“Danger Effondrement” (Danger Collapse) in Aulnay-sous-Bois (North-Eastern Paris banlieue) / Photograph by Léopold Lambert on November 8, 2005 (full photo here)

Since September 2004, I have been taking and selecting one photograph per day in a project that links the short and long term, the banal and, sometimes, fragments of history (during the great French student strike in 2006, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 for instance). One of these fragments can be seen in my November 8, 2005 entry, exactly ten years ago yesterday, with a photograph taken in Aulnay-sous-Bois of a car dealership burnt during the October-November 2005 revolt of the banlieues that the recent blog articles and the second issue of The Funambulist Magazine have been examining. Being a 19-year old architecture student back then, I wanted to confront the media discourse that was offering us visions of a civil war to a reality eminently more complex about which the small-town provincial I was only had a vague intuition back then. The testimonies gathered ten years later in various independent medias (Mouvements and Mediapart for instance) attests that the revolt is as much born from the police racist profiling and brutality, as from the media coverage of the events in particular, and of the banlieues in general, which seemed (and continue to be) taking its information directly from police representatives and demagogic politicians. The most vocal of the latter was, of course, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior and, thus the “chief of the police,” who had already promised to wash out the banlieues “scum” (racaille) with a Karsher a few days before the revolts started (see past article) and who declared on November 10, 2005 that polygamy might be one the cause of the revolt (what most of the French press continues to call “riots”).

Another discursive effort to fundamentally dissociate the Banlieue Black and Arab youth from the rest of French society consisted for politicians and the press to insist on the numerous fires light up in various banlieues burning various cars and buildings, and providing the perfect mix of spectacle for the press and fear for the politicians. In the descriptions of these fires, they particularly insisted on the fact that this youth was burning its own local infrastucture, implying that not only were they violent and dangerous, they were also irrational or suicidal. In La domination policière (La Fabrique, 2012), Mathieu Rigouste (who has been since then assaulted and beaten by undercover police officers) explains that the youth was contained by the police within their own neighborhoods and had to therefore burn what they had “handy” in a gesture that can be seen as a revelation of the banlieues, yet that were also easily instrumentalized by antagonizing, demagogic and often racist political discourses. It is tempting on a platform that had argued numerous times that architecture is to be more thought as a problem than as a solution, to think of these buildings burning as the “positive holes” described by the Situationnists (see past article), or, along the same line to the text written by Guy Debord after the African American Los Angeles revolt of 1965 describing the fires of the city supermarkets as a critique of capitalist urbanism. However, this is something that I refuse to do here. I do not think that there was a constructivist agenda or unconscious to the numerous fires lit in the banlieues back then, but, rather, the desperate (in the proper sense of the term: who has lost any form of hope) catharsis for a legitimate anger of a socially excluded youth.

This is where this November 8, 2005 photograph is useful in the symbolic layer it adds to the reality of the revolt. The structure of the car dealership being compromised, someone had sprayed the phrase “DANGER EFFONDREMENT” (DANGER COLLAPSE) on the building’s remaining facade. I remember these words hitting me for their simple but powerfully accidental description of the situation. On the first page of the magazine’s second issue, it was important to me to link 2015 with 2005, but also to the 1995 vision of the banlieue offered by Mathieu Kassovitz in the canonical film, La Haine (see past article) that presents today a testimony that nothing really changed in the last twenty years: journalists still visit the banlieues “as if they were in a zoo” as Hubert Kounde points out in the film, young Black and Arab men still die “from complications following their police arrest,” and the occasional forms of revolt are still antagonized and feared by the rest of society. But, the most compelling comparison between these words, “DANGER COLLAPSE,” and La Haine lies in the first scene of the 1995 film (see below), when we see a molotov cocktail slowly falling towards the ground with the following narrative accompanying the fall: “There is this guy who is falling from a skyscraper. On his way down, past each floor, he keeps saying to reassure himself: ‘So far, so good…so far, so good…so far, so good…’ But that’s not the fall that’s important, it’s the landing that is.” As we recently saw through the architecture of Paris Northern banlieues’ police stations, the police and politicians already have a scenario planned out for “the landing;” it is therefore crucial that we fundamentally address this narrative that the rest of society is being prepared to legitimize on a daily basis, and undermine it at its very neocolonialist urbanistic and social foundations.

The recent outcry that blamed the Western (social and press) media to bring a disproportionate attention to Friday’s deadly attacks in Paris (Nov. 13, 2015) compared to the two bombs that exploded in Beirut a few hours earlier, can only be denied through disingenuous responses. Such disproportion finds it source in what journalists call in a brutal manifestation of cynism “the amount of deads per kilometers,” i.e. as the distance grows between the deadly event, there ‘needs’ to be a bigger amount of people who die to be considered relevant by a given newspaper or TV news broadcast. This cynical affirmation is furthermore inaccurate as it forgets the Westerno-centric component to it, which makes the death of an Israeli soldier more likely to be reported than the one of a Palestinian civilian despite the same distance. However, only affirming that we should pay attention to what happened in Beirut, and doing so, only after the Paris attacks occurred, is not enough and can fall into the same perverse logic than the one it pretends to fight, since it seems that it is only in the context of the comparison than an event (in this case, the double bombing in Beirut) seems to acquire importance. It also creates a false opposition between two cities, attacked by the same armed group and by doing so also forgets the folds of complexity of the situation: for example, the fact that many people feel connected de facto to the two events (there are 36,000 Lebanese people living in France, many of which resides in the Paris region).

So, before addressing in the coming days the extremely grave and tragically predictable decisions that the French government is currently undertaking, let’s talk indeed of the way the situation in Beirut has been discursively described by the media. The double bombing conducted by Daech members and that occurred in the Burj al-Barajneh municipality (see map below), which killed 45 people and injured more than 200 others — the intervention of Adel Termos who tackled the second bomber certainly avoided that these figures would reach even more dramatic level — was described by many press organizations as occurring in a “Hezbollah stronghold,” or “Hezbollah bastion.” What follows therefore consists in examining how such a terminology is extremely problematic and heavily consequential in what it implies, as well as describing the minimum degree of complexity that any serious media should consider when describing the current situation in Lebanon in general and Beirut in particular.

Burj al-Barajneh is a predominantly Shiite neighborhood, as is the rest of the Greater Beirut Area’s Southern districts (as well as South Lebanon), and the Hezbollah incarnates indeed the local authority in these parts of the city. It also hosts a Palestinian refugee camp and its 20,000 inhabitants since 1948. Hezbollah, engaged in the Syrian war alongside the Assad regime, and fighting Daech as West as the valley of Bekaa valley in Lebanon, was indubtly targeted by Daech in these attacks. By calling Burj al-Barajneh, a “Hezbollah stronghold” however, the Western press accomplish a double effort of minimization of the gravity of the deadly double bombing. Firstly, it discursively contributes to the drastic association that Daech does, between the neighborhood’s inhabitants to Hezbollah and its military action, and thus implicitly denies the status of civilians to the victims. Secondly, by using as directly (in the titles) the name of Hezbollah when addressing a Western audience that immediately associates it to the so-called “terrorist groups” defined by their governments, these medias contribute to an imaginary developed by both the Lebanese and Israeli governments, first during the civil war (1975-1990) and the two Israeli invasions and bombardments (1982 and 2006) in order to legitimize their destructive action against Shia neighborhoods.

As Caribbean American poet (and architect!) June Jordan poignantly writes in a 1989 poem dedicated to the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon targeted by the Israeli army and its Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon in their war against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1982: “They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla strongholds” (see the rest of the poem below). This transposition of a military terminology on civilian dwellings is thus a regularly used discursive device and it has drastic consequences through the legitimization that it implies regarding potential and actual attacks against these so-called “strongholds.” Such a transposition is also carefully calibrated by the Israeli army when it bombs Palestinian homes (see past article about Gaza in 2014), using pseudo-legal narratives in order to force the Palestinian population into the prejudicial status of “human shields” (see past article).

What the phrase “Hezbollah bastion” also implies is the exclusive military function of Hezbollah (a function that is actually attributed to its Jihad Council branch), voluntarily forgetting its institutional role (occupying 12 out of the 27 seats dedicated to the Shia community in the Lebanese Parliament), as well as its significant civil action, in particular in the reconstruction of hundreds of homes after the 2006 Israeli war massive destruction. As Mona Harb (contributor to the first issue of The Funambulist Magazine) describes in a conversation with Nasrin Himada for Scapegoat Journal, Hezbollah has been rebuilding the destroyed homes in association to local councils, refusing to wait for the slow and bureaucratic action by the Lebanese government. Of course, such an enterprise is an eminently political one, through the manifested attempt to gain/keep the support of the local population, but saying so actually insists on the existing separation of this population and Hezbollah.

Finally, the notion of stronghold implies the homogeneity of a neighborhood and its population, thus lacking to describe the significant difference in the reactions that are likely to follow this deadly event. Just like in the Western world, a minority of the targeted population is likely to find the perfect incarnation of the problem in the bodies of the Syrian refugee and deploy violence upon them. Let us remind that there are currently 1.9 millions Syrian refugees who sought a precarious shelter in the neighboring Lebanon, and that thus account to a quarter of the Lebanese population. In a country that experienced twenty five years of civil war, and that currently live a grave political crisis (there is no president since April 2014) that the political and inter-confessional movement “You Stink!” have revealed these last months, the discursive deployment of the situation’s complexities — something that I am barely doing here — is fundamental to avoid reproducing the past’s violence.

FULL MAP ///

FULL POEM BY JUNE JORDAN /// (thank you Laleh Khalili)
via Poetry Foundation

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon

Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called      your apartments and gardens      guerrilla
strongholds.
They called      the screaming devastation
that they created       the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren’t so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.

June Jordan, “Apologies to all the People in Lebanon” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

Soldiers in the corridors of the subway / Photo by Léopold Lambert (Nov. 16, 2015)

After last January’s double attack (political assassination of journalists, and antisemitic carnage) in Paris, I had not written anything, in order not to add more noise to the astonishing brouhaha that followed them. The brouhaha, that had gradually lost some strength (but certainly not disappeared) is now back to full volume after last Friday’s (November 13) six deadly attacks in Paris that killed 129 people and injured more than 400 others. Perhaps, the present article will do what I then feared in January: adding useless noise that will only convince the convinced, but just like my series of articles in the summer 2014 when the Israeli bombs on Gaza were killing dozens of Palestinians every day, I simply feel compelled to write, if only for its cathartic function. To you who will read this text, please only know that my argument is full of doubts and that, on the contrary of the many self-declared prophets and experts that saturate our medias, I claim doubt as the only dignified position one can adopt in this situation.

After the attacks that both President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls experienced themselves from relatively close (Hollande was attending the football game between France and Germany at the Stade de France where three bombs were detonated, and Valls lives only 200 meters away from one of the attack sites), the French government decreed the State of Emergency, that suspends large public gatherings — although, fortunately, no gatherings at the sites of the attacks or on the Place de la République have been dismissed — and allows the deployment of additional police and military force in the city. On the contrary of the United States, France does not have a constitutional obstacle to have soldiers patrol in the city and, since the series of bombs exploding in Paris in 1995, Parisians are used to regularly see a few of them in the spaces of national train stations. Since January, the military presence was much more visible, in train stations and airports, but also in the vicinity of synagogues and Jewish schools (see the photograph below taken a month ago). In the last days, an important amount of heavily armed police officers and soldiers operates in the city (see photos at the end of this article), implement checkpoints, while others close at will entire neighborhoods (cf. Saint Denis in the Paris banlieue and Molenbeek in Brussels) to lead arrests and assaults in areas defined by the media as “cradle of terrorism.” People who know the beautiful cities of Saint Denis and Molenbeek can only sigh in front of this ineptness. Such terminology associating its largely Muslim inhabiting population to the deadly action of some individuals, can only lead to the numerous acts of islamophobia we are currently observing in France and elsewhere.

 Soldier in the vicinity of a 19th arrondissement Jewish kindergarden / Photo by Léopold Lambert (October 2015)

Before last Friday, the State of Emergency had been decreed only three times since its creation in 1955: during the Algerian revolution (1954-1962), in New Caledonia in 1984 during the most intense moment of the independentist stuggle (New Caledonia is still a French department today), and in 2005 during the revolt of the banlieues (see past article). Yesterday (Nov. 19), its three-month extension was voted by an overwhelming consensus, only six representatives voting against it. Unanimity could also be found in the applause manifested to Hollande on Monday when he gave a speech in front of the Congress, that is the National Assembly and the Senate both gathered in a room of the Versailles palace, symbol of the monarchy and, later of the temporary French government that ended the 1871 Paris Commune in a bloodbath (see past article) right after which the newly elected National Assembly gathered in the very same room. In his speech, Hollande argued for an amendment to the Constitution regarding the state of emergency, the state of siege (most severe legal form of suspension of rights) and the highly demagogic strip of French citizenship for people found guilty of complicity to “terrorism.” Let us note that a law facilitating the collect of personal data for counter-terrorism intelligence had also been recently voted by the Parliament and is now in application.

François Hollande unanimously applauded by the Congress gathered in Versailles (Nov 16, 2015)

Before this speech and during the three days of national mourning that the government had itself decreed, the French air force had bombed the city of Rakka, designated as “Daesh stronghold”  (see the previous article about this terminology that rhetorically diminishes the potential status of civilian of people killed by this kind of bombardment). Many people have observed the rhetorical proximity of Hollande’s discourse and action with the ones of George W. Bush after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The only difference might lie in the personal conviction of the two men, since Hollande can be suspected to adopt such a martial attitude in order to cynically leave no room for expression to the two major right wing opposition parties, Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans — yes that’s their name now! — and Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Such political calculations that leads to more war and victims (precisely the aim of these attacks) constitute the continuation of the usual French politics, from the two-century long internal and external colonialism, to the last decade’s drastic ‘americanization’ (or ‘nato-ization’) of French foreign policies regarding the Middle East and the military interventions in Libya, Mali and Central African Republic. It is my conviction that the fact that an important part of French society is so eager to believe and propagate the “they attacked our life style” narrative can be explained by the incapacity of this society to look at this colonial past and its current structural racism. However, I do not mean to explain the attacks through this observation. Such an attempt to “explain,” rather than “comprehend” is, I think, useless and doomed to divide us; after all, we can attribute to them the importance that we decide, and simply grieve our friends and family members who were killed. What is crucial however, is that in our aversion of these attacks’ violence, we understand the violence of our own political actions, both nationally and internationally.

We are in a state of emergency, but not the emergency to deploy more security, suspicion, and bombardments, but, on the contrary, the emergency to dismantle the violence of our society’s structures. This cannot be manifested through the tolerance that the dominant social group would manifest with condescension towards the one that experience this domination on a daily basis, but, rather, through the radical construction of an open-ended definition of this “we” in all its heterogeneity. Such a process is unlikely to prevent any future other attacks, but only through it could we then claim that the violence we experience is unilateral.

Photographs from the recent days in Paris /// (all photos by Léopold Lambert)

This article is a sequel of the one written on October 26 about the weaponized architecture of police stations in Paris’ Northern banlieues. Now that the state of emergency has been declared (see previous article), the power granted to the police is even stronger and the imaginary created by their antagonism crystallized into architecture seems to be even more relevant. As described in the part 1 of this research, architecture, through its usual codes (material, spatiality, aesthetics, etc.) attempts to disguise with more or less success the militarized function that these eight police stations clearly fulfill. A future study should show that police stations in Paris Western banlieues, where most of the wealthiest municipalities are located, drastically differ from this weaponized paradigm of the Northern banlieues, where live the most economic precarious populations partially constituted by a stigmatized Black and Arab youth.

READ PART 1 OF THE ARTICLE

SITUATION MAP ///

North is on the right side / The length of the map is 20 kilometers / Red squares are the cités (see past map/article) / Blue squares are the photographed police stations

01: VILLIERS LE BEL – 02: GARGES LES GONESSE – 03: PIERREFITTE – 04: AUBERVILLIERS /// See part 1 of the article

05: LA PLAINE SAINT DENIS POLICE STATION ///

06: LA COURNEUVE POLICE STATION ///

07: BOBIGNY POLICE STATION ///

08: NOISY LE SEC POLICE STATION ///

On November 10th, I was invited by friend Meriem Chabani to give a small lecture in Paris in the context of the exhibition New South that she curated around six architecture students’ thesis projects engaging cities of the Global South in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Burkina Faso, Morocco and the Canaries. I started writing a digest of this presentation here the next day but the Nov. 13 attacks occurred and I am profoundly sadden to announce that, Amine Ibnolmobarak, the brilliant and kind author of the project for Mecca in this exhibition, was killed in the shootings. Despite the shock of this news and the difficulty to mourn in the maddening noise of the journalistic and political state of emergency, his friends gathered around his family, and remembered with emotion his life in the great hall of the Beaux Arts school last Friday.

The City of the Global South and its Insurrections: Algiers, Cairo, Gaza, Chandigarh, and Kowloon ///

This presentation constitutes a rather shallow examination of five cities’ reciprocal influence between their urban fabric and their insurrections and counter-insurrections operations. In order to make the presentation clearer, I produced a few new maps and thus propose to include my slides here, as well as a few notes to explain them.

Invitation and video of the lecture.

When situating world cities in relation to each other, the choice of projection for a world map already participates to inform a narrative about the importance of the Global South. Traditional projections in the West tend to emphasize the size of the North of the Globe, while the one presented here favors an importance around the Equator line, placing the five cities examined here on a world map where the Global South appears as central.

Since the lecture was presented in Paris, and that the first city examined is Algiers, the introduction consisted in addressing the strategies of counter-insurrection undertaken by the same actors in France and in the newly colonized Algeria starting 1830. This photograph that I took in a Berber restaurant in Belleville (Paris) remembers one of these actors: the French Marshall Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, here associated to his opponent, the main resistor against colonization, Emir Abdelkader. In 1840, Bugeaud is named General Governor of Algeria by Adolphe Thiers, also involved in the counter-insurrection politics on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea since, thirty one years later, he will give the orders to exterminate the Paris Commune during the Bloody Week of May 1871 (see the “chrono-cartography of the Paris Commune“). Bugeaud, in charge of the “pacification” of Algeria will operate on this side of the Mediterranean until 1847. During the French revolution of 1848, he plays a substantial role in the counter-insurrection and later this year, he writes a short manual entitled The War of Houses and Streets (see past article), which proposes a new counter-insurrection doctrine to the French army that attempts to operate within a similar logic than the insurgents themselves (a common way of thinking with many of the counter-insurrection strategists, as we will see through the example of Ariel Sharon further).

 01/// ALGIERS (Algeria): COLONIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION WARS IN THE CASBAH

Algier’s Casbah, its dense urban fabric and sinuous labyrinthine streets.

Photographs by Yann-Arthus Bertrand.

As described in a past article, one of the first actions undertaken by the French army after it conquest of Algiers in 1830 is the ‘administrativization’ of the old city, the dense and labyrinthine Casbah. They thus name the streets — the imaginaries of these names is also a colonial enterprise — and attributes a number to each house. Such an administrative and military process allows the association of identities to urban location, and thus a more thorough policing. As the picture above illustrates in comparison to current aerial photographs, the counter-insurrection strategy of the colonial authorities also consisted in the destruction of the entire Low-Casbah, thus denying the old city to reach the sea — a significant insurrectional component.

In 1933, Le Corbusier presents his “Plan Obus” (a plan that appears to carry a militarized agenda just by its name, since obus means a bomb shell) for Algiers. Expressing an orientalized vision of the Casbah, Le Corbusier includes the latter in his master plan, as merely a fetishized object that his new city’s inhabitants would look down to from the height of his elevated highways. For a broader, yet concise context, see the text “Blocking the Casbah: Le Corbusier’s Algerian Fantasy” by Brian Ackley.

The following images are stills from Gilo Pontecorvo’s canonical Battle of Algiers (1966), released only four years after Algeria’s independence and thus embodying a form of historical reconstitution of the Algerian revolution engaged by the FLN (National Liberation Front) from and in Algiers’ Casbah between 1954 and 1958. The film shows the efforts of the French army, in particular its paratrooper division, to control the Casbah, gather the intelligence to unmask the members of the FLN, and capture or kill them. The precision given by the film is such that the Pentagon itself organized a screening in 2003, at the beginning of the US-UK invasion of Iraq.

Closing of the Casbah and implementation of checkpoints to control the in and out of its inhabitants. The film shows well the usual discrimination at work in who gets actually controlled and how, when three female members of the FLN carrying bombs succeeds in not being control by adopting a behavior and appearance that corresponds more to the French settler population than the Algerian colonized one.

Actual photograph of the house where a key member of the FLN, Ali la Pointe was hiding from the French army that dynamited the house.

The sinuous streets of the Casbah allowed to organize a relatively successful swarming guerrilla despite the extreme weapon and technological asymmetry at work between the FLN and the French army.

02/// CAIRO (Egypt): LEARNING FROM TAHRIR, TOWARDS A NEW MILITARY CAPITAL CITY

 The massive and dense informal settlements of Cairo are neighborhoods difficult to control for the military authorities. Read more on friend Mohamed Elshahed’s blog, Cairobserver.

Many things have been already written about the space of Tahrir Square that allowed the 18-day Egyptian Revolution to exist (see the review of Eyal Weizman’s Roundabout Revolutions for instance). The size of the void it allows in the city combined to the amount of bodies willing to inhabit it, as well as its access and location in the city made it a propitious space for such an insurrection.

 (Photos by Léopold Lambert, February 2015) As already presented in two articles about “Cairo’s objects’ narratives” and “the dangerousness of the photograph,” several zones of Cairo are now barricaded to restrict their access to public servants, following the July 2013 coup d’etat that brought Marhsall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the head of the country. The neighborhood of the Ministry of the Interior, adjacent to Tahrir itself is a particularly expressive example of this extreme militarization of the city. Manned tanks are also deployed at various points of the city (there was one behind the wall showed on the photograph above), in particular near Tahrir between the Egyptian Museum and the former National Democratic Party Headquarters.

In March 2015, the Sisi administration announced that it commissioned the well-known architecture office SOM to plan a new capital city for Egypt, proving once again that “architects have an intrinsic aspiration to work with the military.” Situated a few kilometers East of Cairo’s newest developments in the desert, this city built on military-owned land with private corporations’ funds and that will hosts the national administrations and embassies is a perfect combination of military, political, and economic interests and inscribes the military authoritarian regime in the long term. Although the details of the city are not clear yet, we can expect it to be a model of counter-insurrection urbanism; both for its military agenda, as well as the controllable rationale at work behind all new city’s masterplan. 

3/// GAZA (Palestine): RAFAH AS HISTORICAL PARADIGM OF THE MILITARIZED APARTHEID

 Overview of the Gaza Strip at the South-Western extremity of Palestine-Israel. See this 2014 map for more information.

Map created for the purpose of this lecture (click for high-resolution version)

The city of Rafah (252,000 inhabitants) is particular for its location on both sides of the Egyptian-Palestinian border, not far from the Apartheid wall — between the wall and the city, lie the ruins of the Arafat International Airport that existed for less than two years (1998-2000) before being shut by the Israeli army, then bulldozed two years later. Two thirds of Rafah inhabitants live in refugee camps, generally in the Rafah camp that counts 75,000 inhabitants. I copy here what I had written in a previous article.

In December 1969, General Ariel Sharon — the same who was Prime Minister during the 2002 siege on Jenin — is named at the head of the Israeli army Southern Command after his determining contribution of the 1967 invasion of the Sinai Peninsula. In October 1970, the first Israeli settlement is built in the Gaza Strip, quickly followed by six others in the 1970s. The Israeli army thus wants to fully control Gaza and destroy the Palestinian resistance, particularly active since the beginning of the occupation three years earlier. In 1971, Sharon thus leads a mission of counter-insurrection that he recounts in his memoirs (Simon & Schuster, 1989) . Like other counter-insurgency specialists of colonial armies, from French Marshall Robert Bugeaud (see past article) to U.S. General David Petraeus, Sharon trains his soldiers to know the terrain on which they operate, as well as to think with the same rationale than the ‘insurgents.’ He also describes the various tactics used to detect P.L.O. hideouts in the Gaza urban fabric, some of which can be considered as quite architectural: we can think of the systematic use of knotted ropes to measure homes both from outside and inside to spot potential hidden rooms, as well as the use of folded ladders to conveniently observe what is happening behind private walls.

As one can suspect, Sharon’s memoirs present the Israeli army’s actions as inoffensive to the Palestinian population not affiliated to the P.L.O., only briefly mentioning his decision to widen the streets of several refugee camps (mostly Rafah’s) and the massive home demolitions that result from it. Indeed, 2,500 Palestinian houses were destroyed by this operation of bulldozed street enlargement that will be reproduced thirty years later in Jenin. Dense urban fabrics always constitute a problem for the counter-insurgency officer, who occasionally improvises himself as an architect of destruction in the reconfiguration of these neighborhoods. The 16,000 inhabitants of Rafah subsequently homeless were offered to relocate in new neighborhoods nearby designed and built by Israel (called Brazil and Canada) providing that they will renounce their status of refugee and, thus their rights to return.

After the 1973 Sinai War and the subsequent First Camp David Agreements in 1978, Israel withdraws both its troops and its civil settlements — they destroy them not to leave the infrastructure to the Egyptians, a technique reproduced in 2005 during the disengagement from Gaza — from the Sinai Peninsula. Until now, the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt did not necessitate much of a materialization since Gaza was under Egyptian control between 1949 and 1967 and that both the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip were occupied by the Israeli army between 1967 and 1982. Ariel Sharon is now Minister of Defense — he will soon lead the Israeli invasion of Lebanon — and the bulldozers D9 are destroying another 300 Palestinian homes along the border to create a patrolling zone for the Israeli army.

In 2002 during the Second Intifada, most of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank had been destroyed by the Israeli D9 bulldozers in a very short time-lapse (see past article). When reconstructed as seen above, the camp incorporated street wide enough to accommodate a potential return of the Israeli tanks as showed by Eyal Weizman in Hollow Land (Verso, 2007).

In 2001, Sharon is largely elected as Israeli Prime Minister — this election was exceptionally a direct suffrage — during the Second Intifada that he contributed to start when he visited East Jerusalem’s Haram (the Mosque Esplanade) in September 2000. As we saw, the bulldozers D9 are massively used in Jenin’s refugee camp, but they also constitute the principal instrument of mass demolition in Gaza in general, and Rafah in particular (two thirds of the destruction). Between 2001 and 2004, 2,500 Palestinian homes are destroyed by them, in particular along the Egyptian border whose patrol zone is enlarged from a few dozen of meters to 300 meters. The Israeli army is particularly after the Palestinian contraband tunnels that are used to bring in necessary products banned from the blockade, as well as weapons for the Resistance. Many people died in their homes while they are being destroyed in an international indifference that seems to be only briefly shattered by the murder of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old White American activist who placed her body in the line of a bulldozer D9 about to destroy a Palestinian house in Rafah (see past article). The Yasser Arafat International Airport that was grandly inaugurated in 1998 is also a privileged target of the bulldozers, which destroy its runway in 2002. You can read the 2004 Human Rights Watch report on the question to access a more detailed description of this wave of demolitions.

In 2015, the Sisi administration, hostile to Hamas, decides to create a 2,000-meter militarized buffer zone at the border, in order to prevent the contraband tunnels to operate, and in March, begins the demolitions.  As friend Mohamed Elshahed writes in “The Erasure of Rafah and the Normalization of ‘Gazafication‘” (Cairobserver, April 25, 2015), the Egyptian government plans to demolish the entire Egyptian side of Rafah before the end of the year. I highly recommend the reading of this (rare) text on the matter to understand how the mass demolition of Rafah is taking place on both side of its central border, and a relative similitude in their process. Let’s also recall that, in addition to the vital flux of contraband goods, Gaza also depends on Egypt for 22MW of electric power (about 20% of its general supply since the Gaza power plant was destroyed by the Israeli bombings in the summer 2014), as well as for the occasional opening of the Al’awda Checkpoint. The latter was regularly opened during the year of the Freedom and Justice Party (the governing avatar of the Muslim Brotherhood) administration lead by Presidend Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013), but this happened only sporadically during the Sisi administration.

04/// CHANDIGARH (India): BURAIL, THE PROLETARIAN ANOMALY OF THE CORBUSEAN GRID

Burail is a sort of Kasba situated in Chandigarh’s Sector 45, Before the construction of the capital city of both Indian Punjab and Haryana in the 1950’s following the partition of India and Pakistan — Lahore being the capital of Pakistani Punjab — Burail was a village that could not do much against the eminent domain that expropriate its agricultural land. As explained by friend Mayank Ojha in his architecture thesis however, the farmers managed to organize to obtain the right to keep the political autonomy on the village’s land itself within the limits of the “red tape.”

With time, the village became an intense place of economic production where people of Chandigarh go for products they do not find in the rest of the city (car mechanical parts, household electrical equipment, fresh vegetables…) and where migrants from outside the city can find shelter. Such an economic activity without urban codification led the village to grow significantly in density to become a built mass where the sky is often framed narrowly by the various vertical extension brought to older buildings. The labyrinthine aspect of the small streets inside Burail contrasts with the square properties of its limits that create a form of inhabited wall as an interface between the inside and the outside. Troubles occasioned within Burail are mostly handled by the community itself that recurrently shows its political solidarity as Mayank explains: three years ago, a 5-year old child was kidnapped away from the village and killed. The commerce owners in Burail shut down their stores for three days and many inhabitants of the village faced the anti-riots police forces that were deployed around it (see this article in Chandigarh Tribune. Beware of explicit images).

The existence of Burail as proletarian fortress is particularly remarkable in the context of a city that has been designed as an inhabitable machine by Le Corbusier. Two urban schemes are thus opposing each other: the rationalist grid of the modernist city and its labyrinthine anomaly. Burail is not a machine, it has not been designed in advance to optimize the set of its functions. On the contrary, it grew and continues to grow immanently based on programmatic needs and opportunities of a moment.

Photograph by Santosh Thorat (2013)

Research by Mayank Ojha

Photographs by Léopold Lambert (2013)

05/// KOWLOON (Hong Kong): THE WALLED CITY, A PROLETARIAN FORTRESS PARADIGM

The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong is the only example of the five presented here that no longer exists — it was demolished in 1993. Incorporating it in this presentation was however important, since this compact neighborhood reaches such a degree of density that we can think of it as a sole gigantic building hosting 33,000 inhabitants, rather than a fragment of city as we would traditionally define it.

Although the Kowloon Walled City constitutes the paradigm of what I’ve been calling “proletarian fortresses” a few times in this blog, its name comes from the former Chinese military fort that used to exist on this location, prior to the 100-year arrangement regarding Hong Kong and the New Territories between the United Kingdom and China — Kowloon was effectively under British sovereignty between 1898 and 1997. The residential complex that took its place was years after years the object of an architectural aggregation that gave its extreme density.

 Retrospective fictitious section of the Kowloon Walled City by Japanese researchers. See past article for details.

Following photographs from the book City of Darkness by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot (Watermark, 1993).

Girard and Lambot’s book is instrumental in demystifying the systematic criminalization of the Walled City by the British authorities and the rest of the city. The authors are not denying the operative presence of some Triads groups, as well as drug addicted persons living in the neighborhood, yet, they also insist on the multiplicity of commercial and daily activities that composed the life of the Walled City during its existence.

“With lifts in just two of the City’s 350 or so buildings, access to the upper floors of the 10 to 14 storey apartment blocks was nearly always by stairs, necessitating considerable climbs for those who lived near the top. This was partly alleviated by an extraordinary system of interconnecting stairways and bridges at different levels within the City which took shape -somewhat organically- during the construction boom of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. It was possible for example, to travel across the City from north to south without once coming down to street level.” (City of Darkness)

 In 1993, four years before transferring the sovereignty back to the Chinese government, the British authorities undertook the demolition of the entire Walled City in an effort of eradicating a urban density impossible to control and that carries the potentiality of a local political organization — whatever it might be. Japanese photographer Ryuji Miyamoto covered the eviction and demolition processes (see photo above). To my knowledge, the Walled City has never been the site of production of an insurrectional discourse and action; yet it constitutes a paradigm of urban formation providing the conditions for such an organization.

CONCLUSION ///

The criminalizing discourses that took the Kowloon Walled City for object as well as its inhabitants, even if based, to a certain degree on a actual facts, is common to all neighborhoods presented here. These discourses construct an imaginary of these neighborhoods that prepares the policed and/or militarized interventions against the urban fabric and its inhabitants. The insurrections evoked throughout this presentation are sometimes less the historical accomplishment of their inhabitants than a narrative forced upon them in order to (re)gain the full political control of these urban formations. As described in another recent article, the rhetorical use of “bastions” or “strongholds” to talk about these neighborhoods or other similar ones, contributes (more often than not, deliberately) to their transformation or demolition orchestrated by the State, sometimes including the very lives of their inhabitants (like in the case of Gaza).

After a reinvigorating large meeting against islamophobia and the state of emergency in Saint Denis (Paris’ immediate Northern banlieue) yesterday, I want to attempt giving an architectural account of the 2,500 police perquisitions and the 400 house/town arrests that have been led since the promulgation of the State of Emergency following the November 13 attacks. Let’s start by reminding ourselves that only six parliamentary representatives out of 558 voted against the ratification of the state of emergency that is (for now) scheduled to end on February 26, 2016. What this essentially means is that these 552 representatives are more attached to the executive power and its police, than the legislative one they collectively form. Consequently, France is currently living in a society stripped from fundamental rights, as the government itself is willing to acknowledge since it wrote to the European Council on November 26 to officially declare that the country will not abide by the Human Rights European Convention during the time of the state of emergency — again we cannot be sure that it will ‘only’ last three months and we already know that something significant will forever remain from it. For many people, such a state does not involve a drastic change in their daily lives if we except the visual confrontation with the newly acquired police weaponry and the presence of armed soldiers in the street — until a few days ago, I had to systematically cross a police checkpoint to go home, with a different level of scrutiny depending on the officers’ mood/zeal.

For some others however, the state of emergency corresponds to the last withdrawal of already challenged rights when it comes to encounters with the police. Manuel Valls’ government does not even try to disguise its abuse of power, made legitimate by the Parliament, when it arrests, searches and puts in house-arrest ecologist activists during the COP21 summit. Of course, the most concerned figures of the police state’s violence are however not the ecologists, but, rather, the French Muslim community (5 millions of people, i.e. 7.5% of the country’s population), predominantly originating from the former French colonial empire and that has been therefore historically the subject of the state violence for the last two hundreds years. Although the ‘socialist’ government is currently multiplying discourses against the stigmatization of this community — the second round of the regional elections are on Sunday and the Socialist Party needs the Muslim vote — this same government has barely differentiated itself from the previous decade of right wing governments (2002-2012) which had drastically accelerated institutional and structural islamophobia through the fetishist invocation of the so-called “Republican principles.” On the contrary, and despite the fact another state of emergency had been promulgated in 2005 during the banlieues revolt (see past article), these former governments never had “the chance” to exercises a quasi-absolute power on this community as it currently does through the state of emergency.

2,500 homes, offices, mosques and restaurants — an overwhelming majority owned by Muslims — have therefore been searched by the police in the past month. Admittedly, the accounts of these perquisitions have significantly varied from police officers almost embarrassed to lead such operation (yet, doing it anyway) to extremely violent interventions in the middle of the night (interventions that could not be led without the supervision of a judge outside of the state of emergency), breaking doors, flipping over the house or apartment, insulting its inhabitants, and sometimes even hitting them. We cannot imagine the terror — this is terror — of a family awaken in the middle of the night by a fully armed police squad. Such scenes inevitably bring us to associate them with the ones we know all too well in the context of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We should, as always, be careful in our comparisons since the night raids in the Palestinian context are led by Israeli soldiers (i.e. the army of a state of which Palestinians of the West Bank are not citizens) and that regularly ends in the arrest of the house’s male bodies. Yet, the intensification of the institutional and policed islamophobia in France can’t not remind us of the fate of Palestinians — the rhetorical association of France and Israel made by Benjamin Nethanyahu after the Nov. 13 attacks paradoxically helps us to do so — and the imagery of broken doors and vandalized apartments we’ve been seeing in the last few days reinforces this echo.

This leads me to the architectural reading of this imagery. My (obsessive) argument consists in affirming that walls as material assemblages are almost always built in such a way that bodies (also material assemblages) could not deploy enough energy without tools to move or destroy them. As I often add, a door and its lock compose a wall whose porosity can be controlled and engaged by selected people who have access to this little object we call “key.” My argument often proceed in describing the walls as the enforcement of private property or the forced exclusion and/or incarceration of bodies. One phrase of this argument is important to understand in the context of this specific analysis of police perquisitions: bodies cannot affect walls without tools. Provide a (jack)hammer, a vehicle or a weapon to a body, and the structure formed by the walls, let alone the doors, can be challenged if not disintegrated. A police-state is a state that gives itself the means (both legally and materially) to affect the structural integrity of any wall, and in doing so, the privacy of a spatial domain, when and where it sees fit — here again we can think of Palestine and the canonical interview of Aviv Kochavi by Eyal Weizman about the Israeli army’s 2002 siege on the Nablus refugee camp going through the walls of the Palestinian houses, rather than through the streets (see “Lethal Theory“).

There is something truly subversive against the crystallized order that architecture embodies in breaking doors or walls. If we are serious about this argument, we cannot decide that some interventions are subversive, and others are oppressive because we oppose the political impetus that allowed them. In other words, we cannot make, by definition, of Auguste Blanqui a subversive architect and make of Robert Bugeaud, an oppressive one (see past article to understand this opposition): both call for a complete transgression of the order materialized by architect in the times of urban insurrection. The fundamental difference between them that allows us to systematize this analysis, lies in the instrument of this transgression. By this, I mean as much the material instrument itself (the weapon, the battering ram, the hammer) (was it manufactured for this exact police purpose like the weapons used by the police or army, or is it, here as well, the subversion of a tool’s original function?) as the legal and political framework in which this transgression is accomplished: is it accomplished with the full strength and weaponization of the law (including its self-suspension) and political dominance, or is it accomplished as a transgression of the latter? Architecture embodies the order of the law and its violence. This does not mean that we have to get rid of architecture and, in doing so, of the law itself but, rather, that we have to understand and agree on the acceptable degree of violence they both trigger: the law prescribes rights and these rights corresponds to a certain form of violence (I have the right to be protected in my house, but this means that everyone but me is excluded from this domain). But, in the state of emergency, the law and its rights are suspended, creating an even greater state-induced violence. In other words, the doors violently broken by zealous police officers (sadly comical recent testimonies accounts on many unlocked doors being broken by them) are not retroactively making architecture less violent in the way I am used to define it. Simply, just like a locked door materializes the crystallized order of private property, these broken doors are the material symptoms of the transgression of the right to privacy by a police state liberated from its legal obligations allowed by the suspension of the law.

Project for the Stockholmsporten by BIG (2011)

“Bjarke’s Panopticon, the Rolling Stones and Slight Misunderstandings”
Conversation with Horizonte (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, 2015)

Horizonte: Deleuze described the shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. Thinking about the impact on resistance of these shift, one notices an increasingly fragmentation and diffusion in practices of resistance. Precise juxtapositions seem to disappear. How does this affect architecture, a profession always entangled into political and economical forces?

Léopold Lambert: I find the notion of resistance rather problematic if we do not begin by defining it. A good way to do so consists in thinking of it through its physics definition: resistance consists in the opposition capacity that a material assemblage can afford against a given force. For example, resistance is what keeps our bodies from being swallowed by the ground, and what prevents us from passing through walls. We can see that there is nothing moralizing about such a definition: resistance is not a fundamentally good thing, nor is it a bad one, it simply operates through all material encounters and, importantly, it operates reciprocally on both bodies/objects. The reciprocity should however not make us forget that the degree with which each body/object is affected by their encounter is necessarily different. More often than not, a body crashing into a wall will suffer a higher ‘structural’ damage than the wall itself will. What I think that you mean by “resistance” is thus only one side of a directional force, the side of the body/objects that gets affected in a greater way than that it encounters. It is certainly a legitimate ethical interpretation of this notion that implies that we always stand “for the weaker side” whether in sports or politics, but we might want to complexities this vision.

There is no essential moral aspect at work in the physical encounter between a body and a wall – after all, the wall does not want to resist against the body, it just does. Nevertheless, we cannot forget that there is a necessary political aspect at work through the reasons that lead this wall to be constructed at this particular location. Architecture consists in the spatial agency (we might say “the wall agency”) that organizes bodies in space. Explicit intentions, whether benevolent or malevolent, cannot be fully ignored in the way this organization operates, but we can easily realize how the effects (in particular, the violence) of this spatial agency go much beyond the strict intent inscribed into them, and architects should never claim their intentions as exonerating their responsibility for the violent effects of their designs.

Most people will agree to follow Foucault on thinking that there is no architecture of emancipation, only bodily practices/behaviors can develop a sense of liberation. On the other hand, many of these people will think that the opposite argument can be deduced from this affirmation: just like there cannot be any architecture of emancipation, there could not be any architecture of oppression. This reading supposes that architecture is some sort of neutral instrument that can be equally used for oppressive or liberating purposes. What I argue is that what we call “oppression” is intrinsically part of what is architecture. Now that does not mean that we should give up on architecture, simply that we should understand, how, against what/whom and to which degree is a given architecture violent. This is the sort of agency we have as architects in our designs.

horizonte: When we thought about resistance, we didn´t locate it on a material level. as you described it there is a certain indifference in it, a mutual ambiguity, which makes it difficult to determine a weak side. If the direction of oppression is neutral, the fact that there is always oppression produced through architecture, it certainly can never be innocent. We were much more interested the application of architectural strategies and how they can form resistive policies. Your comment on Foucault reminded us on his description of Benthams Panopticon, which takes us back to our first question, since Foucault described it as a apparatus of discplin. And when we think of the Panopticum, we think of the Koepel Panopticon prison renovation project by OMA. This project shows the shift we described above very clear.  What is striking, is how the ideologically charged form, can be recoded through very simpel means, but the shift is aligned with a shift in political, so it is not an example of resistance. Can the opression and violence, which is intrinsically a part of architecture on a material level, be used to resist hegemonic power on a politival level ?

Léopold Lambert: The example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon used by Foucault to define the paradigmatic diagram of a disciplinary society is interesting, of course. Yet, I find that architects tend to understand it rather literally. Foucault did not see the panopticon as an architecture but, rather, as a diagram. The paradigm it embodies is however not as strong today as it used to be in the 19^th century so we might want to look for other paradigmatic diagrams to understand our era. A few years ago, I wrote an article about the project designed by BIG, which won the competition for the Stockholmsporten. It was a circular residential building with a gigantic levitating reflecting sphere in its center. My point, back then, was to think of this architecture as paradigmatic of the panopticon’s evolution from a transcendental scheme, to an immanent one. Try to picture Bentham’s panopticon as a sphere that only exist through its interior surface. Now imagine this politically charged surface becoming the exterior surface of a sphere that only exists externally. This topological transformation is easily understandable when we think of it like a piece of cloth we pull inside-out. Now the surveillance is no longer accomplished by a unique entity placed at the center of the sphere, it is exercised through each individual seeing all his or her pairs in the reflective surface of the sphere. It is a self-controlling society through a norm, where bodies are continuously scrutinized while simultaneously scrutinizing others. This project by BIG really illustrated this shift of paradigm.

The principle of the norm is that it is essentially productive, and so it takes in consideration every behavior and learns to re-adjust based on them. To put it simply, this is why street art now makes millions of dollars at Sotheby’s, and why the Rolling Stones’ music is now used to sell cars. So with this in mind, I go back with my approach of the notion of resistance through physics’ definition: resistance is not a unilateral movement that can be considered as necessarily ‘good.’ Resistance is simply a political movement that contributes to produce the norm. What you call “hegemonic power” consists in a drastic contribution to it, while what you call “resistance” has a lesser contribution to it, but might be operating in contradiction to the drastic one.

Architecture, because of the weight I was describing in my first response, has a tendency to contribute to the drastic contribution to the norm; yet, that does not mean that it cannot allow this contradictory movement. We should be careful though: this does not mean that there is a violent architecture on the one hand, and a non-violent one on the other. Similarly, there is not an architecture that creates problem and another that solves them. We should always favor the manifesto to the solution, because while the former will have the honesty of knowing what it does, the second one will gives itself whatever means to reach its foreseen solution.

horizonte: In recent years there had been a lot of discussion about networks and digital infrastructures and these discourse had a rather dytopic and pessimistic attitude after the dicourse was very optimistic in the last century, when the thechnology thery were imagining had not yet advanced. Now one can see the effects. How would you consider these new virtual realm. Are they as oppressive as the material realm you described and how are they affecting it?

Léopold Lambert: I tend to have a rather reactionary approach to contemporary issues! I am mostly interested in the physicality of things rather than their virtuality. In the case of the Internet and other technologies of information you describe, we would be highly mistaken to think that they do not correspond to a physicality. I recently wrote an article about Internet submarine cables, since I was trying to understand what it took for the Hosni Mubarak administration to shut down the Internet during the two last weeks of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. The Suez Canal is also a canal for these submarine cables communicating between Mediterranean countries and countries from the Middle-East and the Subcontinent. In it, I was also making the comparison with the New York stock exchange: its infrastructure is no longer in Wall Street, but in a huge warehouse in New Jersey, where investment banking algorithms are fighting against each other, and where a millimeter of extra distance of cable from the main server will give you a tremendous disadvantage compared to your competitor. We should never forget the actual physicality of the things we think as immaterial.

horizonte: The Problem that Architects tend to understand diagrams is maybe a general one. But besides that, we find the notion of norm slightly problematic. Doesn´t it suggest that the conflicting activities, which constitute reality, the totality of facts, described as to a greater or lesser extent contributing to the norm end up being  a somehow harmonious entity. Finally describing reality nihilistically as product of all absorbing normalizing forces. Isn´t there a moment of deterritorialization, regression, détournement, rupture. All these terms describe a concept, that opens the possibility to escape the totality, which might be described as norm. Don´t you think there are situations which are defined my movements of resistance rather than the hegemonic powers. And this doesn´t implies a moral aspect. Or to stay in the picture aren´t we extinguishing conflict when subsuming a creative act in Villefranche-sur-Mer and the selling of cars under the same framework.

Léopold Lambert: Of course there are situations that are produced by movements of resistance. My point is that even these situations are part of the normative production. This is how (almost) everyone now thinks that women should be able to vote, or that slavery should not be legal! In this regard, the situation in which the LGBT struggle is currently inscribed in many countries is interesting to observe. On the one hand, a despicable ostracisation is still very much operating and we have to fear every day that we will hear about yet one more young person committing suicide after being systematically bullied. On the other hand, the process of normalization is also operating and new questions appear, such as “is the wedding a conservative institution or is it the horizon of the struggle?”, or “can an oppressed minority such as the LGBT community takes part in (sometimes extreme) right wing political movements?”, and, of course “does that still make sense to talk about a LGBT community?” This kind of questions can only appear when involved in a normative production, and they are interesting questions.

Architecture certainly contributes to this production and, again, it’s okay! The crucial question is not how to design an architecture that will not participate to the production of the norm, but rather, what is the political agenda through which we want to instrumentalize architecture’s violence. Architecture is a weapon: its violence varies in degrees depending on various factors, but ultimately this violence always exists because architecture occupies a space and necessary organizes bodies in this space, both within it and outside of it. I understand that the term of violence can easily lead to misinterpretation, but I would really like us to think about it. Let’s say that architecture always create problems: the question we have to ask ourselves is for whom should we create problems. Despite the fact that I am convinced that there are many things that we could have been done differently when occupying Wall Street in 2011, this is a good example of creating problems through the occupation of space by bodies and architecture. Many of us were a bit worried at first that the term of “Occupy” was proliferating while the notion of occupation tended to remind us of the occupation of Palestine, for instance. I however realized that it is the same occupation. It would be too easy to say that there are essentially good occupations and essentially bad ones: all of them create problems. Admittedly, some of them produce a much higher degree of violence than others – and we can see how much this is true if we go back to the example of Palestine – but we cannot simply essentialize things according to our own taste.

horizonte: But probably every non architect would describe it as architectures task to solve problems and not to build manifestos. Is writing the only possibility to evade this expectation? How would you describe the significance of writing and the whole theoretical discourse in architecture. Is it possible to sustain an activist position within it or is the discourse a incestuous circulation of expectable arguments. How does the manifesto relate to the building? How can we create a consciousness on the actual potential of architecture and overcome the dichotomy between false practice and right critique?

Léopold Lambert: It is true that experience allows us this intuition that it’s easier to be right when writing than when designing. I think that this is related to the fact that writing is a language, a semiotics, while architecture necessarily imposes a spatial organization of our bodies, as I have been describing so far. So it is true that architecture is not an easy weapon to be used for political agendas that are not consistent with the dominant ideology, since it holds within itself the potential for a tyrannical exercise of power. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we should not try. My intuition for this matter is that we should avoid thinking that we’ll fix something through architecture. The thaumaturgic goal of modern architecture has clearly had dreadful effects, and here again the norm has something to do with it, because modernism always imagined that they were designing architectures for one (the white healthy man) or sometimes two (the housewife). It is normal that afterward, all their architecture express the vision of a society where only these two normative bodies exist.

Let’s not try to fix things, let’s try to problematize instead. Saying this does not consist either in a post-modern relativism; it simply means that we need to design and act within a set of individual and collective ethics in an environment where these ethics often collide with each other in ways that, sometimes do not allow any possible negotiation. For this reason, I don’t see any other fundamental difference between writing and designing practices than the one with which I started my answer. This is also why, despite spending most of my time being a writer and an editor, I try to never forget to design too every now and then!

Informal Roma village of the Porte des Poissonniers in Paris (December 20, 2015) / Photograph by Léopold Lambert (all rights reserved)

So far, the totality of my photographs on this blog were licensed in creative commons, letting anyone use and share them, providing that they mentioned their author and do not financially profit from them. For the first time however, I feel the necessity to keep the copyrights of the ones presented here (above and below), in order to manually check the discourse that they would illustrate on other platforms. This technicality indicates the cautious tone of the following article, the latter being more about how we should speak about the new forms of informality that emerge in some European cities than about these neighborhoods themselves.

Sunday morning is the moment of the week when I undertake my research about the spatial politics of the Paris banlieues. This morning, I simply went at the limit of Paris municipality, not far from Saint Ouen, in order to visit the informal village that currently exists on the tracks of the Petite Ceinture between the gates — to enter Paris proper, one has to go through gates (see past article) — that constitute Porte de Clignancourt and Porte des Poissonniers. The Petite Ceinture is a 32-kilometer long railway that surrounds Paris, adding one more “belt” (that is the meaning of ceinture) to the two already existing ones surrounding “Fortress Paris”: the boulevards maréchaux and the boulevard périphérique (highway ring, see past article). The Petite Ceinture does not belong to the city of Paris but to the national railway company (SNCF) that used to transport goods around Paris between 1852 and 1934. It is now abandoned, and despite the interdiction to walk on it, many Parisians regularly enjoy its relative wilderness inside a highly controlled city. For people who regularly follow the work of architecture or urban planning students, seeing it as a chosen site for one of their projects is never a surprise. No later than two months ago, I gave a tour to Rhode Island architecture students who were going to design fictitious projects on it and, a few weeks later attended a thesis project investigating its Eastern parts.

In the recent municipal study to refurbish the Petite Ceinture in the near future (some short portions have been recently open to the public in the South and West), the Northern part where the informal village is setup is considered as a non-interesting “sequence.” The romantic wilderness that seduces architecture students and photographers — for good and bad reasons; this is not the topic here — is indeed not present here. On the following photographs, one can see a Eurostar train starting its trip to London, contrasting already in its comfortable migration with the surrounding makeshift habitat that echo those of migrants in Calais and Dunkerque, not far from the Channel Tunnel, where some of them are arrested every day trying to cross. The people who live in the precarious village of the Petite Ceinture are however not trying to go anywhere else than Paris. Most of them are Roma or Romani, although we should be cautious as this specific ethnic group became a discursive category that applies to all people from Eastern Europe living in a state of great precariousness. Politicians and demagogic journalists/intellectuals want us to believe that, coming from a nomadic culture, it is for their own good that the police regularly evict them from their dwellings and demolish them in a form of self-realizing prophecy — “see how they need to move regularly!”.  Hierarchizing racisms is not only a risky exercise, it is also useless, but the impunity with which administrative, police and discursive racism deploys itself upon this population is simply terrifying. Let’s recall that this racism is not new and, in its most extreme form, led to the Porajmos (the Romani Holocaust), which saw the industrial death of half-a-million people by the Nazis during WWII. In this regard, the more recent use of a RATP (Paris public transportation company) tramway in 2011 to evict another Roma camp recalled other forms of misappropriation of French transportation facilities to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to the camps of the Holocaust.

If we now address the question of the precarious village as an architectural formation, here again we have to be cautious in our description. We should neither fetishized it in the way some academics and architects currently do with the various slums of the globe, nor should we deny it a sense of home, however precarious it might be. Fetishizing it would consist in completely disregarding the urgency and duress experienced by its inhabitants. Denying it a sense of home, on the other hand, would suggest the innocuousness of its eviction. In my opinion, the way we should look at it is as a symptom of a radically unequal (and racist, since the criteria of differentiation are based on ethnicity) mode of sovereignty or, rather, in the application of a fundamentally different mode of sovereignty. In this case, the biopolitical regime that controls, surveys and regulates the very lives of its subjects and about which our critique usually focus, does not even apply. This architecture is the result of a sovereignty that only manifests itself through the regular displacing violence deployed by the state institution in charge of such violence: the police. On the contrary of the situation often described on this blog of the banlieues, where the state has often illegitimately renounced to provide the services it provides in other parts of the city but is still present (however sordidly) in the very walls of social housing buildings, schools, bus stops, etc., the only relation that this informal village will have with the state will be the (violent) end of it.

Saying “it’s a shame to see shantytowns reemerging in Europe!” like we often hear, is not only insufficient, it can even legitimize the political discourses that order their demolitions in the name of public health (whose health?). But defending the collective appropriation of an abandoned terrain as a means of survival, although constituting an important short-term political objective, cannot go without the implacable critique of different modes of sovereignty simultaneously applied on a given territory. As the state of emergency is still operative in France (see past article), and, through it, an even greater discriminate police violence than in “normal” times, we can already foresee the violent eviction of the informal village by the police, despite the legal protection of the “winter break” that theoretically protect anyone to be evicted from a privately owned land during the winter months. As my research often examines how the spatial formations of neighborhoods facilitate or not potential militarized suppression within them, I can only fear of the conditions of this eviction: the Petite Ceinture constitutes a urban canyon with no entry/exit (in this case, two of them and their makeshift stairs have been produced by the inhabitants), and whose linearity would allow the police forces to intervene with the implacable zeal that they often enjoy manifesting. Through the following photos, I hope that giving the informal village a visibility — I have seen very little written about it — would sensitivities a political impetus to be formed, but I have to admit that producing such documents can prove risky and also serve opposite objectives. This text therefore finishes in the same way than it started, with the conscience of cautiousness that our discourses and actions should embrace when the precariousness of lives is involved.

Further reading can involve a past article about the administrativization of eviction in “Considering that It Is Plausible that Such Events Could Occur Again” (October 2014)

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (2015, all rights reserved):

Happy New Year everyone! In the first days of 2016, I am very happy to announce the launch of the third issue (Jan-Feb 2016) of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to Clothing Politics. This issue examines a scale of design closer to bodies than the ones previously studied in the two past issues. The layers of fabric we incorporate (i.e. form into a body) are all charged both legally and normatively, and this charge combines with those related to a body’s race, gender, behavior, and spatial-temporal context. This issue thus proposes to examine this combination of normative charges — sometimes turned into law — through various wearable objects we call clothes: shoes (Minh-Ha T. Pham), pants (Eric Darnell Pritchard, Mimi Thi Nguyen), shirts (Lucy Jones), accessories (Murktarat Yussuff), and different head garments (Reina Lewis, Hana Tajima, Emma Tarlo). I would like to particularly thank Hana Tajima for having accepted to be featured on the issue’s cover, as well as Mimi Thi Nguyen and Minh-Ha T. Pham for the great direct and indirect influence they brought to the very existence of this issue, mostly through the work they have assembled on their blog Threadbared. For more about the issue, see the index at the end of this text.

WHAT’S NEW?

Because of the way the status of press is allocated in France (at least 10% of the issue should not address the main theme), two new exciting sections are now occupying the first pages of the issue:

— FROM THE BLOG proposes one or two re-edition of the blog’s recent articles. In the specific case of this issue, “The Weaponized Architecture of Paris’ Banlieue Police Stations,” and “Beirut’s November Bombing and the Notion of ‘Hezbollah Bastion‘.”
— GUEST COLUMNISTS offers informed opinions about recent events or projects around the world. In this issue, Merve Bedir analyses the New World Summit’s parliament project in Rojava (Kurdistan), and Françoise Vergès describes the feminists of color’s struggle in France through the organization of the recent March for Dignity and Against Racism, which was held in Paris on October 31.

HOW, AND WHERE TO GET THE FUNAMBULIST?

The Funambulist Magazine only exists through its sales, i.e. through you. Here is a list of the many ways to get it and, by doing so, to help the project:

ONLINE ///
— Individual printed version: 12 EUR (in your mailbox within 10 days)
— Individual digital version: 6 EUR (receive a link to download it right after the purchase)
— Combo printed + digital version: 14 EUR
— Combo issues 02 + 03 printed version: 21 EUR
— Monthly printed subscription: 5 EUR per month (only via paypal for the moment)
— Monthly digital subscription: 2.50 EUR per month (only via paypal for the moment)
NEW! — Annual printed + digital subscription: 70 EUR per year (multiple forms of payment)

OFFLINE ///
— Bookstores: In New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Zagreb, Doha, Ljubljana, Bordeaux and surely in many new places soon (see map).
— Libraries: In UC Davis, Princeton, RISD, Sarajevo, Venice, Bergen (see map). You can help tremendously by proposing an institutional subscription to your library.

AMBITION FOR 2016

The main ambition for The Funambulist is and fundamentally remains an editorial one: proposing through its various platforms (magazine, blog, podcast, books, and external articles) an examination of the politics of the designed/built environment in relation to bodies through a variety of disciplines. Nevertheless, since the magazine venture started (i.e. since I am dedicating my entire time to this project), there also needs to be an ambition regarding its financial sustainability. To be fully transparent with you its readers, the current amount of subscribers and purchasers, although satisfying for such a young publication, is not yet enough to keep me working full-time on it in a few months. You can help by taking a subscription and spreading the word about the project, but also by other means introduced here. A new way to help consists in finding potential advertisers for the magazine, which would significantly contribute to its economic sustainability. You can download the presentation file to advertisers by following this link.

OTHER NEWS IN THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR

— THE MAGAZINE: The next two issues (March-April & May-June) will be respectively dedicated to Carceral Environments and Design & Racism. I am still looking for student projects to be featured in the student section of the magazine. Do not hesitate to send me an email (info.funambulist@gmail.com) if you would like to propose for consideration one or several. 
— ARCHIPELAGO: A few days ago, I published the 100th conversation on The Funambulist’s podcast. This project started on January 1, 2014 and it allowed me to record fascinating interviews of 113 thinkers and creators in the Americas, the Middle East, Europe and Japan. The back cover of the third issue of the magazine features the 100 photographs of these conversations.
— BOOKS: Two books that I wrote will soon be published: The long-due French-English version of Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books)  illustrated by Loredana Micu, while its Italian version (Deleyva Editore) just hit the shelves, and La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project, B2 Editions).
— LECTURES: The first part of the year will bring exciting opportunities to present various aspects of my work in Zagreb (February), Bard (April), NYU (May), Warwick (May), ETH Zurich (May), and Athens (July). I look forward to meeting some of you in these locations.

COVER & INDEX OF THE THIRD ISSUE

Featured on cover: Hana Tajima / Photograph by Parker Fitzgerald for UNIQLO

Above: La Marie-Séraphine (1770) / Excerpt from Bertrand Guillet, La Marie-Séraphine: Navire négrier, Nantes: Editions MeMo, 2009.

Writing about the open wound that the history of slavery constitutes is always a painful exercise. It is also doomed to fail making us fathom the formidable sustainability of violence that the three centuries of legalized slavery implemented — but would we ever recover from such a fathoming? This article is the fifth one about the abysmal Atlantic crossing and its architectural technology, the slave ship. While two of them were comparing (without ever equating) the Atlantic abyss with the current Mediterranean one (see “The Mediterranean Abyss: South Wall of Fortress Europe and Cemetery of the Poors” and “The Politics of Overpopulated Spaces“), two others focused on the historical crossing of the slave trade, citing the three Carribean authors C.L.R. James, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau (see “The Slave Ship Is Architecture” and “Abysmal Atlantic: The Slave Ships’ Genocide“).

The argument of these articles in the broader context of the research exposed on this platform is simple: although architecture and design (and through them, architects and designers) cannot be held responsible for the founding logic of the genocide that constitutes the slave trade, the latter could simply have never existed without their active contribution and, as such, architecture is fundamentally responsible for the operativity of slavery. Here, more than ever, we need to forget any dissociation between the various scales of design: the plantation cabin is architecture, of course (see Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (eds), Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) but more broadly, any materialized form of whatever size or nature implementing the organization of bodies in space is also architecture. This includes the slave ship and its inherent tension between the fundamental cruelty of its design and the economization of life that its function requires vis-a-vis its “human cargo.”

What the example of slave ship allows, because of the world in itself it constitutes, is a representation of the holistic dimension of the weaponization of its architecture. In other words, every component of the slave ship is designed to contribute to the organization of bodies in a spatial configuration optimizing its function, as the illustrations (above and below) of the French slave ship La Marie-Séraphine (1769-1776), show well. This includes the bodies themselves: the sailors’ bodies, in their choreographed accomplishment of navigating this “vast machine” (see Rediker, 2007), the daily ‘care’ of the hundreds of bodies living under the deck, as well as the individualized or collective deadly suppression of potential forms of revolt. In The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2007), Marcus Rediker describes the frequent deaths of these bodies during the triangular crossings, which we can interpret through a logic that shares some similarities with slavery itself: not considering bodies individually but rather, through their muscular operativity as a whole by the ship’s captain and owners. Nevertheless, the sailors’ bodies are not the only one engaged in the holistic optimization of the slave ship through its design. The imprisoned African bodies themselves, through the deliberate overpopulation of their space (see past article), were involuntarily acting as as much walls for each other — the illustrations presented here was drawn by the ship’s officer, not an abolitionist and, as such, is very likely to have minimized the amount of bodies present — in particular when these bodies were handcuffed by two, as Rediker describes in his book.

 La Marie-Séraphine (1770) / Excerpt from Bertrand Guillet, La Marie-Séraphine: Navire négrier, Nantes: Editions MeMo, 2009.

Handcuffs. Here again, we could be tempted to think of them as separate objects from the ship; however, the holistic vision we are trying to achieve here invites us to consider them as fundamentally part of the ship as an architectural machine optimizing its function in the broader scheme of slave trade — Redikers talks about ship wrecks identified as slave ships after finding an important amount of handcuffs within them. Similarly the entire set of disciplinary and torture apparatuses such as the whip or thumbscrews are fundamentally part of the ship’s deliberate design, since they were designed specifically for the function they serve, anticipating the incarcerated bodies’ revolt and, as such, legitimizing it despite fallacious anti-abolition arguments. At a larger scale, the barricado, an armed central wall separating the deck where African men were given punctual access from the rest of the ship, where sailors and their weapons could suppress a potential rebellion, should not be seen as an addition to a regular boat but, again, as a fundamental element in view of the ship’s optimal function. Suppressive means are however only one dimension of this function. Another one considers the incarcerated bodies as a valuable commodity — again, not individually but as a mass — and, as such, needs to limit its mortality (15% of the forcefully displaced bodies from Africa to the Americas died during the crossing). This is how the nets surrounding the ship prevent the exiting of the world in itself constituted by the boat by African bodies preferring to commit suicide rather than being enslaved, and how the curves of some sails were designed to constitute an air chimney ventilating (insufficiently) the space below the deck.

The problem with describing the conditions of life on the slave ship as I just did is that, although it presents the incarcerated African bodies as victims of a genocide, it also depict them within the logic of this genocide, as a biological and anatomical mass — the pairing of bodies in handcuffs illustrates that well — deprived from any agency. Admittedly, the process (including its architectural component) that stripped these bodies from their personal identity and commodifying them — the number inscribed in their very flesh accomplishes both — is what constitutes the true horror of the slave trade. Yet, describing their conditions only in these terms would imply that these bodies died as individuals the moment they forcefully stepped on the slave ship. By recognizing the forms of resistance, however small, that were lead by them during the abysmal Atlantic crossing, we are acknowledging their agency and, by doing so, we recognize the sustainability of the horror they experienced for the rest of their lives.

In conditions of optimization, any behavior or spatial configuration that would not contribute to this optimization constitutes a resistance against it — this shows us how slavery is not only built on a colonial logic, but also on a capitalist one. Revolts and suicides from the African bodies incarnate some forms of this resistance, but so did the hunger strikes (a term admittedly anachronistic), as well as the songs created by them, which would cross the barricado like no physical body would be able to, and sometimes, even allowed the disguise of messages between segregated men and women, despite the multiplicity of languages. The most radical form of resistance described by Rediker in his book is the bombing of the entire ship by revolted African bodies: in the context of the impossibility of the ship takeover or the return to the land, there has been a few occurrences of the complete disintegration of the slave architectural machine by liberated bodies who gained access to the barrels of powder.

As always when describing an extreme example of architecture’s political responsibility, it seems important to me to insist that the logic at work through this example is only different from any other architectural example in terms of intensity (however extreme) not in terms of essence. Architecture is intrinsically an instrument of organization of bodies in space, whatever the motivation for a given organizational scheme, and whether it is accomplished deliberately or not — the example examined here certainly shows the radical violence that deliberate design can facilitate. To the risk of repeating myself from many other texts, this does not mean that we should give up on architecture but, rather, that we should understand, accept, and probably embrace the responsibility for its political effects in a given society.

Illustration: Newly ‘built’ refugee camp in Calais’s “Jungle” (source of the photo)

Calais and Dunkerque are the two French cities closest to Dover in England. As such, they are are the main ferry ports towards England and the entrance to the Channel Tunnel is situated only a few kilometers away from the city center of Calais. The name of “Jungle”  designates a large muddy vacant area of the Calais outskirts (see the OpenStreetMap drawn by students of the Belleville School of Architecture) where about 6,000 migrants and refugees are currently living, often waiting an opportunity to finish their long and tiresome journey in the United Kingdom (there are also two other similar sites near Dunkerque). This name is a distorted translation of the farsi term jangla (originally given by Afghani and Iranian refugees to the place) that, despite a common root with jungle refers more simply to a forest. The name of “jungle” was first spread by local associations helping its population, and we can already see here how humanitarian interventions can be problematic: in this case, it coins a term that triggers a primitive if not racist imaginary of a place, already antagonized by a part of the local and (bi)national population and politicians.

Last Monday, a camp made of a hundred steel containers opened to host 1,500 people after that local associations and other humanitarian organizations pushed for it. This camp reminds us of the Sangatte one that had been opened the Jospin government in 1999 and whose sanitary conditions had quickly reached a deplorable level because of a lack of fundings until it was shut down three years later by Nicolas Sarkozy when he became Minister of Interior. In an article published in Libération last October, Cyrille Hanappe who teaches the seminar that lead to the mapping referred above, regrets that the camp (then only planned) had been designed without any architect’s contribution and that the people in charge’s incompetence had lead to a design that “considers human as cattle” and only think of the camp “for bodies to be managed, to eat and defecate.” Hanappe insists that the camp should have integrated space of sociality and gathering, something that, according to him, many architects would have been able to proposed if asked to contribute.

Sangatte Center (2000)

However, it seems legitimate to ask whether this consideration of bodies in their most elemental anatomical characteristics is related to incompetence, as Hanappe suggests, or to a deliberate strategy to which potentially contributing architects would have only disguised behind an aesthetic effort. The local policing legislation and territorial measures recently taken are an indication to such deliberate strategy. On December 2, the Prefect of Pas-de-Calais department took advantage of the much greater power that the Hollande/Valls government and its ongoing state of emergency enabled for her position (in charge of the police), to drastically increase the legal punishment for pedestrians arrested along the port highway. Migrant bodies who use this road to perhaps trying to board a ship to England are now risking six months in prison and 7,500 EUR by a legislation that clearly targets them and, as such, can be characterized as blatantly racist. The access to the Channel Tunnel, on the other hand, may be one of the most fortified spaces of Europe. 29 kilometers of walls and a multitude of security cameras were evidently considered as not sufficient since, Eurotunnel destroyed 103 hectares of trees in September to increase its surveillance and in December, went as far as flooding the terrain adjacent to the tunnel’s entrance (see source). Such tactic of what friend Francesca Ansaloni calls “the medievalization of territory” shows well the deliberate aspects of the anti-migrant strategies and its highly territorial and architectural embodiment.

 Engineered flooding of the terrain adjacent to the Channel Tunnel’s entrance by Eurotunnel (source of the photographs)

The optimized control and regulation of bodies that this new camp enables by an outsider entity (police or humanitarian organizations) through its fences and container alignments/uniformity is thus to be suspected as deliberate too. Nevertheless, the degree of deliberateness of a design is always less crucial to examine than, on the contrary, its incidental effects. Deliberateness implies the existence of an explicit scheme that can be exhumed and described in its straight-forwardness to denounce its logic. In other words, it is easier to describe the often-racist decisions of institutional actors and their policed enactment than the more complex and, as such, more problematic work developed by benevolent actors such as humanitarian organizations. In the case of the new camp in Calais, it is a local association usually helping persons with disabilities and managing retirement homes, La Vie Active (Active Life) that was put in charge for its operation. Behind the somehow-expected photos of smiling migrant bodies, its website describe the association’s action for Calais’s migrant bodies. In this regard, it announces the eminent installation of 1,500 persons in the containers based on inscriptions and a prioritization for people judged “the most vulnerable.” They also describes the recent construction of a center that now hosts 300 women and children on a daily basis.

Beyond any ethical judgment on the criteria for selecting the bodies who gains access to such facilities — the least we can say is that they do not appear as shocking — we can see how the very implementation of a (finite) architecture, let alone a clearly insufficient one, necessarily triggers such a selection. As I had the opportunity to argue in the past (see “Shelter’s Political Violence” in the latest issue of Volume for instance), architecture and bodies being materially finite, the production of a sheltering architecture necessarily involves the exclusion of some bodies from it, whether this exclusion occurs simply because of overpopulation (think of a crowded bus stop in the rain) or through more complex legally-backed processes of acceptable access (think of private property, locked doors and selected owners of keys).

Although the processes of acceptable access involved here are, once again, not shocking (protecting those who are determined to need it the most), and acknowledging that arguments about cold, muddy and precarious terrains made from a warm office can only take us so far, it is important to see how humanitarian work associated to architecture fundamentally consists in the hierarchization of bodies of which it claims to care. Beyond the architectural embodiment of control and regulation of bodies that the container camp represents, there is therefore another problem more…problematic; a problem that we will not solve (solution is only the name of a newly created problem) but that it seems important to interrogate. In his article, Hanappe evokes self-construction as one of the directions that the humanitarian work could have chosen to propose better conditions of life to migrant bodies in Calais and Dunkerque. Although I have repeatedly verbalized my suspicion of architects’ fascination for self-construction as an occasional form of ‘orientalism’ (see “Why do Architects dream of a World without them?” and “Learning from Architecture Without Architects” for instance), what we can take from this idea is the process it involves, in opposition to a crystallized form of architecture. Addressing the terrible conditions of life in Calais needs to be done through a political process at various scale. There is the institutional one, of course, against the racist policies and legislation that proposes only antagonism to bodies whose displacement was originally undertaken in order to flee other forms of antagonisms. Nevertheless, at a smaller scale (of space and time) and in a context of humanitarian organization’s axiomatic benevolence, political process can to be materialized for migrant bodies (the inhabitants, however temporarily) through the access to the instruments and infrastructure that can lead to proper shelter and daily life necessities for all, but also the constitution of an empowered community at the same time than its spatial conditions. Considering architecture as a process rather than as a crystallized form is what makes the difference between a camp and a urban form that we can call village.

If I had composed this Atlas of the Israeli Settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a few years ago, I would have insisted that this inventory of colonial urban typologies constituted an evidence of the Israeli violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, I would have reminded the history of the invasion of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as well as the Gaza Strip, the Sinai and the Golan Heights) in 1967 and the military rule that subjugated and continues to subjugated the Palestinian bodies since then, I would have refer to these colonized territories as “Palestinian land as recognized by the International Community,” etc. This is however not what I am going to do here, because I am convinced that this narrative and the imaginary it conveys is ultimately harmful to all Palestinians and, for the same reasons, to non-Zionist Israelis too. On the contrary (or, rather, in an apparent contradiction), I would like to undertake the rather perilous exercise of praising the Israeli settlements for the scenario of the post-apartheid future they accidentally allow.

Of course, this praise of the settlements could not be more independent from the politics that lead to their construction, their current apartheid function, as well as the militarized urban typology they constitute. The displacement of a part of the Israeli civil population, whether enacted by the government or retroactively legitimized by it, is part of a strategy of the fait accompli: occupying the invaded land with a civil infrastructure and population that make the withdrawal of the occupying army difficult and complicated. I wrote many times about the way the settlements and their (approximately) 750,000 inhabitants are currently organized at a territorial scale: the apartheid wall built in the beginning of the 2000s by the Sharon administration integrates an important amount of settlements on its Western side (see past map from my book, Weaponized Architecture), many of others are linked to the Western side of the wall by small highways, some of which are only allowed to cars with an Israeli (yellow) plate — these roads are punctuated by military checkpoints that ensure to maximize the Israeli movement while slowing down, if not stopping, the Palestinian one (see the recent visualization of such inequality created by Al Jazeera). As for the settlements’ urbanism, their spatial formation (both urbanistically and topographically), their architecture, as well as their fenced periphery make them redoubtable militarized instruments, despite an aesthetic of Western suburbs, as Eyal Weizman demonstrated in his successive collaborations with Rafi Segal (A Civilian Occupation) and Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti (Decolonizing Architecture).

What praise should there be then? What good can come from these colonial apparatuses of expropriation and extreme segregation? The answer to this question lies in the fundamental contradiction that they incarnate in the history of Israel. If we hopefully accept the impossibility of an eviction of the 2.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — i.e. the dreadful scenario of a second Nakba after that the 1948 one forcefully evicted 750,000 Palestinians, a majority of which are now refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon — we can see that the only scenario for which the Israeli government can aim is the statu quo. In other words, only the current state of apartheid can serve the the Zionist ambitions since it is the only scenario that allows not to grant Palestinians (including Palestinians with an Israeli passport) equal rights with the Israeli population, while maintaining the occupation of the totality of the Historical Palestine territory — one might argue that Gaza has been “disengaged” in 2005, but the quasi-absolute dependence that is maintained on a territory blockaded and regularly bombarded disconcert such an argument. Although we do not hear this discourse from the voice of the successive Israeli governments, I share the conviction with many other scholars and activists that the second best scenario for a Zionist agenda is to be found in the implementation of an official Palestine State “within the borders of 1967” (i.e. on two separate territories, West Bank+East Jerusalem and Gaza). Such a scenario, explicitly sought by the Palestinian Authority (as well as many Western countries that see in it the opportunity to forever ‘wash their hands’ from the Palestinian struggle) would ratify the ethnic cleansing that founded the State of Israel in 1948 and, as such, would finalize to crystallize a profound separation between the refugees and the rest of the Palestinian population (see past article for a list of additional problems). The Israeli settlements, because of their extremely difficult ousting — this is how they were built in the first place — are therefore a strong obstacle to such a scenario, hence the provoking idea to praise them. In addition to a material problem, we should have the courage of ethical consistency and thus condemn the idea of the forced displacement of a young Israeli settler population who lived their entire life in the West Bank and imagine a future where they can continue to do so (providing that this scenario takes in consideration the elements described in the next paragraph).

In the coming months, because of an on-going cartographic/literary/architectural work for an exhibition in May, I will have the opportunity to reflect on what a post-apartheid Palestine could look like. Beyond the immediate positive aspects of such a scenario implies, namely, the equal rights for all bodies living in Historical Palestine and a borderless immigration that would allow the refugees’ return, the problem posed by the settlements will remain a complex one to address. The question they ask is encountered in every decolonizing process: how to consider the wealth that has been produced in the colonial conditions and the necessary inequality between dispossession (the settlements are built on land that has been expropriated) and accumulation that they produced — in this case, between Israelis and Palestinians of course, but also within the Palestinian population too. A realistic decolonizing scenario that would not take this question seriously would preserve the urban typology of the settlements and its currents inhabitants would see the arrival of a Palestinian middle-class wishing to separate themselves from a population in lower economic conditions as we currently see it happening in Ramallah (see this past article, as well as Tina Grandinetti’s article in the second issue of The Funambulist Magazine). The settlements’ urban form would thus continue to ensure a form of segregation, one that would no longer abide by the racist logic of the apartheid, but, rather, by the capitalist logic of the distanciation of social classes. Nevertheless we can can argue that the settlements should not be demolished — we saw the tons of toxic rubble that it produced in Gaza in 2005 — but, rather, that their architecture and urbanism be radically rethought and investigated to address the challenge that they represent. This work has been partially lead by Decolonizing Architecture already cited above, but only in a scenario of a ‘disengagement’ of the West Bank layered on the one in Gaza. The scenario of a post-apartheid Palestine, on the other hand, necessarily involves a work involving the mixity of social classes and communities. My intuition for this matter might seem improbable but the radicality of the current state of apartheid requires a radical imagination to dismantle it to its very last cog: what if the settlements and their architectural/urban modifications implemented to disintegrate their segregative effects were the scene of the temporary return of the refugees, while many of the villages and towns destroyed after 1948 were being rebuilt? The temporary housing infrastructure that such a scenario requires could act as a urban scaffold to quickly and actively defuse the urban forms of the apartheid. This idea is only one of the many that could be investigated both in terms of program and architecture to not only prepare the post-apartheid future, but also to construct an imaginary in which this future is possible.

The following Atlas is therefore less the inventory of evidences of the current state of apartheid — although it clearly shows an important part of its materialization — than a toolbox to imagine a post-apartheid Palestine scenario in which the problem/opportunity constituted by the settlement can be fully investigated. In order to situate each settlement, I reused my 2010 map of “The Palestinian Archipelago” (see past article/maps) that shows the ‘islands’ of relative Palestinian autonomy (Oslo Accords’ Zones A and B) within a ‘sea’ of Israeli control punctuated with numerous ‘reefs’ (the settlements). The index’s numbered keys (and thus the order of the aerial photographs) ‘combs’ the settlements from the North to the South. The aerial photographs can find a more “incarnated vision” in a past article that would deserve a photographic addition. I hope that you will find this atlas useful and instructive:

ATLAS OF THE ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST BANK AND EAST JERUSALEM ///

 Atlas of the Israeli Settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (The Palestinian Archipelago) by Léopold Lambert for The Funambulist (2010-2015).

PHOTOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF THE ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS /// (click on the names to access the photo)

1 Tal Menashe / 2 Hinanit / 3 Shaked / 4 Reihan / 5 Hermesh / 6 Mevo Dotan / 7 Mechola / 8 Shadmot Mehola / 9 Rotem / 10 Avnei Hefetz / 11 Enav / 12 Shavei Shomron / 13 Elon More / 14 Bqa’ot / 15 Ro’i / 16 Chemdat / 17 Sal’it / 18 Hamra / 19 Argaman / 20 Kedumim / 21 Bracha / 22 Itamar / 23 Tzofim / 24 Yitzhar / 25 Alfei Menashe / 26 Karnei Shomron / 27 Immanuel / 28 Nofim / 29 Yakir / 30 Masu’a / 31 Oranit / 32 Sha’arei Tikva / 33 Etz Efraim / 34 Elkana / 35 Kiryat Netafim / 36 Revava / 37 Barqan / 38 Ariel / 39 Kfar Tapuah / 40 Rechelim / 41 Migdalim / 42 Alei Zahav / 43 Pedu’el / 44 Eli / 45 Ma’ale Levona / 46 Shilo / 47 Shvut Rachel / 48 Ma’ale Efraim / 49 Yafit / 50 Petzael / 51 Tomer / 52 Beit Arye / 53 Ofarim / 54 Halamish / 55 Ateret / 56 Gilgal / 57 Netiv Ha’gdud / 58 Nili / 59 Na’ale / 60 Nahliel / 61 Ofra / 62 Kochav Ha’shachar / 63 Yitav / 64 Niran / 65 Modi’in Ilit / 66 Hashmonaim / 67 Kfar Ha’oranim / 68 Talmon / 69 Dolev / 70 Beit El / 71 Rimonim / 72 Na’ama / 73 Psagot / 74 Beit Horon / 75 Kokhav Ya’akov / 76 Ma’ale Michmash / 77 Givat Ze’ev / 78 Giv’on Ha’hadasha / 79 Giv’on / 80 Neve Ya’akov / 81 Geva Binyamin / 82 Alon / 83 Mevo Horon / 84 Har Adar / 85 Har Shmuel / 86 Almon / 87 Kfar Adumim / 88 Ramot / 89 Ramat Shlomo / 90 Pisgat Ze’ev / 91 Mitzpe Yericho / 92 Vered Yericho / 93 Beit Ha’arava / 94 French Hill / 95 Ramat Eshkol / 96 Maalot Dafna / 97 Almog / 98 Jewish Quarter / 99 Ma’ale Adumim / 100 Keidar / 101 Kalia / 102 East Talpiyyot / 103 Giv’at Ha-Matos / 104 Har Gilo / 105 Gilo / 106 Har Homa / 107 Beitar Illit / 108 Ovnat / 109 Gva’ot / 110 Neve Daniel / 111 Rosh Tzurim / 112 El’azar / 113 Efrata / 114 Bat Ayin / 115 Alon Shvut / 116 Tko’a / 117 Nokdim / 118 Kfar Etzion / 119 Migdal Oz / 120 Karmei Tzur / 121 Ma’ale Amos / 122 Asfar / 123 Mitzpe Shalem / 124 Telem / 125 Adora / 126 Kiryat Arba / 127 H2 (Hebron) / 128 Negohot / 129 Haggai / 130 Pnei Hever / 131 Otniel / 132 Carmel / 133 Ma’on / 134 Eshkolot / 135 Shim’a / 136 Susiya / 137 Sansana / 138 Tene / 139 Yatir

01-Tal-Menashe   —> Return to the index ///

02-Hinanit   —> Return to the index ///

03-Shaked   —> Return to the index ///

04-Reihan   —> Return to the index ///

05-Hermesh   —> Return to the index ///

06-Mevo-Dotan   —> Return to the index ///

07-Mechol   —> Return to the index ///

08-Shadmot   —> Return to the index ///

09-Rotem   —> Return to the index ///

10-Avnei   —> Return to the index ///

11-Enav   —> Return to the index ///

12-Shavei Shomron   —> Return to the index ///

13-Elon More   —> Return to the index ///

14-Bqa’ot   —> Return to the index ///

15-Ro’i   —> Return to the index ///

16-Chemdat   —> Return to the index ///

17-Sal’it   —> Return to the index ///

18-Hamra   —> Return to the index ///

19-Argaman   —> Return to the index ///

20-Kedumim (1)   —> Return to the index ///

20-Kedumim (2)   —> Return to the index ///

21-Bracha   —> Return to the index ///

22-Itamar   —> Return to the index ///

23-Tzofim   —> Return to the index ///

24-Yitzhar   —> Return to the index ///

25-Alfei Menashe   —> Return to the index ///

26-Karnei Shomron (1)   —> Return to the index ///

26-Karnei Shomron (2)   —> Return to the index ///

27-Immanuel   —> Return to the index ///

28-Nofim   —> Return to the index ///

29-Yakir   —> Return to the index ///

30-Masu’a   —> Return to the index ///

31-Oranit   —> Return to the index ///

32-Sha’arei Tikva   —> Return to the index ///

33-Etz Efraim   —> Return to the index ///

34-Elkana   —> Return to the index ///

35-Kiryat Netafim   —> Return to the index ///

36-Revava   —> Return to the index ///

37-Barqan   —> Return to the index ///

38-Ariel   —> Return to the index ///

39-Kfar Tapuah   —> Return to the index ///

40-Rechelim   —> Return to the index ///

41-Migdalim   —> Return to the index ///

42-Alei Zahav   —> Return to the index ///

43-Pedu’el   —> Return to the index ///

44-Eli   —> Return to the index ///

45-Ma’ale Levona   —> Return to the index ///

46-Shilo   —> Return to the index ///

47-Shvut Rachel   —> Return to the index ///

48-Ma’ale Efraim   —> Return to the index ///

49-Yafit   —> Return to the index ///

50-Petzael   —> Return to the index ///

51-Tomer   —> Return to the index ///

52-Beit Arye   —> Return to the index ///

53-Ofarim   —> Return to the index ///

54-Halamish   —> Return to the index ///

55-Ateret   —> Return to the index ///

56-Gilgal   —> Return to the index ///

57-Netiv Ha’gdud   —> Return to the index ///

58-Nili   —> Return to the index ///

59-Na’ale   —> Return to the index ///

60-Nahliel   —> Return to the index ///

61-Ofra   —> Return to the index ///

62-Kochav Ha’shachar   —> Return to the index ///

63-Yitav   —> Return to the index ///

64-Niran   —> Return to the index ///

65-Modi’in Ilit   —> Return to the index ///

66-Hashmonaim   —> Return to the index ///

67-Kfar Ha’oranim   —> Return to the index ///

68-Talmon   —> Return to the index ///

69-Dolev   —> Return to the index ///

70-Beit El   —> Return to the index ///

71-Rimonim   —> Return to the index ///

72-Na’ama   —> Return to the index ///

73-Psagot   —> Return to the index ///

74-Beit Horon   —> Return to the index ///

75-Kokhav Ya’akov   —> Return to the index ///

76-Ma’ale Michmash   —> Return to the index ///

77-Givat Ze’ev   —> Return to the index ///

78-Giv’on Ha’hadasha   —> Return to the index ///

79-Giv’on   —> Return to the index ///

80-Neve Ya’akov (1)   —> Return to the index ///

80-Neve Ya’akov (2)   —> Return to the index ///

81-Geva Binyamin   —> Return to the index ///

82-Alon   —> Return to the index ///

83-Mevo Horon   —> Return to the index ///

84-Har Adar   —> Return to the index ///

85-Har Shmuel   —> Return to the index ///

86-Almon   —> Return to the index ///

87-Kfar Adumim   —> Return to the index ///

88-Ramot   —> Return to the index ///

89-Ramat Shlomo   —> Return to the index ///

90-Pisgat Ze’ev   —> Return to the index ///

91-Mitzpe Yericho   —> Return to the index ///

92-Vered Yericho   —> Return to the index ///

93-Beit Ha’arava   —> Return to the index ///

94-French Hill   —> Return to the index ///

95-Ramat Eshkol   —> Return to the index ///

96-Maalot Dafna   —> Return to the index ///

97-Almog   —> Return to the index ///

98-Jewish Quarter   —> Return to the index ///

99-Ma’ale Adumim   —> Return to the index ///

100-Keidar   —> Return to the index ///

101-Kalia   —> Return to the index ///

102-East Talpiyyot   —> Return to the index ///

103-Giv’at Ha-Matos   —> Return to the index ///

104-Har Gilo   —> Return to the index ///

105-Gilo   —> Return to the index ///

106-Har Homa   —> Return to the index ///

107-Beitar Illit   —> Return to the index ///

108-Ovnat   —> Return to the index ///

109-Gva’ot   —> Return to the index ///

110-Neve Daniel   —> Return to the index ///

111-Rosh Tzurim   —> Return to the index ///

112-El’azar   —> Return to the index ///

113-Efrata   —> Return to the index ///

114-Bat Ayin   —> Return to the index ///

115-Alon Shvut   —> Return to the index ///

116-Tko’a   —> Return to the index ///

117-Nokdim   —> Return to the index ///

118-Kfar Etzion   —> Return to the index ///

119-Migdal Oz   —> Return to the index ///

120-Karmei Tzur   —> Return to the index ///

121-Ma’ale Amos   —> Return to the index ///

122-Asfar   —> Return to the index ///

123-Mitzpe Shalem   —> Return to the index ///

124-Telem   —> Return to the index ///

125-Adora   —> Return to the index ///

126-Kiryat Arba (1)   —> Return to the index ///

126-Kiryat Arba (2)   —> Return to the index ///

127-H2 (Hebron)   —> Return to the index ///

128-Negohot   —> Return to the index ///

129-Haggai   —> Return to the index ///

130-Pnei Hever   —> Return to the index ///

131-Otniel   —> Return to the index ///

132-Carmel   —> Return to the index ///

133-Ma’on   —> Return to the index ///

134-Eshkolot   —> Return to the index ///

135-Shim’a   —> Return to the index ///

136-Susiya   —> Return to the index ///

137-Sansana

138-Tene   —> Return to the index ///

139-Yatir   —> Return to the index ///

This article can be read in the continuity of a previous one, written on December 12, 2015 and published under the title, “State of Emergency in France: An Architectural Reading of the Police Perquisitions.”

It has now been 50 days that France is living in the state of emergency, declared in the wake of the November 13, 2015 attacks and voted in the form of a law by the Parliament on November 27. Although the duration of this state of exception was fixed to three months, and should therefore be ended by the end of this month, the government already announced its intention to push for an extension — “until we get rid of ISIS” even said Prime Minister Manuel Valls to the BBC a few days ago! — which should transform the exception into a rule as it is often the case in this kind of situations. A recent poll have shown that a majority of French citizens are in favor of such an extension. What this poll does not reflect in any way, is the extreme inequality of application of the state of emergency on different bodies. For many, the sole experience of this state of exception consists in seeing armed soldiers and police officers in the streets and accepting the search of bags at the entrance of large shops. Others who live in the various banlieues of the country (in large cities just like in small towns, on metropolitan territory just like on ultramarine territories) may experience the exceptional latitude given to the police forces in its racist violence. More than 3,000 individuals, families, companies and Muslim communities have thus seen their private space violated by the brutal intervention (50% of the time, at night) of police squads leading administrative perquisitions, sometimes breaking doors (see previous article) and turning the space ‘upside down’ to finally find nothing of interest in the overwhelming majority of cases.

If most of theses searches leads to no conclusive results, it is neither because people whose homes are searched would be too smart to leave tracks of potential relation with future attack projects, nor because the secret services would be incompetent: it is because most of these perquisitions does not aim at finding anything in particular. They are used as an intimidation method against persons and communities considered as practicing a radical interpretation of Islam — in the context of a quasi-religious republicanism and its secularism, such practice is considered as sociopathic, if not illegal, by the authorities — but, also, as a means to construct a police cartography of private spaces, which is an opportunity that only rises during the application of a state of exception.

 April 19, 2013 manhunt in Watertown, MA / Photographs by Henry Nguyen (see The Funambulist Pamphlet 04: Legal Theory)

Such a cartographic process, regardless of its degree of deliberateness, had stroke me in the context of the April 19, 2013 Boston Police manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspected (and since then, found guilty) to be the co-author of the Marathon bombing four days earlier (see past article, as well as podcast conversation with Philippe Theophanidis, transcribed in first issue of The Funambulist Magazine). More of 2,500 police officers had then been deployed in several parts of the city of Boston and the city inhabitants had been strongly invited (forced in the searched areas) to remain at home, leaving the public space of the city to the sole police for a full day. One of the main elements of this manhunt consisted in the systematic search of hundreds of homes by fully armed police officers contrasting (as visible on the photograph above) with the domesticity of houses. The very principle of such a perquisitive search consists in a form of police knowledge production. If it was executed by single-function robots — we can think of those deployed in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report — such a knowledge production might be reduced to the simple aim of the search, in this case: is or is not the tracked person present in the searched dwelling?However, police officers in Boston just like in Paris are not single-function robots, they are humans who can see beyond the single aim of their mission and behave according to their subjectivity, which makes their intrusion in domestic space even more violent. These humans then write and archive reports that crystallize their observations of a realm to which they are not usually granted access, thus constructing a unique cartography of spaces unrelated to the function of their exceptional mandate.

To put it simply, let’s ask this question: what happened to those of Boston residents who were found with illegal possession or activities (independently from the manhunt) in the houses that were searched by the police? Were they searched again a few days later by police officers who came back on their tracks? Here again, the police function is not uniquely based on the detection of illegal activity and the production of knowledge does not stop here: the cartography of private space they are able to construct through the exceptional latitude that the state of emergency attribute to them, encompasses the entirety of these spaces, whether estimated as suspect or not. Their understanding of a given city acquires a degree of precision that non-exceptional legislation would never allow.

In the case of France, it is not just any part of the city (and therefore, not just any body) that is searched. As described many times on this blog (see the Paris Banlieues series), the French banlieues are suburban spaces segregated from the cultural and economic city centers, where lives an important amount of families originating from the former French colonial empire (many of which are Muslims) in a broad context of economic precariousness. As described in a past article entitled “The Banlieue Battleground: Designing the French Suburbs for Police/Military Interventions,” the French police develops an antagonist relationship to these neighborhoods and intervenes within them (whether through design, or actual physical intervention) mostly through a suppressive scope. The potentiality for them to intervene fully armed and search apartments and community spaces therefore constitutes for them a unique opportunity to acquire and archive a precise cartographic knowledge of what they consider as the bastions of the adversary (“the enemy,” if they add individual racist ideologies to their already colonial collective function). Just like the members of the government with functions related to “public order” realize that their dubious function is facilitated by the ongoing state of emergency, the police see in this legal exceptionalism — this is not the absence of the law but, on the contrary, the abusive power of law enforcement — a chance to exercise its power with no accountability. Only the various incarnations of the judicial power — most of them are not known to disavow the action of the police as we are regularly reminded — are able to cancel the legitimacy of a search as it has been the case in the recent days. Nevertheless, the cartographic knowledge of the police is not cancelled at the same time than is the legitimacy of the search. This dimension of the state of emergency is de facto accumulated and archived, if not administratively, at least in the individual memory of each police officers.

TWO IMPORTANT POINTS:
1. Although the photographs presented here are meant to contribute to a larger imaginary about the Calais’s “Jungle,” they represent only a fragment of it and, as such, can be misleading, the reason being that I did not want to take pictures of people. Is missing, among other things, the Jungle’s ‘main streets’ with its Afghani and Kurdish restaurants, its small shops and its religious buildings (three of which were demolished two days ago). The audacious inventiveness deployed to build these buildings and urbanity is therefore invisible on the photographs presented here.
2. In the same way than I did for a past article, I exceptionally decided to reserve all rights when it comes to these photographs (other pictures that I publish on this blog are licensed under creative commons), as I’m wary that their use could be instrumentalized for political ideologies with which I fundamentally disagree. If you would like to use them, feel free to send me an email to ask for authorization (info.funambulistATgmailDOTcom).

This article can be read in the continuity of the one entitled “Mud, Water & Steel: Migrant Bodies, Policed Environment and Humanitarian Architecture in Calais,” published on January 14, 2016. It constitutes an attempt to organize my thoughts, overwhelmed by a visit to Calais and Dunkirk yesterday. Let’s be clear: the reason why my thoughts are overwhelmed is less due to the extent of the individual experience of duress of each of the refugees who currently live in Calais’s so-called “Jungle” and Dunkirk’s Grande Synthe encampment, than by the massive deliberate means undertaken by the national and local authorities to write a new chapter of hardship for them. This rejoins an intuition that I have been able to express here in the past: when it comes to refugees, a radical politics that the European Union could adopt is…doing nothing. By this provocative statement, I mean that a significant part of hardship that refugee individuals and families currently experience is due to the various means deployed against them by the European Union (borders, walls, police harassment, and racism) and that the dismantlement of these means would drastically transform their daily lives and endeavors. This is not to say that their flee from various forms of individual and collective persecution should be met with indifference, but simply that the efforts that are currently put in antagonizing migrants and refugees are much greater than the ones necessary to provide adequate welcoming conditions to their temporary or permanent resettling. 

 Hyper securitized fence set up along the highway adjacent to the Jungle and leading to the port. The figure and vehicles are part of one of the many police squads punctuating the fence’s course. The graffiti on the stones reads “Have a Dream.”

In the case of Calais, the following photographs illustrate several forms of embodiment of the antagonizing efforts. What strikes the most is the overwhelming police presence. Vans from the gendarmerie nationale (police force of the army), full of riot-geared officers are visible everywhere around the Jungle, in the port, and within the city center. An helicopter also patrols the sky, to potentially spot bodies trying to access the port (or further away, the channel tunnel). Such an access would prove particularly difficult since triple layers of barbed-wire fences and punctuated with surveillance cameras have been set-up along the four kilometers that separates the Jungle from the ferry terminal (a quick look at the Google Streets pictures taken in 2008 illustrate well the radical difference with the current situation). This fence, probably because of its shortness in comparison to the walls materializing the borders between the United States and Mexico or the one between Hungary and Serbia, is however nothing less than the highly securitization of the border between France and the United Kingdom, to the exact same degree than the two instances cited here.

 Newly built container highly controlled refugee camp in the Jungle

The recently assembled 125-container camp for a few hundreds of the 6,000 refugees that currently live in the Jungle, despite its humanitarian claims (or more likely, thought them) is also part of this antagonizing strategy, as we saw it in the “Mud, Water, and Steel” article. Beyond the extreme poverty of design of these containers and the inopportune symbol that they convey of bodies one would like to conveniently ship back to where they come from, beyond even the non-existence of any sense of urbanity (rigid alignment, no social space, etc.), there is the dimension of absolute control that rules its space. The camp is surrounded by a fence and its access is made by palm-recognition through this device — I was forbidden to take a photograph of it — under the supervision of employees, I had trouble identifying between humanitarian or security workers (of course, opposing them is ignoring the function of state-mandated NGOs). At the entrance of this camp, just like at the one of the service complex, a bit further, both operated by the NGO La Vie Active whose conditions of selection by the State remains unclear, the employees at the gates refuse to answer questions, let alone to grant access to regular citizens wanting to inspect the conditions of live provided by the premises.

Of course, security is a non-negligible dimension of such a place, in particular when a part of its selected population is made of women and children (raising other problematic aspects as exposed in the previous article). However, this dimension (as well as the others) needs to be addressed in the terms of its concerned actors, not imposed as a pre-thought condescending solution, informed by various forms of prejudices and the clear will to keep deplorable living conditions as deterrent to potential future settling. The only legitimate strategy that could have been applied here, in a situation that (we should not forget it) only exists through the application of illegitimate enforcement of borders, would have consisted in providing the totality of technical, material and infrastructural instruments to construct an immanent urbanity. In view of the drastic economic, material and human investment deployed for the antagonizing control and suppression of the 6,000 inhabitants of the Jungle, such a strategy would have not been difficult to implement.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SITES DESCRIBED IN THIS ARTICLE /// (all photographs by Léopold Lambert for The Funambulist / all rights reserved, for reasons explained above (February 2015)) Special thanks to Joséphine Larere and Hicham Filali.

• Calais’s port and its layers of fences:

• Calais’s “Jungle” – The container camp:

• Calais’s “Jungle”:

  The Shakespeare Globe Company presenting their interpretation of Hamlet, in front of 300 people (see article in The Guardian).

  Coptic church of the Jungle, run by Ethiopian refugees

• Calais’s “Jungle” – In the periphery, a small residential complex have set up disproportionate fences and barbed-wire to prevent refugees to trespass their property:

• Encampment of La Grande Synthe, in Dunkirk. The advertising sign shows a development project of 500 apartments and ironically reads “Live in the City, Inhabit a Park” :

Last November was inaugurated in South Paris the new building of France’s Ministry of Defense, immediately nicknamed “Pentagon” by journalists for its massiveness and its imperial iconography (something that the journalists did not seem to mind). The list of problematic points regarding this new building is long and, despite the fact that some of them are specific to France, I have no doubt that it can stand as an example of many other similar buildings in the world.

The first of these problematic point has to do with the building’s function, of course, since it hosts the national military headquarters. Although we can see how delusional are France’s successive Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs when they think of their country like an indispensable actor in world’s geopolitics, its army remains an important interventionist force currently deployed in nine countries (Chad, Mali, Central African Republic, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, UAE, Gabon, Senegal). Eight of these countries are former French colonies, and the army is also deployed in the ultra marine departments and territories that never accessed to independence. Of course, the architect as no agency over military decisions, but just like for any other building’s program, he — I will consistently use “he” and “his” in this article for reasons that are made obvious in the title — necessarily contributes to the political agenda of the individual or collective form for which he designs.

The second point concerns the budget allocated to the building’s construction: more than one billion of euros. Of course, comparisons of national-scale infrastructure with the multitude of individual economic struggles are easy to make and sometimes, lack of rigor, but when it comes to a building designed to accommodate the military headquarters of a warrior country, this type of comparison certainly leads us to perceive this country’s priorities — in April 2012, the city of Paris also sued the construction permit that prevented the municipality to build social housing instead. Moreover, part of the reason this budget is so high may be because of the crooked partnership between the French State and the construction company Bouygues Construction whose owner is no-one else than billionnaire Martin Bouygues, good friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, then President of France when the bill was won. The profits made by Bouygues and its partners are massive, since the public-private partnership make the State only the tenant of this space, not the owner. Beyond the likely corruption that is currently under judicial investigation, the precise item billing may be indicative of how profits are also made in aggregate details: electric plugs billed for 1,000 EUR each, printers setup for 13,000 EUR, a door being changed from one opening direction to another, billed for 2,000 EUR. This kind of overpriced agreements remind one of the many judicial investigations in which Sarkozy is currently subjected, when his 2012 presidential campaign was billed for overpriced events (some of which never actually occurred) by a friend’s company.

The issues presented above are however specific to France and may not be as interesting for readers as a more comprehensive account of the architect’s contribution to such an operation. A short news reportage interviewing the architects of the “French Pentagon” (the architecture office A/NM/A) is, in this regard, eloquent. A first interview with one of the architects, Cyril Trétout, insists on the intrinsic secrecy of such a project, and the occasional ignorance experienced by architects regarding what they are designing (a large underground facility to which they had never gain any access), which recalls the leaking of the hyper-securitized new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in May 2007 by its architects, Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. As described in a past article entitled “The Architectural Drawings as Military and Judiciary Documents,” this story shows well how something that appears as benign as the architectural plan is, in fact, a sensitive document in the understanding of a given place’s organizational space it allows. A second interview with Nicolas Michelin, A/NM/A’s main partner and renowned architect in Paris, allows us to understand a second aspect of the architect’s role in this military building. Proudly describing how his building can resist a bomb or plane attack, we can see in this attitude both, how much the militarized function of the building constitute a ‘boy’s dream’ for the architect. The insistence on the roof “looking like a furtive military aircraft” — are we to believe that the building is supposed not to be detected by radars?! — is also very indicative of such a male fetish.

Of course, this article does not mean to contribute to a mediocre psychoanalysis session of Michelin and his two male’s partners, picturing them playing with little soldier figurines as children and reproducing here in reality their child fantasy. Instead, the argument behind this observation lies in how much architecture, as a crystallization of a given society’s relationships of power bears in itself a fundamentally male (understood as a position within these relationships) exercise, which becomes exacerbated in the context of a military program. This is not to say either that this building’s design would have been fundamentally different if undertaken by a female architect (a Condoleeza Rice equivalent of an architect) — although this may still be worth wondering — but, rather, that the very function and spatial organization of this building correspond necessarily to a male exercise of architecture. Lastly, this argument does not condescendingly mean that violence is a male thing, contrasted by female’s intrinsic “softness!” What this means is that male architecture/violence corresponds to a reinforcing of normative schemes of domination, and that we can undertake to design female or feminist architecture that violently challenge such schemes. For all these reasons, we can see how such an architecture would be the opposite of the so-called “French Pentagon.”

Additional photographs by Léopold Lambert (February 2016) ///

Fence recently set up and awaiting barbed wire on its top to materialize the border between Slovenia (i.e. Schengen space) and Croatia / Photo by Léopold Lambert (February 2016)

After documenting the particular Eastern gateway between “Fortress Schengen” and “Fortress U.K.” that Calais embodies, a few weeks ago (see past article), I undertook to document a part of another border of the Schengen space, which was recently materialized through barbed wire and fences: the border between Slovenia and Croatia (member of the European Union, but not of the Schengen space). The photographs associated to this article attempts to give a sense of these apparatuses of control deployed against migrant bodies, but it seemed important to associate this text to them in order to account of a small discrepancy between what I thought I would see, and what I actually saw. Part of the barbed wire ‘rolls’ set up on Slovenian land by the Miro Cerar administration at the end of 2015 had to be recently withdrawn because of them being flood by the river Kupa that separates the two countries close from the town of Metlika. Barbed wires are therefore currently replaced by fences whose Y-shaped posts await to be complemented by additional barbed wires (see photos above and below).This transitional aspect of things has therefore to be kept in mind when reading the following paragraphs. Similarly, it should be kept in mind that my research documents only 80 of the 670 kilometers of the border, including the main access between the two capital cities, Ljubljana and Zagreb.

These two provisions being stated, what surprised me during this research was the discontinuity of the militarized border. At some points, the fence creates an entrance to give access to the river (in such optical manner that it is hidden from the other side), on another, the barbed wire rolls stop in the middle of a forest, a few hundreds meters away from a custom station, some other times, the river remains the blurry and inconsequential boundary between two countries that celebrate their 25th independence anniversary this year. The militarized aspect of the border would thus ‘only’ be a spectacle, allowed by the vocabulary of continuity that the standardized components of the fence and the thread of the barbed wire constitute? This is an aspect of walls that I usually do not really address, favoring the effective immediate violence on bodies that they constitute. Yet, in this case, the spectacle of the walls, its rumor, organizes bodies in the territorial space and therefore finds a place in the editorial approach of this broader research.

The rumor of the wall strategically serves a political agenda addressed to three population through several means of communication — we should hold the press accountable to be a particularly significant one:
– the population of displaced and migrant bodies who developed means of sharing information, crucial to the evolution of their precarious trip, yet permeable to the ambiguity of the rumor. In the case of the Slovenian-Schengen border, just like in the case of the Hungarian-Schengen border (see past article), the rumor of the wall intends to discourage this population to approach it and, thus, to reorient its direction.
– the citizens of Slovenia, and by extension the Schengen and U.K. citizens, comfortably numb in a racist fear of otherness constructed through televised demagogic imaginary. Hearing the rumor of the wall that asserts that their government(s) is acting on containing what is perceived as a “foreign invasion” comforts their certitudes in a self-feeding ideological loop, which is difficult to exit.
– the other governments of Schengen countries, which have pressured the Cerar administration to set up the militarized border in order to contravene to their potentially effortless accommodation and integration of the refugee and migrant population — much more effortless than the formidable means engaged to control and suppress this population.

One place that I encountered in my research is particularly eloquent of the drastic consequences that constitute the elaboration of this rumor, and its means of materialization. The small Croatian town of Bregana, in the direct vicinity of the highway custom station between Ljubljana and Zagreb, extends a small part of its urbanity in Slovenia, on the other side of the thin river sharing the same name. The small street depicted above looks like many European residential streets but while the houses in the background are in Croatia, the ones in the foreground are in Slovenia. The border that used to be only materialized by the small Bregana river is now materialized by the fence awaiting its barbed wire. The reason for this is that this streets happens to be on the separation between Fortress Schengen (a 4 million square-kilometer area) and… the rest of the world. There is something seismic in the radicality of such a fault, where a single country used to stand (admittedly, Slovenia and Croatia were two distinct republics of Yugoslavia). The smallness of the door (Fortress Schengen’s back door) accommodated in the fence only attests of the past domesticity of this street but reinforced the absurdity of the wall’s spectacle.

If citizens of the European Union are serious about their political federation — a project that has still some (perhaps naive) echoes to me — and, if they refuse to transfer the violence of past borders into their new peripheries (exacerbated by racism), they need to interpret the Slovenian wall not as the crystallization of local politics but, instead, the continuity of common politics that deploy themselves in Slovenia, Hungary, Lampedusa, Mellila, Ceuta, Calais, as well as in the externalized (in Morocco, Bosnia, Serbia, etc.) and internalized detention centers that populate their land and thus form other walls of the fortress for which they are effectively responsible.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SCHENGEN WALLS ///

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (February 2016):

Border near the custom station of Krmačina.

View of the newly set up fences from the Croatian side of the river near Dragoši.

Newly set up fence in Križevska Vas. The last photo shows the discontinuity of this militarized border, yet set up in a way that such a discontinuity is invisible from the Croatian side of the river.

Former youth center of Metlika in the immediate vicinity of the custom station. I conducted an interview of local researcher/activist Marjetka Pezdirc, soon to be published on Archipelago.

Metlika custom station. The equipment on the palettes are part of the fence, ready to be set up.

 Slovenian part of Bregana. The fence runs sometimes in the very garden of local houses. The last picture is a close-up of the “Schengen back door” described in the text above.

 Custom station of Obrežje on the highway between Ljubljana and Zagreb.

Dear readers,

I am happy to announce the release of the fourth issue of The Funambulist Magazine. After examining the politics of space/design and bodies of militarized cities, suburbs, and clothing, this is now the turn of Carceral Environments to be investigated by the talented contributors to the magazine. This issue examines various forms of incarceration spaces in relation to the bodies they imprison. Architecture’s violence is never greater than through its carceral typology, and a bit of this typology lies in all architecture. The issue explore political prisons in Ireland (Fiona McCann), migrant detention centers in the United Kingdom (Tings Chak & Sarah Turnbull), Indigenous boarding schools in Canada (Desirée Valadares), the carceral history of Guantanamo Bay (A. Naomi Paik), labor camps in California (Sabrina Puddu), and prison abolitionism (Nasrin Himada) in additions to the usual photographic and student sections, as well as the opinion columns and blog article re-edition.

Although the issue is already available, it will be formally launched at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal on Sunday 6th March at 3PM through a presentation of its contents and an introduction to prison abolitionism by Nasrin Himada, contributor to the issue. See the CCA website for more information. There will also be a presentation of this issue in Berlin on March 29 (more information about this event soon).

As usual, the issue is available for purchase in four different offers:
– Printed Version
– Digital Version
– Printed + Digital Combo
– Issues 03 Clothing Politics & 04 Carceral Environments Combo (printed)

You can also subscribe to the magazine and thus support The Funambulist in a longer span of time while benefiting of better prices:
– Printed Subscription per month
– Digital Subscription per month
– Printed + Digital Annual Subscription

The Funambulist relies on these sales to exist financially, and your support is therefore both appreciated and necessary. However, I apologize to the readers for whom the prices of these offers remain too high. I am thinking of ways to make the magazine more accessible for all in a fair way (cheaper prices in local bookstores for instance), and I never refuse to send the digital version to a reduced price or for free should it be your case and ask for it by email (info.funambulistATgmail.com).

Don’t forget that you can also help this endeavor by requesting your library to subscribe (form for institutional subscriptions) and/or by convincing your favorite bookstore to carry the magazine. The map of libraries and bookstores, where you can find The Funambulist is available here. The next issue (May-June 2016) is dedicated to Design & Racism. If you know of architecture/design/art student projects that address this issue, you may send them to info.funambulistATgmail.com for consideration. Thank you very much, I hope that you enjoy this issue, I certainly did working on it.

INDEX ///

• 0 | COVER: RICHARD ROSS
• 2 | GUEST COLUMNISTS: MIGRATORY CORRIDORS AND BYWAYS ON THE “BALKAN ROAD”
  Lucie Bacon
• 4 | GUEST COLUMNISTS: THE CITY AND THE CITY: SPACE AND SEMIOTICS OF MUSLIM BOMBAY
  Sarover Zaidi
• 6 | FROM THE BLOG: TOWARDS A POST-APARTHEID PALESTINE
  Léopold Lambert
• — MAIN /// CARCERAL ENVIRONMENTS
• 10 | INTRODUCTION:
  Léopold Lambert
• 16 | IRISH PRISONS: BODIES IN RESISTANCE
  Fiona McCann
• 22 | MIGRANT DETENTION: STORIES FROM THE U.K.
  Tings Chak & Sarah Turnbull
• 28 | INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS: CARCERAL CLASSROOMS IN CANADA
  Desirée Valadares
• 34 | GUANTÁNAMO BAY: A PALIMPSEST OF CARCERAL VIOLENCE
  A. Naomi Paik
• 40 | CONSERVATION CAMPS: CARCERAL LABOR IN CALIFORNIA
  Sabrina Puddu
• 46 | ARCHIPELAGO: ON PRISON ABOLITIONISM
  Nasrin Himada
• 50 | PHOTOGRAPHY: JUVENILE IN JUSTICE
  Richard Ross
• 54 | STUDENTS: PROJECT FOR A NEW CARCERAL PARADIGM 
  Fleur Agema revisited by Jonas Staal
• 56 | STUDENTS: ANALYSES OF SARDINIA’S PENAL COLONIES
  Alberto Murru, Federica Spanu & Anna Rita Taccori
• 58 | STUDENTS: THE LOGIC OF GUANTÁNAMO     
  Bozar Ben Zeev

Still from You, the Living by Roy Andersson (2007)

Text originally published as “Shelter’s Political Violence,” in Arjen Oosterman and Nick Axel (eds), Shelter, Volume Magazine 46 (2015)

Shelter is often interpreted as the original typology of architecture, both for its primitiveness and for the simplicity of its function: a shelter is an architecture that protects the bodies it hosts from external conditions, such as the rain, the wind, the snow, etc. However, as often when it comes to the original figure of something, there is a risk of transforming this figure into a ‘pre-political’ myth, which recalls the illusory opposition between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes seeking to define the natural condition of the object we consider. The question is not whether the pre-political subject is intrinsically good (Rousseau) or bad (Hobbes) but, rather, if this very notion of pre-politics exists and helps us to interpret the world. Our imaginary tends to confirm this pre-political vision: after all, what is more innocent than a simple shelter whose only function is to protect our bodies from the elements? By extension, if we were to prove such innocence, we could draw the conclusion that architecture does not always bear political consequences. To the contrary, this text will attempt to demonstrate that the primitive shelter contains the totality of architectural characteristics that make the organization of space violent, regardless of the intentions that motivated its construction.

Let’s try to consider a shelter, the bodies it hosts and its direct environment, in utter simplicity: whether it consists of simply a roof or a walled enclosure of some sort, there is a separation – either an abrupt or a gradual one – between the sheltered space and the space outside of it. The sheltered space is, by definition, limited, which means that it can only contain a finite amount of matter. Bodies are material assemblages, which means that a shelter can only contain a limited amount of bodies and, by extension, that only a limited amount of bodies will be sheltered.

The protocol that defines which bodies get to be sheltered and which do not varies depending on a number of factors – architecture itself being a significant one. For the sake of this demonstration, let’s not yet assume that any specific politics would have driven its design. This does not necessarily prevent a protocol of selection to be applied, even if it is based on such a trivial rule as ‘first come first served’. We can easily picture a roofed space during heavy rain filling up with bodies seeking refuge. No other protocol applies here than the simple progressive accumulation of bodies under a limited roof (assuming that a physical antagonism will not develop between bodies). Eventually, the moment comes when the critical threshold is reached and any additional body seeking shelter simply cannot access the protection offered under the roof due to the dense population of bodies already there present. It is too early to apply a judgment on this de facto exclusion of a body – is it fair? is it ethical? is it legal? – so let us simply observe that this exclusion occurs, and that it occurs because of an engineered separation of a sheltered space from a non-sheltered space. This is the crucial point of the argument I am attempting to make: the status of the non-sheltered body is defined by the negativity of its exclusion as a direct opposite to the sheltered body. As we can see through the very name of their status, what socially separates these bodies is architecture itself: shelter.

“It’s just rain!” one might say, and the politics of who gets wet and who doesn’t still appears relatively inconsequential. What is true for rain is however also true for all other external conditions applied to a given body. Shelter provides protection against the violence of these conditions, and it is rare that its protocol of differentiating bodies that can access such protection and those that cannot is simply based on the ‘first come, first served’ rule. More often than not, the protocol of shelter refers to the rules defined by the regime of private property that no longer grants bodies access to protection based on how many can be accommodated, but rather on a more drastic political selection through acceptability. The criteria of such acceptability are multiple and various, but they rarely escape from the normative categorization of bodies into race, gender, sexual preference, ability, etc. and the violence it implies. For example, we can think of the selective criteria for accepting refugees currently coming from Afghanistan, Syria or Eritrea who seek refuge in Western, European countries. Many political representatives have expressed their will to select refugees to accommodate based on religion (Christians, rather than Muslims) and gender (women, rather than men); thus a protocol of access to a particular form of shelter is formed. It ought to be noted that shelter operates at several scales and being granted access to ‘national shelter’ does not necessarily prevent one from being excluded by other local forms of shelter and their respective protocols of access.

To simplify this demonstration and to show that architecture does not need to be complex to become both applicable and operative, let’s return to where we started, with the example of a simple roof. Such an architectural organization of space is particularly effective to accommodate a ‘first come, first serve’ protocol, however architecture can become more complex to accommodate more drastic protocols of selection, like the ones mentioned above. As material assemblages, walls are largely constructed in such a way that their structural integrity cannot be affected by bodies without proper tools that are themselves subject to the protocol of private property, acceptability and access. Hence why an imprisoned body will not succeed in evading the walls that surround it, yet the buildings experienced by our bodies on a daily basis are not essentially different; one cannot simply cross walls to transgress the way space has been designed and bodies separated. The difference between our homes and prison cells can be found in the ability for a body to directly intervene into the walls’ porosity through architectural devices, such as doors and windows, to which the protocol of admission has been materialized in a small object called the key. Who owns the key is a body included as acceptable in the protocol of admission defined by both a legal regime (private property for instance), and a material one (the wall and its porosity regulator, the door).

In French, homeless bodies are called shelter-less (sans-abri). They are the bodies not included in any selective protocol that grants access to a shelter; they are key-less, and all walls are reminders of the outdoor prison from which they cannot escape. This notion of the ‘outdoor prison’ may sound exaggerated; after all, the exterior milieu of the shelter-less is what remains in the world after we have withdrawn the totality of the sheltered spaces from it. However, I would like to insist on the fact that this ‘remaining world’ does not constitute an untouched condition in which bodies would have the same status as one in which shelters had never been erected. In other words, shelter (and, by extension, architecture) does not only create the status of the selected and protected body; it also actively constructs the excluded and shelter-less one. There are two sides to each wall, regardless of which one may be covered by a roof and which one may not.

Shelter, whatever its form and intention, might indeed incarnate the archetypical architectural typology, but it does so through the inherent political violence of segregation and exclusion it deploys. Architects and designers should not shy away from this violence, but rather understand its inexorability as well as its modus operandi in order to use it to inform their own politics, whatever they might be. Only a political manifesto that conforms with all points with the normative set of power relations at a given moment can enjoy the luxury of not voluntarily adopting a position, since a ‘non-political’ architecture will necessarily reinforce the current dominant politics. Designing architecture means also designing the protocols of its access. If we want these protocols to conform to the ubiquitous relationships of power proposed by the norm, we can surely pretend to ignore this violence. If, on the other hand, we want to challenge these relationships, we need to appropriate architecture’s inherent violence to reconfigure the way bodies are organized in space; to condition – architecture cannot pretend to do more than this – other forms of social relationships undermining the normative configuration of society that determine the various protocols of acceptability.

As I am currently working on the next issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to Design and Racism, I was particularly interested to listen to the video of the recent round table organized by Mabel O. Wilson at Columbia GSAPP about “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture” (see below). This enriching conversation between the guest speakers, Adrienne Brown, Mark Crinson, Dianne Harris, Saidiya Hartman, and the two discussants, Irene Cheng and Charles Davis is self-explanatory and I simply encourage readers to take the time to listen to it — I particularly/personally recommend Hartman’s intervention, as well as the discussants’ inspiring formulation of additional questions. What triggers my need to write an article about this conversation is therefore much less the vain idea that I would have anything to add to these works, than the shock of seeing the amount of empty seats during the conversation in Columbia’s school of architecture’s main auditorium. Of course, there are always circumstantial reasons that can explain such a low attendance: the time of the event (lunchtime), the lack of publicity (although I did hear about it while living almost 6,000 kilometers away), or the various deadlines that students and professors may encounter at various times of the semester. However, hiding behind this contingency would be ignoring the reality of things: not only do architects rarely address the relationship between their discipline and racism, they seem to ignore it when the topic is finally raised in this kind of occasional events. The small audience gathered around this topic in a school that has the ambition to present a vision of architecture’s future is painfully symptomatic of this problem.

At the base of this problem, there is this eloquent figure of 91.3% of American architects being White, as Wilson recalls in her introduction — figures in most European countries are likely to be even more overwhelming. Just like when it comes to statistics of gender inequality, it is easy to understand that challenges to patriarchy and white supremacy, although not necessary actively prevented — they often are but this is beyond the point here — are mostly ignored in a profession that is mostly composed by bodies benefiting from such systems of inequality. The more this disproportion in the composition of who is architect will tend to disappear (as it is likely to happen, in particular when it comes to gender), the more we can expect anti-racism and feminism to be addressed by the profession. However, considering the problem only through this angle as it is often done (focusing on who can be considered as Black and/or female successful architects, for instance) is not enough (although, again, crucial too) and would ignore the essential function of architecture.

Architecture is an instrument of domination. It organizes bodies in space with a varying degree of coercion, from what may appear as voluntary to the most extreme instances of violence. It does not invent racism, but it provides the spatial and territorial conditions for racism to exercise itself. Without architecture, racism would not be able to sustain itself, as explained in a few past articles about the extreme historical example of the slave ship. This does not mean that architecture cannot serve an anti-racist agenda, it simply means that its essential function allows more ‘willingly’ the conditions for racism (i.e. for a domination) to be perpetuated than dissolved. We might add to this that an architecture oriented against a given system of domination would contribute to produce new norms that are not deprived of forms of violence, which would need to be also addressed: this is what an instrument of domination fundamentally does.

The relationship of architecture and racism is therefore a difficult topic to address for many architects. Of course, this difficulty is somehow proportional to their own position within the system of domination, in particular within the most abrupt one, namely white supremacy; yet it is not exclusive to those who benefit from such a position, since the very profession of architect constitutes itself a position of power in any given society. This observation does not intend to go back to the disused figure of the architect as god but, rather, insists on the fact that architecture extends much beyond the architect’s personal agency — the very idea of speaking of the architect as a sole person is a laughable one — and that it therefore requires a significantly strong intentionality in order to challenge a given system of domination; racism in particular. While intention may be irrelevant in the justification of an architecture’s effects on bodies, in particular when this intention is in discrepancy with these effects, it is fully relevant when it is considered in the strategic construction of a counter logic. Just like we should be less focused on who can be labelled as racist (as we recently saw in one of the U.S. Democratic primaries’ debates), instead of how we take position in a fundamentally racist system, we should as well also take position as architects, with the knowledge that ignoring this question necessarily puts us in the position of reinforcing this system, regardless of the way it itself considers us.

Video of “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture” at Columbia GSAPP (February 26, 2016) ///

Friday, February 26, 2016 12:30pm
Wood Auditorium

Adrienne Brown, Assistant Professor – Department of English Language and Literatures, University of Chicago
Mark Crinson, Professor, University of Manchester
Dianne Harris, Dean of College of Humanities, University of Utah
Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Response by
Mabel O. Wilson, Professor, Columbia GSAPP
Irene Cheng, Assistant Professor, California College of the Arts
Charles Davis, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Between 2007 and 2008, and since my return to Paris in late 2014, I have been taking numerous Sunday morning bicycle rides in the Paris banlieues (suburbs). I have always been wary to present these visits here, in any other context than a specific research (such as the one about the weaponized architecture police stations) in the fear that they might end up looking like the orientalist journey of a Paris resident (I live in the 14th arrondissement of Paris) in the ‘wild world of the banlieues.’ This new format to present vignettes from these rides still constitutes a risk of orientalization; yet, many of the buildings visited have a rich (hi)story and it is now my conviction that they deserve to be described instead of remaining in my personal archives as too many have been in the past. My hope is that this collection of vignettes (more will follow) can give an interesting account of the banlieues’ built environment, both in its normalized segregative violence, but also in its construction of an alternative imaginary to the retrograde one traditionally associated to Paris. The map below presents the geographical situation of the six sites visited last Sunday represented by the photographs that follow it.

01. Cité des Courtillières: Social Housing in Pantin

The Parc des Courtillières is what we call a “cité,” i.e. a high density social housing buildings in a low density urbanism, inhabited mostly by low-income residents with the more or less implicit notion that an important part of this population is related to different moments of an immigration from the former French colonial empire (mostly North and West Africa) or, alternatively, from elsewhere (South Asia for instance).  It was built in 1956 as part of the governmental plan to signifanctly increase the amount of available housing in the Paris region following the historical 1954 radiophonic discourse by the well-known Abbé Pierre, founder of Emmaus, the main French organization struggling against homelessness since 1949. The social housing complex was designed by Émile Aillaud, who was also the architect of a similar, yet larger and more removed, neighborhood ten years later: La Grande Borne in Grigny. As the photographs above attest, the state of the common space formed by the serpentine buildings reflects the poor conditions in which the cités are often left, and we may even wonder what militarized purpose the concrete blocks set up at its entrance are supposed to serve. A renovation program is however in progress and, although we should welcome this salutary operation, we should remain cautious critical as it is typically during these transformations that the police imposes it spatial agenda in neighborhoods that it antagonizes more than protect (see past article).

02. Avicenne Hospital: Former French-Muslim Hospital in Bobigny

The Avicenne Hospital is currently a regular hospital in Bobigny but as its name (Avicenna was a 11th century Persian doctor and philosopher) and its orientalist portal (the architect, Maurice Mantout, is also the architect of Paris’ Great Mosque) may indicate, its history is rather unique. It opened in 1935 under the name “Hôpital franco-musulman de Paris” (French-Muslim Hospital of Paris) to achieve a double goal: segregate Arab patients from the White ones following a racist societal pressure and the dubious policies of then President of Paris’ Municipal Council, André-Pierre Godin — they both find clear echoes nowadays — as well as facilitate immigration control by leaving the hospital administration to the Paris police prefecture and the “North African Indigenous Protection and Surveillance Service.” This official collusion of (paternalist) protection and surveillance could not be more expressed than in the very function of this hospital: the care (including the presence of translators if need be) is described to be of good quality, but the distance from the center of Paris, as well as the fear of being administratively monitored refrained a certain amount of immigrants to require its services, leaving them without health protection. After World War II, the hospital started to gradually accept patients from surrounding municipalities, and thus to regularize its function. To read more about the hospital, I highly recommend Clifford Rosenberg‘s book Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2006) that dedicate an entire chapter to it.

03. Commisariat: Police Station in Gagny

Gagny’s police station is the ninth and likely penultimate object of my photographic series dedicated to Paris’ Northern and Eastern banlieue police stations’ weaponized architecture (see part 1 and part 2). Here again, the relatively new and cautious design of the police station fails to hide his fortified characteristics that reveal the police’s antagonism for the local youth and its manufactured myth of a potential civil war. To read a longer text about this series, see part 1.

04-05. Abraxas and Cité du Pavé Neuf: (Social) Housing Complexes in Noisy-le-Grand

Opened respectively in 1983 and 1985, the Espaces d’Abraxas and the Arènes de Picasso in Noisy-le-Grand were designed respectively by Spanish architects Ricardo Boffil and Manuel Núñez Yanowsky. While the former is simply a residential complex, the latter is a social housing complex part of the cité du Pavé Neuf (8,000 inhabitants). Abraxas is a massive post-modern building (see architectural drawings here) hosting 1,000 apartments whose confusion of eras and grandiose characteristics made it the setting of several science-fiction films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985, see below) and Hunger Games (2014). The Arènes de Picasso, as its name suggests, are mostly organized around a central square on which two monumental cylindrical buildings face each other. The cité was recently renovated with what is accounted as a minimum of demolition.

06. Redoute de Gravelle: Police School and Migrant Detention Center in Joinville-le-Pont

The Redoute de Gravelle is a 19th century fort built as part of a fortification complex to defend Paris. Nowadays, it combines numerous functions in a particularly problematic programmatic confusion. On the one hand, it hosts the National Police School, as well as the “Cynophile Unit” (the police unit using dogs for, here again, a confusion of functions from national security to the “fight against urban violences”…) and, as the photograph above attest, the storage of apparatuses of crowd control. However, the barbed wire fences, surveillance cabin and surveillance apparatuses visible on this same photograph are not meant to protect the training police officers nor the dogs (!), but it actually encloses an “Administrative Withholding Center,” i.e. a migrant detention center imprisoning people controlled in an irregular visa situation. We can see here how buildings designed with embraced military characteristics can be turned without trouble into carceral environments preventing any unauthorized access or exit from them. A few hundred meters further, the Vincennes racetrack regularly hosts its famous events such as the Prix d’Amérique in complete indifference for the violence continuously deployed in its periphery.