high-tech military dominance is assumed to directly fuel the urbanisation of resistance. “The long term trend in open-area combat is toward overhead dominance by U.S. forces,” he observes (1996, 6). “Battlefield awareness may prove so complete, and ‘precision’ weapons so widely-available and effective, that enemy ground-based combat systems will not be able to survive in the deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so many of history’s main battles.” As a result, he argues that the United States’ “enemies will be forced into cities and other complex terrain, such as industrial developments and inter-city sprawl” (1997, 4).

To Peters, and many other U.S. military commentators, then, it is as though global urbanisation is a dastardly plan to thwart the U.S. military gaining the full benefit from the complex, expensive and high-tech weapons that the military-industrial complex has spent so many decades piecing together. Annoyingly, cities, as physical objects, simply get in the way of the U.S. military’s technophiliac fantasies of trans-global, real-time, omnipotence. The fact that ‘urbanized terrain’ is the product of complex economic, demographic, social and cultural shifts that involve the transformation of whole societies seems to have escaped their gaze (see Peters, R. (1996), “Our soldiers, their cities”, Parameters, Spring, 1-7; Peters, R. (1997), “The future of armored warfare”, Parameters, Autumn, 1-9).

The supposed geographies of ‘feral’ global south cities certainly loom large in the imaginative geographies sustaining western military doctrine for urban areas. The physical and, electronic simulations being produced by western militaries to train their forces are increasingly including garbage dumps’, ‘shanty towns, industrial districts, airports,’ and subterranean infrastructures.

The key thing about western military operations in global south cities is that they force military groundedness in militaries that are much more comfortable trying to dictate things from the air using superior sensing and firepower. In Baghdad, high-tech western surveillance and targeting have not allowed U.S. forces to triumph over determined insurgents utilising very basic and old fashioned weapons and guerilla tactics. Instead, U.S. forces have had to go out on patrol through city streets. This has brought them into very close proximity with insurgents, who have been able to deploy ambushes, improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades to devastating effect.



A major response amongst U.S. military-industrial complex to try and reorganise the high-tech and technophiliac weapons and surveillance systems so expensively built up since the last days of the Cold war so that they directly address the needs to ‘situational awareness within the complex, 3d geographies of global south cities. Programmes with telling titles such as ‘Combat Zones That See’ and ‘Visibuilding’ promise to re-establish the dream of omniscient, distanciated and machinic vision for U.S. forces in cities, allowing them to once again withdraw physically from the killing power of their machines. Many dreams of robotised and automated high-tech warfare, permanently projecting perfect power into global south cities, are emerging here. The objective being to try and delegate the decision to kill to computer software embedded within networked weapons and sensors which permanently loiter within or above urban space automatically dispatching those deemed 'enemy'.

Take, for example, the thoughts of Gordon Johnson, the ‘Unmanned Effects’ team leader for the U.S. Army’s ‘Project Alpha’ – an organisation developing ground robots which respond automatically to gunfire in a city. If such a system can get within one meter, he says, “it’s killed the person who’s firing. So, essentially, what we’re saying is that anyone who would shoot at our forces would die. Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad would have to play with blood and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went up significantly […]. The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not” (Herbert, 2003, 3)


An even more fetishistic technophiliac fantasy of perfect power emanates from the Defense Watch magazine, in an article that appeared in 2004 in response to DARPA’s announcement that they were developing large scale computerised video systems to track the car movements in whole cities continuously. “Several large fans are stationed outside the city limits of an urban target that our [sic] guys need to take,” they begin:

“Upon appropriate signal, what appears like a dust cloud emanates from each fan. The cloud is blown into town where it quickly dissipates. After a few minutes of processing by laptop-size processors, a squadron of small, disposable aircraft ascends over the city. The little drones dive into selected areas determined by the initial analysis of data transmitted by the fan-propelled swarm. Where they disperse their nano-payloads.”

“After this, the processors get even more busy”, continues the scenario:

”Within minutes the mobile tactical center have a detailed visual and audio picture of every street and building in the entire city. Every hostile [person] has been identified and located. From this point on, nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical center. As blind spots are discovered, they can quickly be covered by additional dispersal of more nano-devices. Unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to selected targets to take them out, one by one. Those enemy combatants clever enough to evade actually being taken out by the unmanned units can then be captured of killed by human elements who are guided directly to their locations, with full and complete knowledge of their individual fortifications and defenses […]. When the dust settles on competitive bidding for BAA 03-15 [the code number for the ‘Combat Zones That See’ programme], and after the first prototypes are delivered several years from now, our guys are in for a mind-boggling treat at the expense of the bad guys” (2004, sic.)
[Bryan Finoki] Needless to say, the military urbanism of today is clearly less about walls and traditional fortifications (even though we have hardly stopped building them), but really about an entire logic of a production of space and an artificial intelligent system for organizing and policing that space; one designed for control; urban space as a completely new medium that is conducive to contemporary warfare. But, just as much, it seems this new spatial dimension of the ‘war on terror’ has also turned the city into a medium for insurgency – what does this suggest about the perceived enemy who is now no longer outside the gates, but also hiding within now?

[Stephen Graham] As with so much of urban life, the key now is seamless merging of systems of electronic tracking, tagging, surveillance and targeting into the architectonic and geographical structures of cities and systems of cities. The production of space within the ‘war on terror’ thus mobilises an intensified deployment of these sensors and systems – through global biometric passports, global port management systems, glocal e-commerce systems, global airline profiling systems and global navigation and targeting systems – within and through the securitising fabric of urban places. This is very much a Deleuzian and rhizomatic process which helps to sustain the breaking down of the traditional binary of ‘inside/outside’ for nation states and instead brings urban and socio-technical architectures of security into a range of globe-spanning and telescoping assemblages which continually perform urban life.

[Bryan Finoki] In addition to the global-span of these surveillance technologies, there is also a rampant boom in border fence construction today following, ironically enough, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not that these wall projects aren’t pushing the technological implications of peripheral national security, but I was curious of your assessment of the future of nationalism given this patterning of geopolitical border relations?

[Stephen Graham] Certainly architectures of control – architectonic and digital combined – are being mobilised with unprecedented scale in defence of national territoriality. But I think many of these projects are as much symbolic as practical. They are physical demonstrations that nation states can control global flows of people, goods and capital when, in many cases, this is simply not the case. So the future of nationalism will rely fundamentally on the degree to which it can move away from the idea of an imagined and homogenous community and, instead, come to terms with radical heterogeneity, especially in global cities. If it does not do this, we will see accelerating tensions between ideas sustaining urban governance and those sustaining national governance. For one thing, European nations and Japan, especially, will have no choice but to radically extend their immigration levels if they want to avoid the economic melt down that will come with geographic ageing.


[Image: The fortress of Tignis.]

[Bryan Finoki] Getting back to an earlier question, I read that the earliest forms of cities were built on forms of conflict and barricading against the natural elements. That is to say, at their root, cities are defined by a defensive kind of urban DNA, I mean – shelter, for all intents and purposes – could be construed as a primitive form of military urbanism. But, clearly we have come a long way towards full-scale gated communities now; what are the psychopathological implications of this morphology? Having moved from improvising mere shelter from the elements to complete enclave barriers against more abstract notions of fear, I guess my question is: how is the culture of an “Us” and a “Them”, or the “Other”, not only embodied in the current trend of security urbanism, but extensions of an ongoing pathological development?

[Stephen Graham] There is a major contradiction here. One the one hand, the Bush doctrine has simplistically relied on the constant invocation of a putative ‘us’ and ‘we’ marshaled against a threatening, monster-like, racialised and demonic ‘them’ who offer an existential threat to ‘our’ civilization and all its hallmarks (‘freedom’,’ democracy’ etc). Here we see long-standing Orientalist tropes being recycled.

On the other hand, it is clear that, in many ways, the cosy, folkish language of ‘homeland security’ fits very poorly with the transitional cultural, social, ethic and economic realities of U.S. metropolitan regions. So there is a major tension between the construction of a an imaginative geography of nationhood as ‘us’ and the reality of U.S. metropolitan region. I think this is caused by the fact that it is largely white exurban U.S. that forms the real heartland of the Republicans: the central cities are as alien, demonised and Othered to them as are Fallujah and Baghdad. So their ‘war on terror’ can be thought of as a war against cities both in their own nation and in the colonised war zones. At home this has involved a ‘cracking down on Diaspora,’ in Andrew Shryock’s words.

Once again, then, Western nations and transnational blocs -- and the securitized cities now seen once again to sit hierarchically within their dominant territorial patronage -- are being normatively imagined as bounded, organized spaces with closely controlled, and filtered, relationships with the supposed terrors ready to destroy them at any instant from the ‘outside’ world. In the U.S., for example, national immigration, border control, transportation, and social policy strategies have been remodeled since 9/11 in what Hyndman calls:

"attempt to reconstitute the [United States] as a bounded area that can be fortified against outsiders and other global influences. In this imagining of nation, the US ceases to be a constellation of local, national, international, and global relations, experiences, and meanings that coalesce in places like New York City and Washington DC; rather, it is increasingly defined by a ‘security perimeter’ and the strict surveillance of borders" (see Hyndman, J . (2003) Beyond either/or: A feminist analysis of September 11th. ACME : An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. (February 2006)

To architect Deborah Natsios, meanwhile, the ‘homeland’ discourse “invokes both moral order” and specifically normalizes suburban rather than central-metropolitan urban conditions. The very term ‘homeland security’, in fact, serves to rework the imaginative geographies of contemporary U.S. urbanism in important ways. It shifts the emphasis away from the complex and mobile diasporic social formations that sustain large metropolitan areas through complex transnational connections, towards a much clearer mapping that implies more identifiable and essentialized geographies of entitlement and threat. This occurs at many scales -- from bodies in neighborhoods, through cities and nations to the transnational -- and delineates a separation that works to inscribe definitions of those citizens who are deemed to warrant value and the full protection of citizenship, and those have been deemed threatening as real or potential sources of ‘terrorism’: in essence, the targets for the blossoming national security state.

Amy Kaplan argues that the very word ‘homeland’ itself suggests some “inexorable connection to a place deeply rooted in the past.” It necessarily problematizes the complex and multiple diasporas that actually constitute the social fabric of contemporary U.S. urbanism. Such language, she suggests, offers a “folksy rural quality, which combines a German romantic notion of the folk with the heartland of America to resurrect the rural myth of American identity” (ibid. 88). At the same time, Kaplan argues that it precludes “an urban vision of America as multiple turfs with contested points of view and conflicting grounds upon which to stand” (ibid. 88 see Kaplan, A. (2003), Homeland insecurities: Reflections on language and space. Radical History Review. 85: 82-93.).

Such a discourse is particularly problematic in ‘global’ cities like New York, constituted as they are by massive and unknowably complex constellations of diasporic social groups tied intimately into the international (and interurban) divisions of labour that sustain neoliberal capitalism. “In what sense”, asks Kaplan, “would New Yorkers refer to their city as the homeland? Home, yes, but homeland. Not likely.” Ironically, even the grim casualty lists of 9/11 revealed the impossibility of separating some purportedly pure, ‘inside,’ or ‘homeland city,’ from the wider international flows and connections that now constitute global cities like New York -- even with massive state surveillance and violence. At least 44 nationalities were represented on that list. Many of these were ‘illegal’ residents in New York City. It follows that, "if it existed, any comfortable distinction between domestic and international, here and there, us and them, ceased to have meaning after that day" (Hyndman, 2003: 1). As Tim Watson writes:

"global labor migration patterns have […] brought the world to lower Manhattan to service the corporate office blocks: the dishwashers, messengers, coffee-cart vendors, and office cleaners were Mexican, Bangladeshi, Jamaican and Palestinian. One of the tragedies of September 11th 2001 was that it took such an extraordinary event to reveal the everyday reality of life at the heart of the global city," (2003: 109: see Watson T. (2003), Introduction: Critical infrastructures after 9/11. Postcolonial Studies. 6: 109-111.)


[Image: The decimated lobby of the World Trade Center in NYC after the bombings of Sept, 11th.]

Posthumously, however, mainstream U.S. media has overwhelmingly represented the dead from 9/11 as though they were a relatively homogeneous body of patriotic U.S. nationals. The cosmopolitanism of the dead had, increasingly, been obscured amidst the shrill, nationalist discourses, and imaginative geographies of war. The complex ethnic geographies of a pre-eminently ‘global city’ -- as revealed in this grizzly snap-shot -- have thus faded from view since Hyndman and Watson wrote those words. The deep social and cultural connections between U.S. cities and the cities in the Middle East that quickly emerged as the prime targets for U.S. military and surveillance power after 9/11, have, similarly, been rendered largely invisible. In short, New York’s transnational urbanism, revealed so starkly by the bodies of the dead after 9/11, seems to have submerged beneath the overwhelming and revivified power of nationally-oriented state, military and media discourses.

[End of Pt. 1: Bryan Finoki / Stephen Graham, 2007]
• • •
Pt. 2, I hope to post in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime:

Check out:
Stephen Graham, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Durham
Cities Under Siege: Katrina and the Politics of Metropolitan America
Architectures of Fear: Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West

Previous coverage of Stephen Graham on Subtopia:
Peering into the Arenas of War
'Military Omniscience'
Cities Made by War

This looks like the ultimate project right now to be a part of in the Middle East – the kind of border zone diplomacy that should be mimicked in regions across the world. Amidst all of the vicious turmoil and violence that grips the Arab community, this is a truly refreshing effort. And in light of the recent underground lake discovered in Darfur – which some say could help lead to a massive pacification of genocide there stemming in part over a scarcity of water resources (not to mention the water wars that may ensue as a result of climate change in regions all over soon enough) – this highlight between Israelis and Palestinians has resounding implications.
Thanks to my architectural storian buddy Orhan who sent word my way, we learn about two mayors on opposite sides of the Israel/Palestinian border who have signed a joint agreement to clean up the heavily polluted Wadi Abu Naar river that runs through both of their towns.


In short, the article explains how Israel’s Baqa al-Gharbiya is “building a sewage system and treatment plant to combat the diseases borne by the river,” while the Palestinian town Baqa al-Sharqiya with little funds will soon extend a pipe into the Israeli plant “when it is completed in the middle of 2008.”
It is a kind of hydrologic border suture.


Water in this part of the world is not only scarce but more tragically it serves as a continual dimension of war. We are reminded by Eyal Weizman in his classic essay, The Politics of Verticality, how the Mountain Aquifer under the west bank, the largest reservoir in the area, has been co-opted by Israelis through an informal subterranean sovereignty over most of the aquifer.


“The 1995 Accord transferred responsibility for the water sector from Israel’s civil administration to the Palestinian Authority. But in practice, the scope of Israeli control of this sector did not change. A Joint Water Committee (JWC) was set up to oversee and approve every new water and sewage project in the West Bank.”

Palestinians, essentially, need to get approval from this committee for any water related action they take, while Jewish settlements can tap the aquifer in any way at any time without requiring the same permission. There is also the physical terrain to contend with, and the hydro-politics of the conflict which Weizman described as allowing both sides to sabotage sewage structures and deliberately spill their waste into each other through valleys and over hillsides: a war of shit.

“Sewage is a political weapon when dislocated from the bowels of the earth to the overground. When shit is invisible underground, it is merely sewage, running through a technically complex system of public plumbing. But let it only break loose over the surface, and sewage becomes shit again.

The latitudinal co-ordinates affirm the nature of the substance. When sewage overflows and private shit, from under the ground, invades the public realm of the street, it becomes simultaneously a private hazard and a public asset – to be used as a tool by the authorities.”
Makes you realize how significant this little joint-mayors water-works agreement is, and hope it can have an even more significant ripple effect.
The "Good Water Neighbors" (GWN) project was initiated by Friends of the Earth (FOE) Middle East – a tri-national environmental collective of Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis who work together on environmental and hydrologic border issues in attempt to resolve the conflict, reclaim the spaces of hydrology as an arena for healing rather than war.
Environmental Justice, logic over politics, progressive border suture. Sounds revolutionary to me.
Like the article suggests, it is taking a green approach to the Green line. But not just green in that generic eco-centric superficial/commidified kind of way, but in as far as it has retooled the political basis of the area’s access to water, achieving a new diplomatic model in addition to a system for sharing water across borders - real green geopolitics.
Anyway, I’m cutting this post short, but want to leave it with these final statements from the two mayors in the west bank.

Hussein said issues of health and the environment are borderless problems that require a borderless solution. "The sharing of air and water requires co-operation between the two sides." Wald agreed. "It is for the people ... without any political circumstances."

Once the environmental project is completed, Edelstein said the cross-border partnership will have a series of positive knock-on effects. "The environment is a lot of things. It's health, it's sustainability. It's not just making your town green, it's co-operating on very real issues."

Wald said: "The idea is that such projects can push politicians to understand that co-operation gives you the opportunity to go further toward peace here in the Middle East.

"We start with small steps and these small steps can lead us to much wider and longer steps later on."
Why aren’t there more examples of this kind of grassroots commitment along the U.S./Mexico border? Or, are there? I know there have been others in the Middle East and other places I am sure, but this seems like a perfect example of using environmental justice as a launching pad for greater political change and conflict zone resolution.

There is a massive new real estate project quietly rooting itself along the U.S./Mexico border just south of San Ysidro where San Diego and Tijuana officially share a border crossing – the busiest in the world, by the way. While it is not exactly a border fence its ultimate effect I imagine going on to serve just as much the same once it is completed and persists in its lifetime. It is I think a wall by another means, if you'll excuse my skepticism.


After all, were talking about one of the world’s richest cities neighboring one of the world’s poorest. Nowhere else can the economic disparity between two nations, within just a few miles reach of one another, nonetheless, be made more visible. Nor, I suppose, can we expect that any construction along the border at this scale would not somehow serve as a sort of de facto barrier, given the conservative political climate right now and its dismal depiction of the border.
And if all continues to go according to developer Moisés Abadi’s plan, it will end up being the tallest set of structures not just on the border, but in all of Tijuana. A new epic landmark to be sure.


“New City”, as the project is unsurprisingly called, is a cluster of seven 25-story tall condominium towers currently rising less than a mile south of the border in Tijuana's Zona Río neighborhood. You could say they are high-rise resorts for the “crime-weary middle-and upper-income buyers who can't – or don't want to – move across the border to San Diego,” as one writer for the Union Tribune has put it. In this case, it’s probably just as accurate to say – instead of going to San Diego, San Diego has come to them.
Essentially, it is a massive urban gated community boasting 500 units with access to luxurious swimming pools and private tennis courts, unique business spaces and hotel-like sky lounges with views of downtown San Diego, the bay, and the Pacific Ocean. It goes without saying, of course, that New City will also provide protected parking and an 11-foot-high wall encircling the entire 7.5-acre privatopia, its own network of video surveillance cameras, special electronic passes for residents, and the usual suspects of round-the-clock security guards.
Could this be a new form of border zone panopticon? The urban vertical gated community?


In the end, I wonder if these towers, which will redefine the Tijuana skyline, will open up to a more affordable spread of housing development, or just preside by themselves there over the 2.5m people living in TJ like a new set of fortress gates further enforcing the barriers of geo-economic exclusion that quintessentially defines the space between the U.S. and Mexico.
Even though Abadi is a Mexico-based developer the clients are just the type of mix you’d expect, and “range from retirees looking to simplify their lives, to cross-border businessmen searching for a pied-à-terre, to young families starting out, to anyone who can afford units selling from $150,000 to nearly $800,000. San Diegans looking to lower their housing costs have also been buying.”
It all adds to the complex and intricate joint flows of migration that occur between the two nations, as more and more money from both sides of the border begin to move back and forth, resettle and huddle along the border in oddly reciprocal and ironic geographic shifts. Mostly all you hear about is the great burden of Latin immigration to the U.S., but rarely enough about the opposite droves of retired American couples pouring down south to buy up vast swaths of Mexican real estate – just look at the incredible gringo squat that is the Baja peninsula.
Even if New City houses a middle/upper class mix of Mexican residents, the convergence of all these different populations from both countries on the border and ultimately how the border is being planned and constructed fascinates me. The towers are really just giant stacks of money mostly bridging an upper class exodus from Mexico City with the moneyed highways of commerce running in all directions through out San Diego, pressurizing the nexus of one of the busiest and already most economically polarized borders in the world.


And the developer makes no qualms about catering and capitalizing off of the main impetus for this new housing trend in Tijuana, either. The San Diego Reader reported last year how increased kidnappings of upper society people in both Mexico City and Tijuana have opened up new movement patterns and security businesses.

Two years ago, Total Shield, an automobile-armoring business from Mexico City, opened an office in Tijuana. Fear of kidnapping and carjacking fuels the business they've been doing since. Abadi feels the same fear of crime will help him sell another Mexico City concept to Tijuanenses.
And so, as you would suspect, these residential fortresses are starting to pop up left and right in Tijuana. From the same news sources we learn that “Tijuana first went vertical in 1982, with the completion of the 295-foot Agua Caliente towers, now a well-known emblem of the city.” But, New City will surpass that milestone. In addition, “Mexico City-based Keco, is investing $21 million in a tower overlooking the golf course of Tijuana's Club Campestre” – known as the Green View Towers. And “in Colinas de Agua Caliente, developer Luis Mario Islas' company, Habitamex, is planning Bosque de Agua Caliente, a gated community aimed at upper-middle-income buyers.”


Maybe all of this just represents a greater growth pattern in what is cementing the larger global divide – altogether, in essence, defining the defensive outline of a global “wall of capital”, as Mike Davis would call it.
But, particularly interesting to me is how border real estate itself is devised, by what collisions of formal and informal space? The spatial politics of the border exists in such a matrix of contrasting layers and opposing landscapes; from a pervasive para-militarism to the unarmed huddle of millions of impoverished people, from more natural bi-national boundaries like the Rio Grande to the blatant NAFTA-induced pollution disasters that riddle the southern borders of Texas and California where maquiladoras get away with environmental murder, from rampant gentrification in certain pockets to the overall absence of any real urban planning at all - where condominiums are surrogate border walls and the border wall itself becomes an architectural form of detention.


It’s as if all of the forces and counter-forces of globalization converge on the border to constitute the ultimate geopolitical fortification, through some indiscernible spatial logic that organizes the physical dimensions of free trade, national security, selective migration, and different forms of civilian occupation into a single border space. I mean let’s face it, this isn’t the contrasting typology of a future global urban landscape, this is the present complexion: fundamentally distilled into gated communities that soar in the air, checkpoints and border fences, and an immeasurable expanse of favelas tumbling over the landscape.
In the end, what if the border becomes completely lined with these towers, side by side - a run-on wall of towers - altogether creating the world's longest as well as tallest gated community, as Teddy Cruz might remark? That would be freaky. Not sure any ladders would be able to hop that fence.
Talk about uneven capitalist development.

[All images of the project New City via www.tienetodo.com. For all you lucky spanish speakers out there, here are some additional disscussions to check out on SkyscraperCity (1 & 2).] (Story via Planetizen)

Recent obsessions with the border have made me neglect so many other layers of what I think make up the composite of a Subtopian landscape. One of which is homelessness - global urban homelessness. In fact, it was my early concern with the homeless issue here in San Francisco that got me to rethink my interests in architecture again a few years ago, searching to relate social policy and spatial practice through a type of architectural activism.
From there, my fascination with the political domains of architecture grew, as well as my need to learn more about the spatial dimensions of politics. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps. Via the prison issue and my own experiences wandering around India’s squatter societies, all these layers sort of took off and fused together in the exploration of military landscapes and looking more closely at the disciplinarian nature of institutions and state power. About a year and a half ago Subtopia, and the search to define ‘military urbanism’, was born.


Be that as it may, I came across this project not too long ago, which again takes a temporary approach that in the end I think might not really help resolve the crisis of housing the homeless at all. While it cleverly addresses the needs of persons who might choose to remain in the streets, or of some global nomads where shelter is simply unavailable, the main problem I have with these types of solutions is that they don’t challenge the political structure of municipal housing markets to provide the necessary supply of supportive, transitional, or affordable housing that is really required to get people off the streets in cities.
Of course, I understand solutions are needed for an interim period where cities may have no viable means of housing or sheltering their homeless people at the time. But, I would still like to see more innovation in the ways architectural solutions can write themselves into other existing places that may be overlooked in the city, or to chart new ways that design can re-write the housing code in some way, or alter construction methodologies, recycle urban scraps, perhaps approach adaptive reuse or historic preservation in a unique and revolutionary manner. But I will speak more about that in a moment.


The Ownless unit, as it is called, however, when we read the philosophical statement that describes it, seems more like a space for a sadhu rather than the victim of homelessness or a forcibly displaced person deprived of access to a home. [For those who don’t know, a sadhu is a holy man in India who has wittingly given up all of his worldly possessions in order to wander the country in search of enlightenment, or spiritual fulfillment.] And while I can relate to that (as I spent many months wandering the planet in my own sort of quest for enlightenment – I am even writing a book of travel narratives on the topic of an urban sadhu), I still find this proposal a bit philosophically cutesy and pseudo-utopic.


Geotectura, the Israeli firm who designed the compact housing vehicle, implies this is a solution for the urban environment, and builds upon the psychological notion that a person can positively start from scratch in life, with nothing, and therefore exist in this space with a certain political environmental conscientiousness in mind. The two designers, Joseph Cory and Jacob Eichbaum say:

The Ownless unit is transforming the homeless terminology into a hopeful term. On the same tone of the modernist sentence: less is more the Ownless unit is declaring that less is home. And indeed - why not consume less if we can maintain the basic needs and freedom of mankind. Ownless unit is first and foremost a psychological state of mind saying that being in this situation is not the end of the world but rather adjusting with optimistic approach to a new situation. You can restart from nothing and build yourself again by hanging onto the important values and letting go the wasteful style of living.
Granted, the design is pretty cool. It has a pull out bed, special outer advertisement space for potentially making money, adequate storage space, lamps and lights, a hitch that allows it to be pulled by other vehicles; it allegedly provides security (though I wonder how these mobile cubicles on the street all the time can really be expected to be secure); the rooftop is lined with photovoltaic cells that charge batteries so it is not only pedal-driven but can move as a non-polluting vehicle, as well. It’s nifty, to be sure! But I am not sure that homeless people need nifty. Or to be urged to just zen-out and accept the minimalist essence of their homeless existence as a base spiritual clarity, or state-of-mind, I don't know - it gets a little wacky for my blood.
A few months ago Design Boom organized the shelter in a cart design competition. There were some very cool ideas and projects, don’t get me wrong. It’s a seductive context: nomadic urbanism. Especially when we think about all of the millions of people on the move around the planet right now, which is perhaps where I see these types of homeless coaches being more useful. Maybe in Darfur, or India, or along migration zones through out Africa. But I still have trouble trusting their efficacy in a truly urban environment like San Francisco or New York City.


[Image: the street cart named survivor, design by : ing-tse chen from china.]

Cameron Sinclair chose one design from the competition as particularly noteworthy, but said this as a general reflection:

“The brief set out was fairly controversial given the fact that the criteria was to develop a ‘cart’ system to support those who chose to stay on the streets, rather than the housing shelter approach. During the review the one thing that worried me was that many entries ignored two basic needs – protection of ones valuables and a self-sustaining economic engine.”

“The competition and these initiatives are not the answer to issues of homelessness but they force the design community to begin to ask serious questions. What is the role of the designer? Who is the designer? Should we support these communities? Is homelessness a solvable issue?”
While I agree with him, is this really the strategy for addressing any part of the urban homeless issue? Not really. His questions towards the end get at the crux a bit more, but I think they need to be re-aimed and more specified? Of course designers have a role in solving homelessness, and yes I believe homelessness can be solved. But what specifically does the designer have to consider? Band-aid solutions like shelter-carts are too easy for architects, too detached I think, as much as they seek to engage the problem.
How can the designer force municipalities to re-calibrate their strategies for providing more efficient affordable housing? What types of innovative programs can designers instigate to provide both housing and jobs in a single planning scheme? How can designers force local government officials and planning departments to take advantage of already pre-existing wasted space? Unremdiated space? How can designers partner with non-profs more infrastructurally and determine new funding mechanisms in partnerships with the city to fund these types of projects regularly? The solution itself has to forge a new municipal housing model for all of these actors to come together and work politically.
With all of these groovy sidewalk shelter designs and homeless chariots on the drawing board, I still think the First Step Housing design competition back a few years ago was on a more pointed and realistic trajectory with all of this. Real quick, the goal was to remake an existing flophouse in New York City’s run down Bowery neighborhood and propose ways of converting and re-using the building for housing the homeless. One of the winners was a project by New York City-based firm Lifeform, who I invited to join us at Postopolis! to discuss their project.


You can read coverage of Monica Hernandez’s presentation at City of Sound, but in essence they had proposed a very modular and flexible kit of parts system for a floor in the building with three different types of living spaces that could be configured to more specific needs and unique personalities. Look at the design right here. Read more here. It became symbolic as a way attention to the homeless population could also help remake the building, even the neighborhood in some way. That to me seems like a much more progressive mode of using design to address urban homelessness, to address the broader context, to revitalize some part of the city.
In San Francisco, a couple of years ago housing rights activists helped pass the Surplus Property Ordinance, which effectively secured several city-owned sites and parcels of land that have sat vacant, unused, or simply unconsidered in terms of any real development, for the sole purpose of building housing for the homeless. I was involved with this for awhile, but sadly have fallen a bit out of the loop. But, even more disappointing is that I don’t think much real housing has come out of this yet, though there have been some tangible results. But the ordinance is a great one. It forces different departments like Park and Rec. & the Fire Dept. to periodically transfer some of their underutilized parcels, and even some odd slivers of seemingly uninhabitable real estate dispersed through out the city, to the Mayor’s Office of Housing. Some of the sites are vacant office buildings that have been used merely as storage for bureaucracies for years, or that have been kept in holding simply because certain departments didn’t want to give up entitlements to their real estate even though they have not been able to put it to any solid use in ages. Here is a chance for architects to partner with non-prof developers and try to work with these conditions; odd lots, nook and cranny spaces around town, separate floors in old office towers, sloped and narrow park space, etc. Authoring productive space into the dead fabric of the city - recontextualizing dead space.
Like everything else in San Francisco, particularly housing development, and even more particularly homelessness, progress is always impeded by contentious politics. In this case, the allocation of money in the city’s affordable housing kitty and to which developers those funds will go, into which neighborhoods, and for which specific projects, all play into the unfortunate political factional divide that gets in the way of getting actual housing built. Of course, NIMBYism is always a factor, too (especially in SF), and when it comes time to proposing a homeless supportive housing project in certain neighborhoods, well - that always opens another can of worms.
Nevertheless, I keep thinking of strategies of adaptive reuse as a means for architects to write themselves into the solution around housing the homeless. I think of successful design initiatives like the Accessory Dwelling Units (ACUs, or Granny Flats), which have also forced a re-examination of building codes to allow micro-units into existing housing fabrics and neighborhood densities.


[Image: Rainbow Apartments and the New Carver Apartments and run by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust, Michael Maltzan Architecture. Photo via NYT.]

And the more I think about the erosion of social welfare in the United States, the decline in the institutions of health care and education, the gap and inaccessibility that is increasing for the middle and lower class populations of this country who are looking at a dire future of basic needs deprivation, the more I see models like supportive housing serving greater purposes than just housing the homeless. [For those who aren’t familiar with supportive housing, it is housing specifically designed for homeless people that includes certain health care, vocational, educational, services provided on–site, programmed into the design of the building. Considered the only viable solution to really tackling the chronically homeless, it has proven incredibly successful. Read this book review I wrote awhile back on the subject.]
What if a melding of supportive housing, co-housing, transitional, elderly and low-inc family housing, became the ideal model for affordable housing in general across the country? And an optimal urban building recycling practice as well? Whereas the state continues to let people down by not providing adequate institutional provisions like public health care and education, and by letting affordable housing stocks dwindle, perhaps the new green urban housing model of the future will account for this by programming these necessities on-site, building upon new models of community and alliances with local non-profits who begin to pick up the slack?
We become this bad-ass tribe of bottom-feeding city-scraping architects and builders, filling in the cracks, helping the homeless to house themselves.
Who knows, maybe in planning for specific housing models and solutions for the homeless we stumble upon solutions for a greater housing and social welfare crisis looming at large?

[Images: This article on the National Guard in New Mexico stationed along the Mexican border says these tents house around 300 NG members and can withstand winds up to 85 mph. Like nomadic deployable future desert shells what strikes me most though is their similarity to the tents used to incarcerate illegal immigrants in nearby Raymondville, Texas. Unlike those detention circus canopies which take a day, these are up in 72 hours. Maybe it's just me but they look like they could double up, so when the NG finishes their mission the tents could easily be re-purposed for detention.
Not that I am suggesting that, of course. It's just an incredibly grim observation.


Aside from some descriptions of the National Guard's Operation Jump Start duties supporting the Border Patrol with surveillance infrastructure and logistics, this is the quote of the article: “I thought there was going to be more action, more challenges,” she [a National Guard troop] said. “I thought I was going to capture undocumented immigrants or that I was going to be able to use my rifle, something like that.”]

In a story that could only come out of China (or India, perhaps), we read about plans in the Hunan province to build a new 24-mile long fence aimed at preventing – no, not an invasion of migrants from North Korea, or mini-tides of refugees from Afghanistan – hardly, this time it is to wall off a land rush of 2 billion scattered mice and rats that have been uprooted since water has been released from the Three Gorges dam in order “to ease pressures on rivers and plains” that has been caused by some of the worst flooding in central China in 50 years.


[Image: An unrelated painting by Dan Witz of an interminable landscape of rats. Photo via Art Moco.]

So, apparently the water release is a normal occurrence, as is the subsequent rat exodus around nearby villages and across local terrain. But, this time, the magnitude was unparalleled.
The water was released into Dongting Lake that had experienced drought for months. This sudden flogging of the plains has forced millions of rodents from their holes in the ground to flee for their lives.


The story was first reported I believe in PanAsianBiz, but this Guardian article provides some crazy details.

“Local villagers described their migration in terms of an army on the move, eating everything in their path. Entire crop fields were reportedly devoured in a single afternoon.

According to domestic media, the munching was so loud that it could be heard inside villagers' homes.”
No doubt the makings for a creepy subtopian landscape horror show, the same article also reports that due to China’s current flooding crisis 3 million people have also been uprooted from their homes and forced to evacuate.
A grim scene to be sure: millions of villagers wandering the countryside starved, while the “roads and hillsides” have been “turned black” with the mass exodus of a plague of rats fleeing the same area. Meanwhile, restrateurs from Guangzhou are scooping up the rats with nets to prepare them as pricey little delicacies for businessmen craving something exotic, though some reports deny this.




The infestation has been exacerbated partly because of the construction of various dams recently in China, which has exposed and decreased the populations of normal predators (snakes and owls) more to the villagers who then eat them as popular dishes, and because the “proliferation of dams has lessened the downstream waterflow, widening the habitable territory of the rodents.”
The Guardian also reports that locals have been beating thousands of mice to death with sticks while also using ferrets and poison, but in the process have killed fresh supplies of livestock as well. So far, it sounds like nearly 2 million rats have been exterminated and buried weighing close to 90 tons. Wow - mass grave mounds of dead buried rat refugees.
So now, according to this article, to protect villagers from future infestations, “the Lujiao Township along Dongting Lake in northern Hubei is ready to shell out $792,000 to build the one-meter-high rat-proof wall,” while the “provincial government of Hunan has allocated $1.05 million to repair rat-proof walls” (I assume that means some already existing barriers in place). Not much more seems to be said about how the rat wall will be constructed or how it will work, how deeply underground it would need to go, or where the rats will flee in the face of such a barrier. Of course, I am only curious of the repercussions or natural consequences of any barrier!

And, just what you were hoping for – we’ve got a video for you right here, compliments of Reuters.



But perhaps the whole scenario is just a grotesque symbol for the kinds of human displacements that are happening on other various levels and scales. Not only for how these types of mass hydrologic projects are evicting people from their own communities, or how the force of dam building booms may be even altering the earth’s rotation in some way, but metaphorically the dam as a symbol of global gentrification, borders and the military hydrologic control of the flows of global migration; and the mass displacements that are caused by institutionalized border levees, flood gates and selective international filtration.
What if we looked at global migration as being controlled by a military hydrology of border enforcement infrastructures? If eventually global borders operated and functioned much the same way these massive automated superstructures of hydrology do, re-flooding certain zones while drying up others; directing migrants to certain labor plains while exposing others for the exploitative taking; forcing migration routes underground while raising other subterranean zones to the surface; allowing certain flows in while preventing others – dams analogous to a massive reshaping of the landscapes and geographies of migration.
Okay, I admit, this isn’t that well articulated yet, and maybe this metaphor is a stretch, but when I think about 3 million people being driven from their homes by flooding, and 2 billion rats on the move, and the dam as an ecological border (and being the incessant border freak that I am!) I can’t help but to draw comparisons between these rats on the move, a rat-proof fence, the Three Gorges Dam, and global migration.
Anyway, over and out!

(Thanks Rob for the story!)

Well, of all the conferences, exhibitions, art shows, Biennales, funky parties, boring ass lectures, academic/pseudo-academic love/hate nerd-fests out there; of all the ridiculously cool underground and even annoyingly pompous events happening at this very moment [not to mention the No Borders Camp social action gathering coming up and all the other cross-border cultural stuff going on this summer that I have absolutely no idea about still at this point] – of All that stuff, The ONE I dream of being flown out to right now, right NOW -- in order to cover for Subtopia (somehow, someway) -- I have to say, the one I’d be going to is in Barcelona, Spain, called simply enough "Fronteres,” or (as you probably guessed) “Borders.”
Yup. A big old installation dedicated to the geopolitical ramifications and complex patterning of the world’s contested border zones. Photos, videos, multimedia installations, guided tours within the gallery of different political fault lines as depicted by large scale images and maps, writers and researchers, there is an even a section dedicated to exploring border music in Istanbul. Download the catalog here.
Regardless, I am going to repost the “Fronteres” press release and exhibition outline below for my own future reference. For now, I'll just have to sit back and hope that some of our lucky Spanish located readers will take the time to kick back with us a few afterthoughts on this one.

The Press Kit for "Fronteres":

The Centro de Cultura Contemporánea presents the exhibition Borders, a reflection on the concept of the border, its types and a review of some of today’s geopolitical borders (the boundaries of Europe, US-Mexico, Israel-Palestine, North Korea-South Korea, Kashmir, Miami-Havana, the case of Melilla...).

The exhibition is designed as a journey through different worlds, in a movement that brings together history and geopolitics, the gaze of photographers and eye-witnesses, sounds and maps, general reflections and field studies.

As visitors make their way round the exhibition they’ll find photographs by Patrick Bard, Olivier Coret, Marie Dorigny, Olivier Jobard, Nicolas Righetti, Frederic Sauterau, Eric Roux-Fontaine and Michel Semeniako, and the reflections of Roger Bartra, Zygmunt Bauman, Georges Corm, Manuel Cruz, Francisco Fernandez Buey, Michel Foucher, David S. Landes, Tzvetan Todorov and Eyal Weizman. Also taking part are the creators Frederic Amat, Enric Massip, Angel Morua and Josep Niebla.

Borders, curated by the French geographers Michel Foucher and Henri Dorion, is a co-production of the CCCB and the Musee des Confluences de Lyon (Departement du Rhone), which was presented from 3 October 2006 to 4 February 2007. It will run at the CCCB from 4 May to 30 September 2007.



PROLOGUE FROM THE CATALOGUE BY JOSEP RAMONEDA

In the labyrinth

The border, as Claudio Magris said, is an idol at whose altar many lives have been sacrificed. Borders define an inside and out, one of them us and one of them the other.

There are many types of border: physical, political, cultural and even psychological. A border creates an interior space which seeks to be homogenous and purposely different from the outside one. Frontiers are also invisible barriers which come between people, even in personal relationships. We live in a time of flows: of the permanent and potentially unlimited movement of people, goods, money and ideas. And, nonetheless, we talk about borders more than ever. Governments find it easy to respond to any conflict – bloody or otherwise – by building or reinforcing borders, even though they know that it will be increasingly difficult to lock the door.

We are at a time of change between old and obsolete certainties and new references to be discovered. The physical, political, cultural, ideological, psychological and spiritual demarcation lines are on the move and the world is a choppy sea. The fall of a physical border doesn’t automatically mean overcoming psychological and cultural barriers. At the same time, borders are constantly being built which are difficult to mark out physically but have an undeniable social efficiency (or perhaps this isn’t the meaning of the discourse of the clash of civilisations?). In any case, the convenience of homogenous spaces, bounded by a single large border and with internal divisions, which under no circumstances questioned the unity of the national framework, is passing into history.

Any individual identity is a small space protected by physical and mental forms which separate us from the other to make us into an autonomous subject. Using these as a starting point, with the interplay between passions and interests, we emerge from ourselves and establish interrelations with others. Personal pronouns remind us of this in each sentence.

The same thing happens in the collective sphere. And in this regard, Zygmunt Bauman is right to present the border as the third element between cultural diversity and the unity of the human species. The border is exclusive, but it is also constructive.

Borders rise and fall. Today they close, tomorrow they open. It is this interplay between the apparent regulation of flows which won’t prevent a growing global interrelation.

This exhibition looks at borders by exploring the edge territories which, in some way, express the contradictions of a world that moves between hypercommunication and deep fractures. The more we join together, the more labyrinthine the world becomes.

Josep Ramoneda
Director, CCCB


Guided visits to the exhibition “Borders”

Guided visits to the exhibition “Borders” by writers, journalists and experts who have worked on it and analysed the subject and who, with their knowledge, give us greater insight into the theme.

This cycle of guided visits is organized in the conviction that crossing borders helps us to see and understand. With the help of people who have worked on, studied and experienced in depth the borders they present, it sets out to teach us something more about them.


0 - INTRODUCTION

The contemporary world is crossed by over 226,000 kilometres of land borders. The European Union has long been engaged in a process of devaluation of these barriers, and, during this time, “without-border” organisations have become legion, globalisation has called for the removal of obstacles that prevent the circulation of people, products and images, and border issues have never been so widely discussed. But, why? This is what the exhibition Borders explores, using an approach linking history and geopolitics, photos and eye-witness accounts, sounds and maps, general reflections and field studies.

In turn, fronts and frontiers, links and separations, stitches and cuts, caesuras and interfaces, these lines which map out borders contribute to identity. For an “inside” to exist, it must open on to an “outside” which can accommodate it. Everyone must take on their role as Hestia, the keeper of the hearth, and their role as Hermes, nomad, wanderer, master of exchanges, waiting for encounters, the god of paths and guide of travellers.

Crossing borders helps us to see and understand. Looking beyond means taking the risk of venturing on to a foreign continent, of facing up to a different horizon, of being surprised by new faces and finding oneself without a home, without identity or, at least, implicated. A mirror effect. The exhibition Borders has been conceived as a journey, through different worlds. We know how to enter them. What will we know at the journey’s end, once we have crossed the final boundary?

The exhibition begins with a mural by Josep Niebla : Patera no. 1


1 – THE BOUNDARIES OF EUROPE

The borders of Europe and the question of its boundaries: from the Aegean Sea to the Barents Sea. Screening of photographs by Frédéric Sautereau who, together with the journalist Guy-Pierre Chomette, undertook a journey between June 2000 and August 2003, during which they followed the borders of Eastern Europe.



"The maritime and terrestrial borders of the expanded European Union stretch from the Canary Isles and the Straits of Gibraltar to the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea and Barents Sea. The Turkish question has triggered a salutary debate about the borders of Europe. Classical geography has marked the boundaries on the continent inappropriately (the Urals split Russia in two and the Bosphorus connects both sides of the city of Istanbul, although, by convention, it separates Europe and Asia). Europe as a civilisation defined a secular cultural identity, Europeanness, the feeling of cultural belonging, the legacy of Christianity and the Enlightenment. Since 1957, Europe also denotes an idea, a project founded on a European identity and awareness which have resulted in an organisation: the European Union. The integration of Poles, Hungarians and Balkans in 2004 amounted to history encountering its geography.

Although there is no definitive answer to the question of Europe’s boundaries as a continent, the question of the political borders of a Union of States sharing a common project depends on the choice of its citizens and their powers of attraction to their borders. Since 2004, the Union has brought together countries at the heart of Europe. With Turkey, Ukraine and the Balkans in crisis, we would need to include those countries which, for centuries, have been on the periphery of Europe, at the edge (the word Ukraine means borderland). Hence the current uncertainty. Without a geography given once and for all by nature, Europe must rely on its history and project in order to define the relationship it wishes to build between its inside – the heart – and its outside – its periphery. In view of the fact that geography doesn’t come to the aid of politics, it is up to the Union of States to determine its political geography, by public debate. "

Michel Foucher


From the Aegean to the Barents Sea, a journey along the eastern borders

"Among the ten countries that joined the European Union on 1st May 2004, six were on its eastern marches: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Bulgaria and Romania were to follow in 2007 or 2008. The European Union thus acquired a new eastern border, and with the new border, came new neighbours. Turkey, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were now on the other side.

A new division of the continent? Even if it is in no way comparable with the Iron Curtain – a painful split which set the west and east of Europe against one another for 40 years – the new eastern edge of the European Union raises new stakes and a great many questions. In certain remote regions, it highlights, in particular, the division of people scattered here and there, and disrupts the relations between neighbours which have been gradually re-established since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the river Evros, between Greece and Turkey, to the desolate landscapes of the Arctic tundra on the Kola Peninsula, via the Trans-Carpathians and the Estonian rivers of Lake Peipus, who are the border inhabitants of the Union? What is their history? What is their day-to-day experience of living with this new European architecture? How are they affected from a moral and psychological point of view? By gathering eye-witness accounts on the west and east sides of the border, Guy-Pierre Chomette and Frederic Sautereau are trying to answer these questions by combining their editorial and photographic approaches. They went on seven journeys between June 2000 and July 2003, along this border, which runs for over 7,000 kilometres from the Aegean to the Barents Sea. These are described in a book, Lisieres d’Europe (The Edges of Europe), published by Autrement."

Photographer
Frederic Sautereau
Oeil Public

Journalist
Guy-Pierre Chomette


2 – CLANDESTINE ITINERARIES

The challenges of migration in the world (the European case): images of Kingsley’s journey around Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, across the Sahara, Algeria, Morocco, the Western Sahara and across the Atlantic. Photographs by Olivier Jobard with voice-over by Kingsley



Migrations

"There are an estimated 185 million migrants – men and women – worldwide, according to the latest report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Geneva. The main destinations are North America (35 millions immigrants in the United States), Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. Latin America, Sahelian Africa and the most heavily populated countries of Asia are the main regions of departure, while Mexico and North West Africa are zones of departure and transit. Almost two thirds of the world’s immigrants and refugees come from nine countries in Asia (Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand), the departure and arrival zone for economic migrants. People escaping a conflict or poverty (the Middle East and Africa), looking for seasonal employment (in Southern Europe, the United States and South East Asia), temporary employment (in Asia and the Middle East) or a more permanent job (North America, Asia, Europe), wanting to go into higher education (China, Vietnam and India encourage people to return home once they have received their qualifications). If people aim to leave their country of origin for good, they tend to choose to settle in the United States, Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom. The IOM estimates that remittance flows to the countries of departure are in excess of 120 billion euros."

Michel Foucher


Kingsley: Travel journal of an illegal immigrant.

"It was in the year 2000, while I was producing a report on the Red Cross centre in Sangatte, northern France, that I became aware of the consequences of all the conflicts I had witnessed: Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone... The population exodus.

Before, while I was working on my reports, I was quite happy just to pass people by, focusing only on the event itself.

In Sangatte, the last caravanserai for many illegal immigrants before the final stage, England, I made time for them.

While I was working on two so-called “topical” reports, I went back to visit these men who, from one day to the next, abandoned a past, a culture and a family for a new life which they dreamt would be better.

I listened to them talk about their journeys, their suffering, their hopes, their fears. Sometimes I was able to give them news about their country. It was through these exchanges that I felt the need to share their experiences in order to put a name to, and tell the story of those people commonly referred to in France as “sans-papiers”, or “without papers”.

So I decided to follow the route taken by one of them.

I met Kingsley in Cameroon while I was working on a report about illegal immigration. This young man of 22 had already set off into the unknown two years earlier but had been forced to turn back due to a lack of money. Since this abortive attempt, he had saved up and gained a great deal of support from his loved ones. His best friend and former workmate, Francis, had managed to emigrate to France legally by marrying a French tourist, and was waiting for him there. So, Kingsley was ready to set off again.

He left his country in May 2004 and travelled illegally through the whole of Nigeria and Niger, crossing the Sahara Desert to Algeria. Finally, he reached Morocco. It was here, after three months of waiting and two spells in prison, that he set out on a makeshift boat provided by people traffickers, together with some 30 other illegals, bound for the Canary Isles.

Six months after he left Cameroon, after changing identity five times and nationality three, he landed on European soil at last ... escorted by members of the Civil Guard.

At the beginning, our relationship was based on a common interest to take our enterprise as far as possible. When he suggested I be present when one of his friends handed him some money, I realised straightaway that I was his moral guarantee. Later, he asked me to look after his money so that he wouldn’t be robbed while crossing the different borders. I agreed, knowing that if I kept his savings, he would do his utmost to find me again if we were separated from one another.

Stronger bonds were gradually forged as a result of the difficult times we had shared. An almost unshakeable trust was established. The experiences we had lived through and the mutual respect we had for each other bound us together. I admit that I often vacillated between the role of observer and the role of actor throughout this story, until the time Kingsley obtained his residence permit.

Because he trusted me, he allowed himself to be featured in the newspapers while he was still illegal. I told him that this media coverage would possibly allow him to put together a solid dossier which would secure him special dispensation to remain. This is what happened. He now lives in France, where things are just about ticking along.

At a time when merit is a virtue that is much bandied about by politicians, when “risk-taking” and “putting oneself in danger” are raised to gold-standard levels, I would like to expose, through this report, the difficulties of such journeys and bring to light everything these migrants give – sometimes even their lives – in the hope of a better existence."

Photographer
Olivier Jobard
Sipa Press


3 – THE LAST PARADISE

Borders that remain closed: North Korea is one of the last examples of an isolated world, hermetically closed by militarized borders that are almost impassable to its inhabitants, where the regime maintains an autarchy characteristic of bygone days and reserves the benefits of foreign contact for a minority. Screening of photographs by Nicolas Righetti



A theatre where the box office is closed

"Here is one of the latest examples of a closed world, hermetically sealed by militarised borders which are almost impossible to cross by its inhabitants, where the regime maintains an autarky from another age, while reserving, for a narrow caste, the benefits of outside contacts.

The Korean Peninsula, which was united for many centuries, has been divided into two states since the war in 1953, in which five million people were killed. This was the aftermath of the Cold War. In the south, a modern, democratic State, a world- ranking economic power which jealously guarded its independence from China and Japan, supported its American ally. In the north, the world’s most reclusive regime, overarmed, calling for nuclear status but unable to protect its inhabitants from risks of famine, and keeping its population in a giant labour camp presented through the theatrical fiction of a communist paradise. The People’s Republic of North Korea is supported by China to counterbalance the military presence of the United States in the region and the ambitions attributed to Japan. The inter-Korean border comprises a demilitarised zone, 4 km wide and 239 km long, which is guarded night and day. The world’s 6th and 7th armies – or 1.7 million soldiers – face each other at the border. We no longer count the tunnels built by the troops from the north. The capital of the south, Seoul, 40 km from the border, is vulnerable. Talks have been held between the two Koreas. The unification of Germany has been analysed by the South Koreans. But the isolation imposed on North Korean society doesn’t lead us to expect an outcome comparable with the one in the former GDR."

Michel Foucher



The last paradise: North Korea

""We are happy", an enormous slogan written in Korean: white script on a red background. The first sentence translated for me when I arrived on the tarmac in Pyongyang. I am happy too. I feel moved to be here, to have finally managed to set foot in one of the most reclusive states in the world. It has only taken nine years of manoeuvring to get a visa and four invitations extended through official channels. Four trips there and back, each proving to be more alike each time. The earthly paradise created by the charismatic leader Kim Il Sung is quite unlike the one imagined by Christian society: you can go there and leave.

As you come out of the airport, the world is turned upside down. No advertising, no movement, no sellers, no noise, no animals, no Asia. The country lives in isolation, and the prevailing atmosphere is that of a citadel under siege. On the road taking us to the capital there are only silent, uniformed pedestrians, walking in their hundreds on the verge. The many soldiers, standing straight in full military gear, are ready to intervene against the imperialist threat.

Han, my official guide, is always there to keep me on the right path. We are still happy. He is convinced of my unconditional love for the regime. I have to capture the propaganda on my film. He presents me with the same schedule for my stay. The same itinerary. The same timetable. Taken aback, I point this out to him. “Yes, it’s true, but people seldom visit twice”, he says, with some surprise. Daily visits here are put on record, hour by hour, because each foreign delegation staying in the paradise is treated in the same way. And I’m a foreign delegation in my own right. They’ve given me such a heavy schedule that I can’t get out of it. I’m irrevocably tied to this glossy piece of paper. The house where Kim Il Sung was born, the triumphal arch, the Museum of International Friendship, store number one, the Juche Idea Tower, the Children’s Palace. There is no show of power without the appropriate setting. The capital is a vast communist Hollywood. The same attractions for the same emotions. As I travel the city by bus, I pass quickly from one scene to another. Interior, exterior, everything seems false.

During my second trip, I realise that the important thing is not to reveal what lies beneath a totalitarian stage set, but to show the country as you see it. I decide to film the artificial happiness of the ceremonies I am invited to. Just like Alice in Wonderland, I finally go through the looking-glass. I make reality out of fiction. Unless, of course, fiction is the reality.

The whole experience fills me with unexpected joy. The happiness at discovering a simple, clean, tidy and flawless world. The great strength of the North Korean visual universe lies in being uniform, homogenous and repetitive. All these "I love Comrade Kim Jong Il, the strongest man in the world ", "Think, speak and act like Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, our beloved leaders", and the portraits that embellish each apartment, official building, dining room, are very real. To see and be seen: this is the function of these effigies which take pride of place in every home, like a placid Big Brother with slanting eyes. The people pin onto their chests a badge bearing their image. Nobody escapes the authorities’ gaze. I am a child in the Garden of Eden, and the figure of God the Father is my guide. Even though he’s dead, “Kim Il Sung still lives among us”. This is where life begins. There is no other. Kim Il Sung is everywhere. Kim Il Sung is God. His son, Kim Jong Il is the Messiah. Pyongyang, their heaven. On posters, in books, on banners, on television and the radio, father and son are omnipresent and omnipotent. These two patriarchal figures often appear side by side. They are portrayed as being the same age, they become timeless and similar, like one and the same divine icon. As I stand in front of their image, I no longer know if I am looking at them or they are looking at me.

I arrive in the capital, Pyongyang, "pleasant place” in Korean. “Heaven is here”: Han translates another sign for me. Shops and metro station exits are also christened “Heaven”. The regime views the capital as the perfect archetype of this Eden. It only remains to duplicate it throughout the country. Propaganda injects it into the countryside. The "farmer-comrades” have a duty to work hard in order to establish “heaven” where they live. And, in turn, the inhabitants of the capital are supposed to support the farmers during their “difficulties”, famines and floods.

The streets are clean. The people are disciplined. The children line up “naturally” in single file to get on board the school bus. The people are both spectators and actors. They act and look on, but only the leaders have the power to alter the setting. And, since we are in heaven, one celebration follows another. It’s official. The public always have a prominent presence so that they can applaud mechanically.

I still have the feeling of emptiness and fullness. A deserted boulevard. In a second, the square is filled with a crowd of young people. The choreography to the glory of the regime can commence: 200 red T-shirts and trousers dance and sing the praises of Kim Jung Il. Majorettes wave red flags. Suddenly, they all depart just as they have arrived. The square reverts to its empty, silent reality.

“Long live peace in the world!”, my guide blurts out, to fill in the silence. There’s something touching about him, but I get the feeling that he is troubled by anything that disturbs this wonderful equilibrium. He wants to convince me of the superiority of communism, Korean style. He frequently peppers our anodyne conversations with slogans. I get used to it. Nobody in the street speaks to me apart from my guide. Even when I’m on my own, no contact is made. Nobody seems to take any notice of me, everything happens as if I didn’t exist. Neither the police nor the army risk approaching me. Fear pervades us all.

On the bus, Han describes each building untiringly. Here you have the museum dedicated to the founding of the party. Over there, you have the bronze statue of Chollima. Elsewhere, the Liberation War Museum, an exhibition about the timeless exploits of Comrade Kim Il Sung: "This great leader drove back the invasion by the imperialist allied forces, for the country and its people..." Han always has an answer to my questions.

I have had to return there several times to realise that it’s all true. And that what is false is also true."

Photographer
Nicolas Righetti
Rezo


4 - KASHMIR

Territorial conflicts—forgotten paradise. The war in Kashmir is probably one of the oldest territorial conflicts. Since the partition of India in 1947, it has seen the confrontation of Pakistan, India and Kashmiri separatist guerrilla movements. Photographs by Marie Dorigny.



Dying at the front

"Even if the number of open or latent conflicts between states or within states is tending to decrease, we can still compile a register of critical situations. A by no means comprehensive list includes: Africa, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, between Chad and Sudan, between Congo and Rwanda; in Europe, in the southern regions of the former Yugoslavia and in Moldavia, in the Caucasus, between Russia and Georgia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan; in the Near East, between Israel, the Lebanon and Syria, as well as the Palestinian territories; in the Kurdish regions, between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran; between Afghanistan and Pakistan; between India and Pakistan, between the two Koreas, between Japan and Russia, between Japan and China, not to mention the relations between China and Taiwan.

The war in Kashmir is no doubt one of the oldest territorial disputes. Since the partition of India in 1947, it has brought into conflict Pakistan, India and the pro-Kashmiri Indian guerrilla independence-seeking and separatist movements. The high valleys and mountains of Kashmir have been divided since 1949 by a cease-fire line, known as the LoC (or Line of Control), which is heavily militarised on both sides and the scene of recurrent bloody incidents and infiltrations. The conflict is also taking place on the Siachen glacier, which stands over 5,000 metres above sea level, near the Chinese border. Admittedly, as the result of the commotion caused by the earthquake in October 2005 (73,000 victims), the first bus route was opened between Srinagar and Muzzafarabad, which soon became accessible to lorries; four other routes are planned.

Attempts at a peace process between both states have been under way for at least two years, in order to improve economic exchanges, but commercial transactions between them account for less than 1% of their overall trade. The concept of a “soft border” has been put forward by the Indian side: not to change the actual borders but to make them free territory, by organising an Indo-Pakistani cooperation strategy in Kashmir, for instance as a condominium. For the time being, the only hope for the Kashmiri people lies in the pursuit of a “cold peace”. So it seems the blockade will last for some time to come."

Michel Foucher


Kashmir, the forgotten paradise

"We have been visiting Kashmir for about 15 years: a region bloodstained by a conflict which has its origins in the birth of the two independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947. The border separating these countries has cut the region in two and divided the families on either side of what we refer to today as the “Line of Control”.

We quickly fell under the spell of this mythical region and it seemed to us that a simple journalistic report of bomb attacks and military operations, which attract reporters from all over the world, would be terribly reductive. We both felt that, in this valley, where death and pain are prevalent, there was another Kashmir, either dreamt or fantasy. It was within reach of anyone who knew how to recognise it. In order to do so, you only had to take the time to let the chance encounters and desires of the moment come into play.

Without us knowing it, we were following in the footsteps of two great writer- travellers of the 19th century, who were the first to describe, with wonder, the gentle beauty of the place and its inhabitants. The reflection of the foothills of the Himalayas in the waters of Dal Lake, and the ospreys swooping down at sunset. The call of the muezzins at dawn in the old town of Srinagar and the warmth of a cup of tea, placed into the hollow of the hands, while sitting on the steps of a Sufi shrine. The chatter of the women departing for the fields and the calm expression on the men’s faces as they gathered around a narghile. The straight-backed horsemen who accompanied the flocks of sheep, and the shawl draped over the shoulder of an old man. The delicate taste of saffron and cardamom too, with which they perfume tea and rice...

Thus, year after year, thinking we were blending softly into the intimacy of the Kashmir of legend, we let ourselves be possessed by its humanity, its spirit of tolerance and the splendour which demand respect."

Photographer
Marie Dorigny

Journalist
Marc Epstein


5 – A BORDER IN THE MAKING: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

A unique case in the world of the physical formation, before our eyes, of a cement boundary, reinforced by passing places with sophisticated equipment, the prelude to a border between a state and an institution that aspires to statehood. Photographs by Olivier Coret with the background sound from around the wall.



Borders that are neither safe nor recognised

"This is a unique case of the physical formation, before our eyes, of a concrete wall, reinforced by passing places fitted with sophisticated equipment, which is a prelude to the establishment of a border between a State and an entity which has the vocation to be a State.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has a central territorial dimension: where and how to trace the border between both States from the time when the principle of the formation of a Palestinian State has been acquired? From 1948 to 1967, an armistice line – the green line – separated Israel from the West Bank. After 1967, the strategic border was moved to the River Jordan and the Golan Heights, and, according to law, the areas in between became the occupied territories where Israeli settlements were placed, but they were also home to three million Palestinians. This made it impossible for a Jewish majority to live permanently in a space to the west of the Jordan. Hence the acceptance of a Palestinian State by the Israelis. This option, which is also dictated by security concerns and breaches of trust between both societies, is expressed by the unilateral building of a wall separating Israel and the West Bank, and the return of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian authorities. The wall doesn’t follow the green line but runs parallel to it, including settlement blocks and enclosed villages and, at its boundary, the Jerusalem conurbation, which is another point of contention. This wall is a barrier and border which can serve as the basis for a demarcation between two separate entities. As the Israeli geographer David Newman points out, it is not a wall between good neighbours: “first of all, we create the events on the ground and then we expect the whole world to align itself with the new situation”."

Michel Foucher


Life by the wall

"Since the start of the second Intifada, I haven’t stopped travelling backwards and forwards between Europe and the Near East. The situation has got worse with each report I’ve filed. Six years ago, you could cross from Israel to Palestine without realising. Concrete blocks of particular colours at the side of the road indicated that we were entering one zone or another. And then there were the checkpoints, up to three of them on the 15 kilometres between Jerusalem and Ramallah. And these checkpoints were transformed into permanent structures, with barbed wire, watchtowers, endless security checks, random openings. It became a nightmare to move around. People’s lives were restricted.

Before beginning this report on the wall, I had stopped travelling to Israel. I couldn’t see the point of going to take a look and showing people over here what was going on over there. When I used to do reports on the Israelis, I was branded a Zionist. When I worked on reports about the families of the Palestinian kamikazes or Hamas, I was viewed by others as a pro-Palestinian militant. My work unintentionally fuelled the already established points of view, whereas I was working so that people would ask questions and feel empathy with mankind.

Building work on the wall began in 2003, and magazines published photos of the structure. They were beautiful photos, often showing panoramic views, with lovely colours. The wall was reduced to an aesthetic, cynical game. The role of photography came down to providing a graphic illustration of the subject. Because of this, I then decided to get back on the road to Jerusalem. I wanted to go and see people who were going to live with this wall and not the wall itself.

As I began working on this project, I expected that I would have to face dangerous, very violent situations, as is often the case in Palestine. However, over the course of a year, I’ve met with more resignation than rebellion, and that’s what has struck me the most. A people who have had themselves enclosed without even having the strength to rise up. I asked the inhabitants questions. They replied that they couldn’t do anything, not any more. I have never felt so useless but I carried on regardless. The Palestinians told me to stop, that these photos were of no use and I almost agreed with them. These photos are of no help, but they show how a border is created. I had wanted to condemn what was happening, but all I had done was to document history.

I feel the wall is part of the sense of history. For 50 years, the Israelis have been gaining ground, gaining space on this territory. This wall stops a border, it marks the end of an encroachment, and it may also be the beginning of a Palestinian State.

I would like to thank Beatrice Guelpa, Agnes de Gouvion Saint-Cyr and Jean- Francois Leroy for their unfailing support."

Photographer
Olivier Coret


6 – THE NORTH. THE US-MEXICO BORDER

The economic challenges of borders as a result of globalization. Unemployed Mexicans aspire to a better life on the other side of the border and American companies exploit cheap labour on both sides of the line. But this is an age in which differences between neighbouring societies generate migratory movements, which some people consider too large. And it is at this point that the border becomes a wall. Photographs by Patrick Bard and screening of a film by the same author.



The grass is always greener on the other side

"Are we on the brink of a world without borders? One border vanishes, and two others appear. It is as if man had an irresistible need to break up the world and to etch lines of fracture on the land between territories subjected to different rates of development. Borders remind us of the face of Medusa, whose gaze protects and attacks at the same time: they attract populations and businesses which seek to take advantage of difference, yet can end up preventing the much sought after contact and exchange.

The Mexico-US border illustrates this situation more and more clearly. Unemployed Mexicans aspire to a better life across the border and American businesses take advantage of cheap labour on both sides of the line. However, a time is approaching when the gap between neighbouring societies is engendering migratory movements which are deemed to be too large by some. And this is when the border becomes a wall. Two figures express the importance of this phenomenon: today, the US has a population of 20 million Hispanics; for ten years, the Mexico-US border, which is about to become another iron curtain, has seen the death of more than 3,000 people in search of a new homeland."

Henri Dorion


El Norte

"El Norte. The border separating the United States of America from the United States of Mexico is some 3,200 km long, and stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. News reports frequently put the spotlight on the immigration problems that crystallise there. The NAFTA accords, which allow the free movement of goods between Mexico, the USA and Canada, came into effect at the end of 1994, at the same time as Operation Gatekeeper. The latter focused on stepping up border patrols in order to stem the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America: the building of a wall which is a material representation of the border in all urban areas, an increase in personnel, an ultra-sophisticated surveillance and detection system. The America-Mexico border is the world’s most frequently crossed line, both legally and illegally; it represents an important economic wager. Even more so if we consider that it is the longest shared border between an emerging country and a rich country. The richest country in the world. A place where everything, or nearly everything, is enlarged as if under a magnifying glass, on a continental scale. George W. Bush recently stated his intention to send 6,000 soldiers from the National Guard to the border. At the same time, the US president announced the regularisation of several million migrants. Contradictions of a country that cannot do without cheap labour and has to pander to its most conservative wing, who are concerned about the 30 to 40 million Spanish speakers who live in the USA.

A low-intensity zone of conflict for the Pentagon, an economic laboratory for globalisation, a place of economic and social violence, the object of all kinds of peripatetic industries, the US-Mexico border is an obstacle for migrants who aspire to a binational vocation. However, the border is also a third country, between Mexico and the USA: an “Amexica” where two nations, two cultures, two peoples are summoned to meet, in a state of chaos, no matter how high the walls."

Photographer
Patrick Bard


7 – REAL CHRONICLES OF AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY

The world of landless peoples: gypsies scattered throughout Europe. Photographs by Éric Roux-Fontaine.



Scattered throughout Europe

"We know about the sad fate of the so-called landless nations. But are they deprived of borders because of this? Doesn’t the juxtaposition, without osmosis, of societies rooted in their territories and scattered societies, underline the fact that the sedentary world imposes its social, economic, anthropological and cultural borders on its transient neighbours? Others will say that the travelling population carry with them in their meagre luggage their community borders, which mark out ephemeral territories, at each stage of their journey.

These are two contemporary realities which turn their backs on one another by drawing on their origins in different times and contexts: on the one hand, a sedentary world which is modelled on the new mobility codes stemming from globalisation and, on the other, a world which, for centuries, has taken its roots and identity from what is perceived as an eternal wandering. Could this exclusion be responsible for the astonishing vitality of these flexible societies? Because we can say that these societies, of which the Roma are a classic example, are protected, to a certain extent, by the invisible borders which surround them and follow them on their journeys: borders that are just as invisible as their territories."

Henri Dorion


Rromano than

"When asked, “What does being a Romany mean to you?”... the man answered me, “It means living here, or anywhere else on earth, and knowing that, whatever happens, no government will stand up for us ...”

This prompted me to follow the journeys taken by these families, who have to juggle endlessly with requests for asylum, notifications of expulsion, and forced repatriation. Month after month, I encountered friends in Sarajevo who I had met in Vaulx-en-Velin, when they would come knocking at my door, and other families who had been “escorted” out of the country by the border police some time earlier, who paid me a short visit before setting off again in secret for England or Montenegro.

Rromano than is the result of “geopoetical” wanderings through a country that nobody ever reaches. A journey through travel, to meet the Europeans who are exiled in Europe, to meet a landless nation.

The photographic project was carried out over a period of about four years, mainly in France, Romania, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and India, the historic country of departure for those who would later be called Manus, Roma, Kalderas, or Sinti."

Photographer
Eric Roux-Fontaine


8 - EXILE

Permeable and hard borders: the exile of refugees. Photographs by Michel Séméniako.



Exiles and refuges

"Borders break up time and space in equal measure. Initially, they are lines, either imposed or agreed, which mark out a more or less watertight solution of continuity between the territories where the candidates for voluntary exile hope to make their new homes, and those which impose on them living conditions that are deemed to be unacceptable and which they seek to leave. This line also marks out long periods of time: the time of waiting to travel to a second life and then, after the crossing, the time of the expected welcome, of a job, of inclusion. But the border is often a purveyor of illusions. The image of a better world beyond the line holds an attraction which doesn’t always keep its promise.

Getting past the border guards is no guarantee that you have made it. Once crossed, a new version of the border can weigh heavily on the shoulders of these travellers for a long time. Solidarity between refugees often shows itself in the shadow of the factories or blind walls, much more so than inside these worlds which are often closed to them. Nevertheless, borders spring up there too: the taggers also need to mark their territory 19 which they feel is under threat or to make their presence felt in other people’s territory. But would physical borders, no matter how much barbed wire they contain, be less watertight than social borders?"

Henri Dorion


Exile

1/

"One day in the year 2000, I came across the spectral, greenish image of a group of illegal immigrants in the press. It distressed me deeply.

A hitherto buried family memory, as fragmented and disorderly as a graveyard, was suddenly reactivated by the news.

This image of human beings, hunted down like wild animals by heat-seeking cameras, expressed the overriding violence of the powerful, equipped with sophisticated technology, on the poor unfortunates who are fleeing war and poverty. By using infrared film, I divert this “cold” surveillance technique. I invert the process: heat no longer outlines a target, but expresses the aura of living bodies, their energy to survive.

The close links which connect recent dramatic events (Sangatte, people without papers, the Mediterranean boat people) with my family memories have given rise to this project.

The origin of migrants has always marked out the map of conflicts and poverty in the world.

There is no other way out for illegals other than to break away from their family, material and cultural roots: their flight forces them to hide their uniqueness to the point of invisibility. They incorporate this obliteration as a condition for their survival and their exile takes the shape of a dream-nightmare.

The denial of the past wreaks havoc. This questioning, which touches on memory, history and the sources of artistic creation, runs through Louise L. Lambrichs’ literary work. Her texts, which were written to accompany my photographs, trigger a dialogue with them and generate a realistic fiction. Spoken writing, an inner dialogue as if in suspense, links the character-images to the reader and imbues my stray ghosts with vibrant humanity."

Michel Semeniako, summer 2004


2/

"Exiled in their history or language, foreigners in their own land, isn’t it the writers who always start with a point of view from which they seek 20 to make understood what cannot be seen? From this point, they question the world, clarify, shine forth, have encounters, connect with others.

Michel Semeniako’s work on exile, at the time when I had just completed We will never see Vukovar, awoke familiar voices in me. Doubtless because I myself had just relived the same story, – the story he told from his own origins – by other paths."

Photographer
Michel Semeniako

Writer
Louise L. Lambrichs


9 - OCEANMALECONDRIVE

An installation designed by Enric Massip and Ángel Morúa contrasts the seafronts of Havana’s Malecón and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, forming a “border street”.



OCEANMALECONDRIVE TRANSATLANTIC STREET: BORDER STREET

"OceanMaleconDrive is a new category of urban planning, comprising two linear, sea-facing faccades, separated by 300 kilometres of ocean. Two faccades, the Malecon in Havana, and Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, which are, in turn, the urban icons of their cities, their paradigmatic images.

And each side of the street has its own neighbours, who despite facing the difficulties of a border in order to cross the 300 kilometres of liquid road, think about their neighbours across the way, neighbours they dream of but can’t see. So, the inhabitants of Havana lean out of their windows or sit on Antonio Maceo Avenue to talk and dream about life on the other side. Meanwhile, on the other side, their neighbours sit on the terraces in front of Lummus Park to imagine their lives over there, a return or a visit made possible just by crossing the road.

But this street already existed at the beginning of the 20th century, although then it was a physical not an emotional border. And the way of crossing it has changed over the years, depending on where Paradise or the Enemy are. Perceptions of each of the two Cities, of each of the two Worlds.

The 300-kilometre wide street, shaped from the feelings of its neighbours, seems to be the ideal setting for building OceanMaleconDrive."

Angel Morua and Enric Massip-Bosch


10 - MELILLA

The fence in Melilla: three successive rows of wire fencing. The tallest is seven metres high. On one side, the Moroccan army controls the perimeter, on the other lies the sea of wildest dreams. Beyond the fence, on the outskirts of the cities of Morocco and Algeria, improvised camps hide people who, one day, set out on a journey in search of a decent life.



Europe: an island?

"Heaven lies behind a fence. For many years, Berlin divided Europe in two. Its wall enshrines the tragic memory of the thousands of people who tried to jump it, always in the same direction. Today it is just an icon, but then it was a border and a metaphor for two worlds: heaven and hell. Everything hidden on the other side was suspect and uncertain. And although the wall finally fell, the idea behind its existence is still prevalent today. It seemed there were no walls left in Europe, yet what form of short-sightedness can overlook the 12-kilometre fence in Melilla? The world hasn’t changed so much when it is able to maintain a deep divide between those who enjoy it, with all their rights, and those who are condemned to view it from the barrier.

This fence, which also separates two worlds, represents the imposed and compulsory repetition of ideas that have proved to be archaic. However, its aesthetic instils fear and the barrier is real. There are three successive rows of wire fencing, the highest standing 7 metres. Between them, a labyrinth of cables and barbed wire has been designed to destroy, one by one, all the parts of the human body. On one side, the Moroccan army patrols the perimeter and shoots to kill, and on the other side, lies the land of milk and honey. Does the fence serve any purpose? Its presence is so imposing that, every day, it prevents us from seeing the bodies being torn apart. However, the problem it is trying to halt hasn’t disappeared, it has just moved a little further away, towards a place in silence. Does anybody think they can stop immigrants coming in? Immigration continues, at a slow and constant pace, despite border closures, because there is no hope of change, in the near future, in most of the countries the immigrants come from.

The fence is certainly impressive, but what it tries to conceal is even more so. A reality as overwhelming as its height. Its presence has fostered the development of real human traffic networks which use the closure of borders as a resource. These networks now decide the fate of the thousands of stateless people with no papers, and no income, who, one day, set off on a journey in search of a decent life and are now hiding in makeshift camps on the outskirts of cities in Morocco and Algeria. Some have been in this situation for years. The journey to the European dream is a journey with no way back. They have no alternative: they will reach Europe or die. Today, their body is the only border that separates them from heaven. Nobody stands up for them and, what is even worse, in the limbo they occupy, nobody feels compelled to do so. They are so far removed from the European conscience that they can wander until they vanish, without us even being aware. We know they exist, but our watertight society doesn’t want uncertainties. The fence thus becomes a way of alleviating collective responsibility: those on the other side don’t matter to us, their drama no longer has anything to do with us. They are shipwrecked people, outside the island. Our main concern, on this side of the fence, is to know how long we can remain cut off from them."

Rafael Vila San Juan



11 - Audiovisual installation with original work and artistic direction by Frederic Amat. Produced on the basis of the lectures given as part of the “Borders” cycle, which took place at the CCCB from 12 January and 29 March 2004 in the framework of the 7th Barcelona Debate, with the participation of the following speakers: Roger Bartra, Zygmunt Bauman, Georges Corm, Manuel Cruz, Francisco Fernández Buey, Michel Foucher, David S. Landes, Tzvetan Todorov and Eyal Weizman.

Back in May, I invited Neil Smith to participate in Postopolis! But, at the time he was heading to Berlin and unfortunately could not join our crazy 5-day conversation at the Storefront.

For those who aren’t familiar, Neil is a seriously bad-ass geographer who has done some of the most important work looking at the historical landscapes of uneven capitalist development in the West. His theoretical research on the complex social dioramas and gentrification patterns of the city has been largely influential, and has major resonance today given the current geopolitical climate. While teaching anthropology at CUNY he is also the Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, an academic forum that invites leading thinkers to deconstruct globalization’s contemporary modalities of space production by considering a wide range of social urban issues. He has won numerous book awards, received distinguished fellowships, and is one of the highest regarded professors in the field.

So, we reconnected upon his return and since then I’ve picked his brain over a brief email exchange on his thoughts about the manifestation of the military’s role in today’s global economy. Let me say, that his comments on the inevitable destruction of cities in order for the cogs of the capitalist real estate machine to turn are particularly poignant right now. Given how the world is experiencing and responding (or not) to so much destruction and simultaneous reconstruction that is brought on by perpetual conflict and a volatile increase in natural devastation, the implications of the nature of capital and the city are endlessly confounding and need to be articulated like this more often. So, with that – I’d like to thank Neil for taking the time and giving Subtopia a brief education on this angle of a pervasive military urbanism.

[What follows is the transcript of an email exchange between Neil Smith and myself just a couple of week ago.]

• • •
[Bryan Finoki] In essence, Subtopia is about the relationship between the military and cities. There is, of course, an ancient history there, but today the institution of the military seems to engage – or even, constitute – cities on many different levels. This is evident all over, from places like London that boasts having perhaps the single largest and most dense urban surveillance network in all of the world, to Tijuana where the military and police regularly collide not only with each other but with highly armed cartels and pervasive gang warfare; to New York City’s armored skyscrapers and futurist fortress urbanism; to Sao Paulo’s interwoven paramilitary groups that practically run the sprawling capital from prison; to Baghdad that is informally governed by probably more sectarian militias than we can even count; and all the way back to New Orleans post-Katrina when the private military company Blackwater stormed the area in a feral sweep of martial law long before FEMA had even hit the ground.

These are just to name a few, but there is a precarious relationship these days between cities and the military and I was hoping you could reflect on the nature of it a bit first to get us started.

[Neil Smith] Historically, wars and battles were often won and lost with the capture or sacking of cities. More than anything, this reflected the political and cultural power of cities in pre-capitalist societies. The rise of the national state, as the scale at which competing territorial economies were organized, partly deprived cities of some of this social power and the wars of the last two centuries were – in the most general sense – less focused on cities. But that is beginning to change again.

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed a significant rescaling of social activities. National economies are comparatively weaker, for example, in the face of globalized economic relationships, but so too has the urban scale been strengthened as cities have become the fortified nodes of the global political economy. Cities were never out of the crosshairs of war, but in recent decades the re-empowerment of cities has made them broadly more visible as "places of military interest." This was a shift that was well underway before September 11, 2001 – a day, which in and of itself did not (as so many seem to suggest) change the world. The response to that day, by contrast, did change the world in various ways, among them the intensified securitization of cities. It is a shift paralleled by the rapid class polarization between rich and poor, and the new military interest in cities expresses not just the fact that cities are military targets but that they are also concentrations of extraordinary wealth that the state defends.


[Image: The cover image for Neil Smith's book The Endgame of Globalization published by Routledge in 2004. Image by CORBIS.]

[Bryan Finoki] In your book The Endgame of Globalization you deconstruct the inherent contradictions of the American ideal and how they have translated through neoliberalism, which has largely prevented the success of creating a truly dominant global system. While I haven’t read the book entirely yet myself, you cite the current occupation of Iraq as the contemporary and penultimate folly in this pattern of chronic self-contradictions that have evolved the American project as both an imperialist and democratic one, and so my question is: what are the systemic mechanisms today heading deeper into the 21st century that defines the city as an engine for this type of perpetually flawed neoliberal agenda?

[Neil Smith] Endgame makes the argument that it's a specifically liberal imprematur that is picked up and remade in the fashion of neoliberalism. It does so through a U.S. lens but of course neoliberalism has many identities. The so-called democracy of the U.S. imperial project is a democracy of capitalists on behalf of their own interests which might look democratic in comparison to feudalism, and it's exactly that kind of democracy that the U.S. empire threatens the rest of the world with. I'd like to think we're beyond that – or, have to get beyond that.

As regards to the question about cities, they have become the engines of neoliberal economic production. This was not true in the Keynesian period. Then, cities in the advanced capitalist world were cogs in subnational regional economies, supplying labor power for the larger national economy. Today, city economies, polities and cultural regimens compete among each other – almost regardless of national borders – in the global economy. The mechanisms? Crucially, cities no longer function primarily as the reservoirs of labour power (the social reproduction of a work force) for national economies. Labour power can now be imported across national borders. Rather, as part of this global rescaling, cities (more accurately ‘city regions’) have become the centres of production for the global economy. Sloughing off their social service functions – medical, unemployment, welfare, education – was the task of roll-back neoliberalism which abolished all sorts of state support for social reproduction; the new roll-out neoliberalism establishes cities as the crucibles of a new entrepreneurialism – in germ, the so-called ‘creative city.’

[Bryan Finoki] In an essay I read in a recent issue of Volume magazine, Andrew Herscher talks about the “World Bank City” as a new form of urbanism that uses the context of post-conflict reconstruction to lend money and institute “conditionlaities” of economic neoliberalism in nations desperate to rebuild. With these arrangements comes a whole host of market “liberalization effects,” as he calls them, like the downsizing of municipal governments, the privatization of public services and utilities, the erosion of fair labor practice and the escalation of informal urban economies. He concludes by saying: “To speak of the World Bank City as an object of ‘reconstruction,’ then is imprecise; more accurately, it is an object of redestruction, a place where the physical violence of war is transmuted into the structural violence of neoliberal globalization.”

First, what is your take on this concept of a “World Bank City,” and how do you gage the economy of military occupation in its complicity with the kinds of post-conflict capital investment we see in such places like East Timor, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Kosovo?

[Neil Smith] I've always thought the language of the "neoliberal city" worked quite well, but I think this language of the "World Bank City" works, too. My own argument in the journal Antipode, that a new globalism brings a new urbanism, fits this broad picture, as well. When I think of the economy of urban occupation, I think mostly of Iraq, but these other examples are equally useful.

A central part of the neoliberal city is that the city itself becomes a vehicle of accumulation – city building becomes an accumulation strategy in a far more intense way than at any previous moment. Militarization, massive reconstructive reinvestment and a supposed humanitarian agenda (bombs dropped alongside care packages on Kabul) all feed into this strategy of city building. The charm of capitalism, as Marx and Schumpeter both understood very well, is the necessity of creative destruction – an insight that the theory of uneven development mobilizes. It is necessary to destroy capital in order to create the opportunity. Disinvestment can be gradual or cataclysmic – in many cities gradual disinvestment creates the opportunity for gentrification; military destruction speeds the process up. While the Iraq war is all about the "endgame of globalization," part of this equation is the massive state funding of Halliburton and Blackwater and other multinationals to orchestrate a reconstruction. That this reconstruction has proven an utter failure is of only secondary concern – indeed, as long as the state keeps funding accumulation through multi-billion dollar contracts to these and other corporations, failure simply establishes the conditions for further investment.


[Image: Coalition Forces patrol the ruins of Fallujah, Iraq in 2004. Photo by Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images via MSNBC's article: Surveying the ruins, making plans for Fallujah, Nov. 15 2004.]

[Bryan Finoki] How would you distinguish the difference between militarism and the militarization of space? Geographer Colin Flint said at the recent AAG meeting in San Francisco, something to the effect that “militarism” is an ideology while “militarization” is an internalization of those ideals. I’m wondering if you concur with this, and how you see the American ideals as having been defined historically perhaps by this sense of militarism, and how that has or has not played out in American, or even perhaps, global urban development?

Taking this question even a step further: If we think specifically about constructing a spatial narrative of globalization, or, telling its history strictly in terms of the spatial forms it has engendered or from which globalization as a system has emerged (i.e., cities, suburbs, naval ships and trade routes, military bases, corporate dominions, prison space, hotel chains, etc.), I would be interested to hear how you trace the urban morphology of globalization in a specific conjunction with militarization? How has the role of militarism or the militarization of space served the production of the type of uneven global development you have written about so extensively?

[Neil Smith] I seem to be anticipating your questions as I go! I would be less inclined to divide militarism as an ideal from the actual experience of militarization. To do so invites the sense, as your question suggests, that militarization is about putting ideals or even ideas into practice. This to me privileges the ideal and/or idea and represents an idealist explanation. The military for me represents forms of forceful power and this is a power that is always used on behalf of some social interests rather than others. The key for me is to 'follow the interests.' Who wins from militarism at home or militarization abroad, and who loses?

I think what we are seeing today is a shift from a geopolitical calculus dominating global power to a geoeconomic calculus. This is very much expressed in the global ambitions of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as with the present Bush. The contradiction amidst all of this is that military force is generally deployed in order to pacify the world such that this geoeconomic power can work. That is explicitly the U.S./U.K. goal for the Middle East, but of course pacification is not easy to extract from war – hence the debacle in Iraq. Put differently, geopolitics is tactical whereas the geoeconomic vision of global economic control is strategic, but sometimes the tactics get in the way of the strategy.

What does this mean for cities? The militarization of cities is, for ruling classes of whatever ilk, at best a necessary evil. It enforces some interests over others. The real global cities today, I would argue, are not the Londons, New Yorks, and Parises of the world, so much as Mumbai, Shanghai, Mexico City, and so forth – the production hubs for the global economy. This requires social control and whether such control is forcibly maintained by police forces or by the military – whether it takes a directly brutal form or operates largely by dominance and threat – depends on many things. But China's cities today seem to me to be militarized very much in support of capital accumulation. The militarization of New York since the Giuliani era may seem softer but it is very much aimed at pacifying the city for sake of attracting business and tourists even as the lurching economy creates more and more poor people, even homeless people, who have to be "pacified."

The crucial question to recognize is the extent to which urban building is a crucial plank of capital accumulation today. The spatial dimensions of military power are in the end tied to economic interests. The proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world is precisely about pacifying all regions of the world to enable and facilitate massive capital investment. How better to do so that to send the city re-builders in with the city destroyers. Turnover time is reduced to almost zero. I'm not suggesting that specific wars, invasions, or urban military projects are organized with all of this fully in mind; rather, a certain military intent and economic logic finds themselves working hand in hand.


[Image: A helicopter owned by the private military contractor firm Blackwater swoops over the flooded and chaotic ruins of New Orleans just after hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Photo via Too Beautiful.]

[Bryan Finoki] Right. And then we can think about those connections specifically, say, in the context of the GWOT (“Global War On Terror”), and the kinds of similar urban development both in Afghanistan as well as perhaps even Chicago or New York City. What are the growth patterns, or economic ties between militarization and gentrification that are marked similarly across the world? Not to rehash or harp on the earlier question around “World Bank Cities,” but what are the parallels between the reconstruction efforts in Kabul and New Orleans, for example, two utterly different cities (or, are they?)? What is the underlying urban geopolitical principle?

[Neil Smith] Let me just focus on New Orleans since I think much of this has already been covered. There, where the destruction was initiated (but not caused) by a hurricane and subsequent events. I say, "not caused" because had the levees never been built and the wetlands tarred over, the level of physical and economic destruction would have been far less. Had the society that built and populated the city been more egalitarian in terms of race and class and age, and had there been an evacuation strategy that wasn't based on the private property of car ownership and need to protect landed property, the death toll would have been minimal instead of 1400 people. That Blackwater and Halliburton were so quickly into New Orleans, as we now know, alongside – and in some cases in charge of the military (National Guard) – simply confirms the breadth of the connections between militarization and economic opportunity. The reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is being used, in fact, as an opportunity to reconstruct a social geography without many of the working class poor who had been ghettoized there in the past. Gentrification, militarization and capital accumulation come together in near-perfect unison, and nature gets the blame.

From inside the Danger Room: HAARP Facility Complete; Break out the Tinfoil hats / Cheyenne Mountain May Stay Open for Business / Robo-Tasers for "Pipeline" Defense (Updated) / Baghdad Walls Key to Baqubah Push? / Taser-Armed 'Bot Ready to Zap Pathetic Humans / Pentagon Goal: Render Walls "Transparent" / And, (not DR but close enough): Purdue Researchers Create Scientifically Accurate Animated Simulation of 9/11 (NYT)


Secrecy, Security and Suburbia in Baghdad / How Permanent Are Those Bases? / How US Army trains for a different kind of war / Army Looks To Expand Training Bases / Army Corps Details Flood Risks Facing New Orleans / Military focuses on development in Africa / When Iraq Is Israel / Costs Skyrocket As DHS Runs Up No-Bid Contracts / In Iraq, a Private Realm Of Intelligence-Gathering


InfoBunker: nuclear hardened data center / GSA awards development contract for new FBI Field Office in Corktown / Architect Chosen to Overhaul U.N. Headquarters / Biowarfare Research: Site 300 in Tracy, California / Inside Russia's missile defence base / Systemic Failure and Pathology / NASA looks at the next Great Wall of China / Users rage against China's 'Great Firewall' (and other China Walls) / War Graffiti / a google map mash up of cia prisons in Europe begins to take shape / Army's Greatest Inventions for 2006 / Sitting Cage / elin o'Hara slavick / Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy / °National Emergency / If these reefs are islands / Cities UnBuilt - VOLUME Issue #11 (A Review) / Modeling Urban Panic

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This video cracks me up -- an instant classic now for Subtopia. With just the right soundtrack, too. Simply dubbed, Border Patrol Gets Pwned, this is some old school Looney Tunes cartoon kinda silliness, right here -- but in the flesh, and at the border! nonetheless....

(Thanks Eli for sending this my way!)

Going on right now at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada is an exhibition called Informal Architectures which looks pretty interesting and would no doubt get my attention if I were there. All of which I think is part of a bigger ongoing project that had a symposium at the Tate Modern in February earlier this year, and will continue next year with another part at PLUG IN ICA.


Implying perhaps spaces of an informal economy or a counter-landscape to that of the strictly formal, the show is about how certain political and social assumptions are embedded into the landscape, be it subconscious determinants emanating from fear, or consumerism, political residue, cultural collectives of identity which continue to push through the landscape in reverse gravities of informality and subversions of common-place power, presumed knowledge, inherent self-contradictions -- the exhibition looks to explore the emergence of "incessant counter-narratives haunting modernity’s ideological projections" and ultimately how a larger sense of failure has been institutionalized by the incorporation of assumption into the design of our built environment.
Right up Subtope's alley, to say the least. Actually, I am just going to post the entire statement of the show as written by Anthony Kiendl, the exhibition's curator, right here (for you and my own future reference, since I am curious to toy with these notions myself as time goes on):

Informal Architectures is an exhibition gathering the work of a number of artists exploring the intersections of architecture, social thought and failure. The exhibition presents predominantly new works (some commissioned and produced by artists at The Banff Centre) with select historical works. When viewed together, these works form a narrative about the often unspoken role of architecture in controlling people.

This exhibition describes a contemporary landscape of social, political and cultural assumptions. These ideas are incorporated into the structures of the built environment —economic, physical, and institutional—affecting the recent past, uncertain present and near future. In this landscape, technology and consumerism are the primary vehicles of a utopian modernity. But waste, materialism, entropy and abjection form incessant counter-narratives haunting modernity’s ideological projections. In and around these scenes of our post-9/11 environment, artists re-configure our surroundings.

While monumentality continues to weigh on contemporary art and architectural practices in western societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By considering work by artists from diverse and unconventional perspectives, the assumptions and dream-narratives of modern art and architecture may be re-imagined. The artists in Informal Architectures visualize economies of both excess and lack —chocolate and dirt, shopping malls and ruins, humour and destruction—proposing alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation and inhabitation of space—or of how to be in the world.
Reviews of some of the featured artists can be read right here, including "Luanne Martineau’s work Parasite Buttress, a flesh-like form that can double as a mattress, descends from the gallery wall and unfurls across the floor." Or, William Pope.L, who has installed a "Historic Building, a temporary structure that oozes 100 gallons of chocolate syrup." There's newly commissioned works by Jimmie Durham, Eleanor Bond, Edgar Arceneaux, Matthew Sloly, Vincent Galen Johnson, and Olga Koumoundouros. There's a film of Gordon Matta-Clark's, the homeless shelter installation by Japanese architect Kyohei Sakaguchi, and the list goes on.


Needless to say, check it out if you can and, if you feel so inclined, drop me a line to let me know what you thought. Maybe one day I will find a way to get lucky and get paid to go cover this type of thing, but until then - I will just have to sit here and advertise it. So go!

A few nights ago I had the very rare and fiendishly creepy privilege of getting a tour of the historic San Francisco Armory building hunkered down on the corner of Mission and 14th Streets, a monster relic right smack down along a scrubby industrial edge in the Mission district with a vital revolutionary past.


You can read a short history of the armory at Wikipedia which has also done a good job of tracking the many different proposed plans to re-use it ever since its closure in 1976, from dot.com office space (as you might have guessed) to (yes) more condos, to much sorely needed post-homeless housing, to, of course, what it is now finally being used for – sex films.
In the past it served intermittently as a place for social events like boxing matches, but for decades the armory has largely remained untapped in a big disappointing and unimaginative way. At the very least this space could make for an amazing installation venue, a temporary art space, a wicked pavilion or bazaar for a weekend wandering of sorts. But, anyway…
As we read, “The Armory served as a stronghold and rallying point for the National Guard in their suppression of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike (an event known as "Bloody Thursday").”
Essentially, it is a 152,000 square foot concrete behemoth with a brick façade that I spent the good part of over a decade myself walking around trying to climb up to the lower level slivers of look-out space that have remained for the most part boarded up ever since I can remember, just to see if there was any way to peak in, to get even a semi-worthless glimpse, the vaguest of ideas, anything about what the hell was or was not going on inside. And how could nothing have been going on, especially for so long? I tell ya, for a place this mysterious something sure as hell better have been happening in there, that’s all I can say.


[Image: The opened door to a prop room for Kink's fun little stash of props that properly reads "Fuckign Machine,", though, unfortunately it was empty, doh!]

I can’t count how many times I’ve circled this landmark hopelessly plotting, strategizing in vain as to how I might manage to sneak in, if even just to try in order to gather some bits of realism for a much more exciting future dream about sneaking in and wandering around inside this old military beast, where clandestine CIA operations were coming together or maybe being botched, or the NSA had set up another illegal domestic wiretapping facility, or entire secret societies of revolutionary squatters had secured the coolest fort in town, or where crazy avant-garde performance sex-art parties were happening completely unbeknownst to me in all my callous lack of urban cool wisdom.


Damn, for years this place occupied a menacing architectural fascination for me, that I have to say could only have been satiated by this eerie freaky-ass flashlight tour I got from one of the nutty caretakers there who was more than willing to let me indulge my pent up curiosity by running around like a fearless raving madman fishing for answers to my bottomless soul in the pits of the fortress’s urban dark.



With massive wands of light in our hands we kicked and crawled our way through the darkness of abandonment, a little group of us fingering and poking our way down the half-lit stairwells into hallway after hallway, getting darker and darker, combing every random room off to the side I could find like a dog let loose in a new property, sniffing out every corner nook and cranny, mapping a secret geography of his new domain.
In actuality the interior of the entire fortress has been kept excessively clean, I mean, really clean – like psychotically mopped and buffed over and over again. I swear Jack from The Shining must have been hiding somewhere watching us from a dark furtive corner while we admired his obsessive bleach work. Needless to say, the cleanliness was ironically chilling, purely spooky.


[Image: This was hilarious. A classroom setting with a simple desk, and a chalboard that reads over and over and over again, I will not leave my cage without permission again.]

But, irritated by my attachment to people, I bolted off alone following only the nose of my intrepid flashlight into corners of old officers quarters that had now been adorned with mirrors and turned into little unknown dance studios; or, wide open office like spaces from where I climbed onto indoor balconies that I should not have until I heard sounds of creaking wood and bending metal; that being my cue to backtrack into new clefts of storage space where little infrastructural skeletons of ancient trusses and bolted beams were revealed in jagged light fragments, while my panting nostrils siphoned pungent wafts of bleach and old wood just like an old ghost dog on the prowl in some purgatorial compound.




There were rooms with absolutely nothing in them, and others with out of place desks, displaced closet spaces, isolated chairs – presumably basic props for silly sex scenes I’d probably never see; black rooms with half walls holding up pitiful ceilings, bathrooms cautiously taped shut, rusted old bathtubs ideal for a horrendous torture flick.




Through lesser obvious rooms with crumbling door frames I found a set of ramps that led down even further to new hallways lower and lower until the groups’ giddy voices and cackles were trapped in far-off corners, searching for something (always searching for something) yet still lower until I skipped across a section of slimy planks and rotted boards that stretched over a water-logged floor where cold concrete walls whispered in drippy voices, gaining speed to just reach an end or a bottom to the armory until I finally tripped over a bucket and some strewn hardware. Finding a mess of tools and crap there with my light a small gang of drills and saws stared back at me like little mechanic heathens looking as if I’d just interrupted their orgy, or as if they’d just been turned off seconds before I got there. Moving past them until alas I heard Mission Creek oozing by my feet, and this was it, the bottom of the well, the absolute bowels of this massive concrete body where it finally met the earth and could sink into it no more; for a moment I could have sworn I saw a body flowing through the river of black foam as I stopped to just realize my point in time and place on the planet.




Down some more steps that led into the thick slush I flashed my camera over and over again, pretending to be the forensic psychologist I always dreamt of being, alone by the blackest creek in San Francisco, lost to the world inside the remains of an old shooting gallery where the walls had been blown to pieces, waiting for some dead hand to reach out from the water and pull me in, drag me under, on my way to some Subtopian neverland.


Then, I caught a whiff of some thing’s insides, unmistakably the stench of a mammalian cavity and I hustled back up the stairs rummaging through the blocky labyrinth with a flickering flashlight in my hand, catching my toes in ground rivets and looking for a new forward exit, until I swept past a series of cages tucked under a walkway, reminded for a moment of scenes from the recent film Children of Men where immigrants were stashed in stockades screaming in vain, when these were more likely at some point packed with rifles and ammunition, but which now had curiously and freshly mounted hooks for chains I figured ready to lace some secret little S&M scene for a flick soon to be available in Hi-Def on your TV.



Scrambling up some stairs I found the infamous boiler room with its scalded walls, and on my way up and up past the original half-lit stairwells from which I began further north until eventually I was funneled into a room with no other place to go than out an open window where empty beer bottles beckoned me towards a rooftop ladder that scaled dangerously the side of the rooftop where suddenly there I was staring at a view of San Francisco I’d never seen before in one fell swoop.

[All images courtesy of Subtopia, 2007.]

Well, I may have at least found a partial answer to the question from my previous post: could the fence be transformed into a kind of bridge to at least begin the process of deconstruction, towards a structure that unites?
Well, in this case it certainly hasn’t helped to progress any type of border fence deconstruction (that’s for sure), nor has it really helped to unite U.S. and Mexico in the sense of creating a more open border – but, without a doubt, the border fence in San Diego (at least for some indeterminable amount of time) had been turned into a bridge. Literally!
Check it out.


Apparently, yesterday, some Customs and Border Patrol Agents discovered a rather clever ramp system that had been mounted to both sides of a lower level of fence nestled up against another kind of extensive boulder pile there to help act as a de facto barrier. So sophisticated in fact, the ramps could be assembled, used to drive over the fence, disassembled, and the tracks brushed away all in a matter of minutes according to this report. Wow, that's a serious job.


After following a suspicious truck bolting off from Route 94 towards Mexico, this article tells us, the agents were led to a scene where “20 people had crossed into the U.S. and put up welded metal ramps over the top of the border fence.” Upon the BP’s arrival they all took off back into Mexico but the ramp was left behind and, well, we got some good pics right here for ya.


Look at that thing, pretty bad-ass, actually. The truck that was stopped contained “60 packages of pot valued at $735,000” weighing 916 pounds. That’s some serious cashish right there.


It just amazes me, the types of ingenuity that go into these little secret infrastructures of informality, particularly in and around the border.
In case you’re a new reader, I‘ve been trying to track some of these under a category that I’ve loosely referred to as Improvising Sub_Base landscapes. Mostly, border and smuggler tunnels, but there have been some fascinating tales of smugglers using rope and pulley schemes underground across the border, too, that I have learned about adopted from old Vietnam tunnel-warfare tactics. Of course, a border ramp is nothing exotically novel, but certainly nothing I’ve come across yet. The typical border-crosser ladders are about the closest thing.


But, it also gets me back to my original curiosity of what the border fence could theoretically and imaginatively become, perhaps even ludicrously out of context. For example, maybe both sides could rig up dozens of more of these ramps, properly reinforced, to host a kind of border derby using the fence as a massive stunt superstructure; dune buggies busting flips off the fence, soaring back and forth from California to Mexico in amazing aerial loops, like border-crosser daredevils, almost as if it were some long-winded skate ramp. That coud be cool, too. Turn the fence into a transborder skate park. Cross-border derby stunt jumping contests could become the new craze. Extreme Sports would host annual skate competitions down there, BMX rats would develop insane new tricks off the old useless rusted sheet metal. I mean, come on, that'd be awesome! Why not?

[All images have been heisted from this article on the NBC News website, where there is also a video: Agents: Drug-Smuggling Ramp Found At Border.]