On May 19-21 2016, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin hosted a 36-hour long conference entitled “Public Space: Fights and Fictions: a 36-hour Factory of Thought,” dedicated the politics of public space, organized in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut. The numerous keynote lectures, roundtables and performances involved the participation of many architects, urban planners, artists, journalists, and other thinkers from both the Global North and Global South. Along with good friends of New South, Meriem Chabani and John Edom, I was invited to curate a publication built upon the discussions that seemed the most relevant to our respective work’ editorial line. The result is the publication below, grouping interviews we did of contributors to the conference (Eyal Weizman, Nana Dusei-Poku, Cooking Sections, Omar Nagati, Ana Dana Beroš, Pedro Gadanho), as well as short essays by others (Anna Minton, Tentative Collective, Elpida Karaba, Mona Fawaz & Ahmad Gharbieh, Kathrin Röggla, Ethel Baraona Pohl). We hope that you will enjoy the editorial result of this collaboration and would like to thank Julia Albani, Nicola Beissner, Joachim Bernauer, Karin Lelonek, Johannes Odenthal, Joanne Pouzenc, and Andrea Zell for this opportunity. You can read the publication below or download freely the PDF version by clicking here. 

Public Space: Fights and Fictions. An Editorial Project by The Funambulist and New South commissioned by the Akademie der Künste and the Goethe-Institut (Paris-Berlin, 2016).

INTRODUCTION BY THE FUNAMBULIST & NEW SOUTH ///

“Who do we exclude from our fictions?
Who do we include in our desires?”
— Tentative Collective

Architects appear increasingly to be getting interested in the politics of public space. The 36-hour Factory of Thought event at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin is therefore inscribed in a larger movement towards social awareness as a key value in architecture practice. Regardless of its successes or failures, the 15th edition of the Venice Biennale Reporting from the Front, curated by Alejandro Arevena, provides the latest solid evidence of this move. Although such a shift both in the practices and questions encountered by architects can only be a positive shift, what is too often missing from the conversation is the crucial need to question the very nature of public space itself: not only the way it is made and used, but the broader societal vision that it represents and reinforces. A useful starting point, then, is to examine what we mean when we say ‘public’, before we move on to ‘space’, the material that as architects, urban planners and spatial practitioners, we may dissect more comfortably.

Who is the public? The temptation is to take its pure definition at face value: ‘public’ means open to all, inclusive, democratic, shared, a right. What emerges upon closer examination of specific cases however is that these apparently universal values come with rules attached. The label public, across different contexts, can therefore obscure fissures that exclude certain individuals and groups, or that place constraints on their belonging to a common ideal. As such, ‘public’ reproduces a hierarchy of belonging and a dominant idea of ‘the public’ that eclipses a multiplicity of diverse minor ‘publics’. Behind these symptoms of inequality lie the structural mechanisms of the norm. Bodies that share a majority of characteristics with the local norms are those perceived primarily as constituents in this notion of the ‘public’. On the contrary, bodies that do not conform to the norm, be it on the basis of their gender, their race, their health, their age or, more generally, their behaviour, are excluded from this notion to an extent proportional with their degree of non-conformity. Consequently, the ‘space’ of the ‘public’ will also be proportionally inappropriate for these non-conforming bodies.

Let us be clear: this is not a problem of a lack of tolerance or inclusivity. In her interview transcribed here, as well as persistent and patient contributions throughout the event in Berlin, Nana Adusei-Poku addresses the simple but devastating point that tolerance of people of colour, the queer community, Muslims and other marginalised groups in European and American public space is experienced by those individuals themselves as the postponement of a negative and violent rejection. Tolerance for — and what we conceive as ‘good intentions’ toward — others from those normative bodies toward which public space is calibrated, only constitute the patronising testimony of this inequality. Architects and designers are too often the deliverers of such a testimony. Before hoping to contribute to better, more ‘participative’ forms of public space, we need to deconstruct this notion and its contradictions. This is the aim of the present publication; it can be seen as a theoretical toolbox oriented toward spatial practitioners and others engaged in the physical modification of the commons.

The other contributions curated for this present publication also engage with these processes of deconstruction.

Ana Dana Beroš addresses the segregation of public space in her close analysis of the infrastructure for receiving displaced persons in the so-called ‘humanitarian corridor’ in the Balkans, and particularly in Croatia and Slovenia. The fast paced evolution of the refugee situation and the political adaptions and improvisations that seek to address it, throw into relief many assumptions and underlying tensions within European societies and the way that these are articulated in the public sphere.

With a recalibrated awareness of the power of public to exclude and obscure its own hierarchisisation, we can begin to develop a more nuanced understanding that admits the possibility of public space not only facilitating conflict and negotiation, but being made by them.

Omar Negati insists on this characteristic of the public, drawing on his experience of the immediate aftermath of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Here, a new set of rules to govern the public sphere had to be constantly improvised, negotiated and renegotiated, illuminating through the absence of the state or any shared understanding of constraints, their integrality in ‘normal’ circumstances. Omar’s experience of an absent state in post-revolution Cairo also provides the basis for his critique of the tendency, particularly amongst architects, to reject another key aspect of the definition of ‘public’, namely as it relates to government as opposed to private interests.
We wonder ‘for whom’ public space is designed, but also ‘against whom.’ In her contributed essay, Anna Minton discusses the current proliferation of privately owned public spaces in the UK. These selective spaces have ushered in the phenomenon of private security companies effectively policing the bodies that use them, where the nature of ‘policing’ demonstrates an ambiguity in which behaviours are actually prohibited: unlawful ones, or simply those that do not produce capital. Anna places her observations within the context of an increasingly militaristic and hostile attitude towards the public on the part of the political and business classes in the UK.

For spatial practitioners Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of Cooking Sections, the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ no longer function and need to be supplemented with new terms that capture the nuances of the dynamic and mutating situations we now find ourselves in. Cooking Sections aim to explore these themes through their work, opening up the field of possible constituents of the public to include insects, plants and climatic phenomena, both as active stakeholders and in terms of the way they demand and influence negotiation and engagement in the public sphere.

This publication compiles what we consider to be a cross section of the key themes to emerge from 36 hours of intense discussions, performances, key-note lectures, parties and interviews. It is not a report on the event per se but a specific and situated regard derived from our own participation as critical observers. Neither is it a collection aiming at a universalist reading of public space — we know all too well that universality often masks an exclusionary Western hegemony. On the contrary, it attempts to learn from the specificity of each context within which each of these contributions are formulated. The publication includes six interviews conducted during the event with Eyal Weizman, Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe of Cooking Sections, Nana Adusei-Poku, Pedro Gadanho, Ana Dana Beroš and Omar Nagati. In addition, we present a selection of articles that provide a response to the event by Anna Minton and Mona Fawaz, as well as texts that formed part of contributors’ presentations at the event itself from Elpida Karaba, Tentative Collective, Wilfried Wang and Kathrin Röggla. Our hope is that this editorial approach can be used as a framework for debate around the question of public space, the remit of which should not be constrained to the field of professional architecture but integrate and impact upon the broader social contexts within which we operate.

After the first year of existence of The Funambulist Magazine that examined the politics of militarized cities, the suburbs, clothing, prisons, structurally racist designs, and objects, I am delighted to begin this second year with an issue dedicated to health-related political struggles. This 7th issue opens with a new recurrent section entitled “Political Walks” that asks a contributor to introduce us to a meaningful pathway in a given city — in this case, Alex Shams about Tehran. The three guest column of the general sections are dedicated to the denial of citizenry that Japan attribute to the Korean (and Taiwanese) members of its society (Christina Yi), a report on the situation of women’s rights in post-invasion Iraq (Zahra Ali), as well as a personal account on the recent night that saw a coup failing in Turkey, as well as the following days (Merve Bedir). The main dossier, “Health Struggles,” does not approach the concept of health merely as that which prevents a body from dying but, rather, as the most incarnate level of politics since it tend to mobilize the very biologies of the bodies it takes for object. For this same reason, it is also a domain where the norm shows the highest degrees of crystalization in its stigmatization of some bodies over others.

The dossier begins with six significant vignettes approaching various aspects of this topic: the 2014 Ebola Quarantine in the neighborhood of West Point in Monrovia, Liberia, the work of Alondra Nelson about the alternative healthcare program of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, the hospital as an architecture of control, the former French-Muslim hospital of Bobigny, the use of medical expertise in the asylum process in France, as well as the work of Paul B. Preciado around the gradual use of testosterone. The main articles involve the designation of abject bodies in the way the city is thought and designed (Blanca Pujals), he Texan regulations on abortion clinics that poorly disguise their antagonism against them (Lori Brown), the hunger strikes undertaken in political prisons from Guantanamo to Turkey (Banu Bargu), the criminalization of HIV positive Black and/or Queer bodies in the United States (Che Gossett), as well as the ‘pathologization’ of Disabled and/or Female bodies enabled by medical discourses (Noémie Aulombard). Exceptionally, the podcast transcript and the photographic section have merged to serve a long interview of Momoyo Homma about the work of artists/poets/architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. The issue ends with two student projects related to the topic, a look at clinical characteristics in architecture (Piergianna Mazzocca) and a bacterial kit for DIY gynecology (Giulia Tomasello).

A new commercial aspect of this second year is a simplification: the printed version of the magazine (including the monthly and annual subscriptions) will always be complemented with the digital version. With this in mind, here are the different ways to acquire this new issue:

• Printed + Digital Version (12 euros)
• Digital-Only Version (6 euros)
• Printed + Digital Monthly Subscription (5 euros per month)
• Digital-Only Monthly Subscription (2.50 euros per month)
• Printed + Digital Annual Subscription (60 euros per year for individuals, 200 euros for institutions)
• Find a partner bookstore near you!

Talking about partner bookstores, it is also my pleasure to announce that the various partnerships with bookstores of Southern/Eastern Europe and the Global South proposing the magazine for a more accessible price (indexed on the cost of life of the concerned country) have started in Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Morocco, Portugal, Croatia, Pakistan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (and soon in Lebanon). If you are aware of bookstores that would be interested to be part of this specific program, you can send an email at info@thefunambulist.net. Thank you!

Two Caterpillar bulldozers at work (right: Rafah, Palestine in 2002, left: Standing Rock, ND on Native sacred burial ground in 2016)

Since April 1, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, later followed by over 200 other Native nations, has been occupying the sacred site of Standing Rock in order to protect it against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline (named after the two American States, not the Native nation of course), which would carry Bakken crude from North Dakota to Illinois. Yesterday (September 8),  North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple has called for the U.S. National Guard to intervene at Standing Rock a few hours before the ruling of a lawsuit that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has brought against the U.S. government. A few days earlier, some Native organizers had been attacked by dogs ordered by private security force, and bulldozers had demolished a sacred burial ground (see the Democracy Now report here).

In looking at the right part of the photograph above illustrating this deliberate profanation, you will recognize the well-known yellow worn by all non-customized Caterpillar construction (or rather, destruction) equipment on what appears to be D8 bulldozers. Condemning Caterpillar for actions committed in the context of a State’s infrastructural construction can appear as far fetched at first glance — we will see in the last paragraph that it is actually not — but this 90-year old American company is also renowned for its numerous contracts with the U.S. Army, and has no problem to display its support to the “armed forces” on its website:

Screenshot from a Caterpillar brochure for the military.

The part of the Caterpillar website dedicated to “Defense” is particularly interesting in this regard and relatively generous in the information given. One might have an overview of the “Defense Product Line” proposed by Caterpillar to the U.S. army and U.S. Federal civilian agencies, including bulldozers such as the D6K or the D7R. The company however does not stop at providing military equipment to an army knowingly deployed in various parts of the world; it also offers training to military operators and provide a schedule of courses throughout the year. The website also features a list of federal agencies and branches of the U.S. army that it supplies with equipment. Under the title “Foreign Military Sales Programs,” the company lists the states of Iraq and Afghanistan as also provided with such equipment as part of the so-called “Supplemental Acquisition Program.” There is however no mention of another indirect important foreign military client: the Israeli army.

The Israeli army indeed regularly purchases Caterpillar bulldozers through the “US Foreign Military Sales Progam,” which are later customized by Israel Military Industries to become an autonomous war-machine able to operate in Palestinian cities without any supporting squad. The model D9 of the Caterpillar bulldozers has been a particularly recurrent acquisition by the Israeli army for decades now. Created in 1954, it has been used in every war lead by the Israeli government since the first Sinai invasion in 1956. This ‘steel monster’ is 8-meter long, 4.6-meter wide, 4-meter high, it weights 60 tons, and is usually equipped with a 1.8-meter high blade in its front and a long plowshare in the back, which can dig a 1.7-meter deep furrow. The latter was particularly used during the Second Intifada in order to sever the Palestinian infrastructure (road, water, sewage, electricity) under the pretext of demining — an easily deniable pretext since the plowshare is situated in the back of the bulldozer. The D9 has many variations: the D9T does not need an operator to be present within the vehicle, the “Lioness” version is higher than wide and can thus penetrate in narrower street — although demolishing house to let bulldozers move forward in Palestinian refugee camps has never been a problem for the Israeli army in history… (for more on the question, I can refer to my short book, The Politics of the Bulldozer)

In March 2003, an American activist named Rachel Corrie was killed by such a bulldozer in Rafah when she interposed herself (see past article) between the military vehicle and the house that its operator intended to destroy — about 2,500 Palestinian houses were demolished by bulldozers during the Second Intifada. Although this dreadful event was legitimately relayed by Western media, we can however regret that such coverage does not extend to the many Palestinians who also died in the demolition of their houses by these bulldozers. In November 2004, Human Rights Watch issued a call entitled “Israel: Caterpillar Should Suspend Bulldozer Sales – Weaponized Bulldozers Used to Destroy Civilian Property and Infrastructure,” which remained unanswered positively, Caterpillar’s CEO James Owens saying that the company did “not have the practical ability or legal right to determine how our products are used after they are sold.”

Whether used in the desacration of Native land, in the post-invasion infrastructure of Iraq or Afghanistan, or in the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes, for the moment, this article has only evoked what we can call the weaponizable function of the bulldozer. However, we ought to look at what a bulldozer is in its essence: it is fundamentally an instrument of absolute geoengineering control over a territory and, as such, a weapon, rather than a weaponizable tool. As argued at length on this blog and elsewhere, qualifying something as a weapon (like, say, architecture) does not necessarily means that its use should be forever proscribed. What it means is that its use is inseparable from violence itself and that, as such, it necessarily crystalizes, enables, enforces a political program. If we go back to North Dakota and, more broadly, to the ways the United States have systematically assert their genocidal claim on the land, we can see how an instrument like the bulldozer (like the barbed wire, as Olivier Razac would say) was invented in such a logic of territorial domination — the displacement of Bakken (a mineral only found in the Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) that the Dakota Access pipeline would enable on thousand of kilometers is also inscribed in this geoengineering dominating logic. Just like the bulldozer is a weapon, not a weaponizable tool; we should interpret what is at stake in Standing Rock and in Palestine not through a negotiation of the ways in which the politics involved could become acceptable, but rather through the prism of the entirety of the political ideologies at work: in both cases here, the variations of the same colonial project.

On September 9, 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video in which he affirms that the evacuation of the Israeli civil settlements in the West Bank in the context of the creation of the State of Palestine would constitutes “ethnic cleansing.” These remarks were received with outrage by many defenders of the Palestinian narrative, coming from the head of a State that was created on the ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, whose families now constitute over 5 millions refugees in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Even the U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau judged unequivocally the use of such a term as inappropriate in the context of settlements whose very existence is relatively consensually condemned at an international level. In a column written for Al Jazeera, Funambulist-contributors Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon deconstruct perfectly such a discourse:

Through his Facebook video [Netanyahu] transforms the colonising settler into the victim of human rights abuses and the subjected Palestinians into the perpetrators who are ostensibly supported – unjustly, according to this distorted logic – by the international community. This, to be sure, is a very strange form of human rights: It is the human rights of a dominant ethnic group whose dominance has been instituted precisely through the expulsion and subjugation of Palestinians. Furthermore, decolonisation becomes a crime against humanity, and the global discourse of human rights is turned into a tool for advancing domination. (“Portrait of an occupation: Human rights of the settler,” September 12, 2016)

The argument that I would like to make here is however slightly different and consists firstly in a critique of our outrage as being fully part (if not the main object) of Netanyahu’s strategy and, secondly, in the paradoxical recognition that the Israeli Prime Minister might, in fact, have a point when he evokes the notion of ethnic cleansing — admittedly, that’s a “hear-me-out!” type of argument.

As I had the opportunity to argue in a recent article for Jewish Voice for Peace, the way we formulate our political outrages are perhaps as important, if not more important, than that against what we formulate them. The way this particular one operates, like many others that focus either on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank — those in Jerusalem seem to be often conveniently forgotten — or on any other designation of Palestine as being reduced to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and potentially East-Jerusalem, conveys a collective imaginary in which the historical event that needs to be recognized by all is the 1967 illegitimate invasion of the (then under Jordanian and Egyptian administration) “Palestinian territories” by the Israeli army — along with the still-occupied Golan Heights in Syria and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt — as well as their subsequent occupation and civil colonization. Netanyahu’s remarks intend to keep us within this narrative that fundamentally denies the ethnic cleansing from Palestine of half of the Palestinian population in 1948 by the Zionist paramilitary groups later gathered under the newly created Israeli army. We should not formulate our arguments and visions of the future on the terms ‘brought on the table’ by a person like Netanyahu. It is my conviction that doing so would be an equivalent positioning than the ones of these NGOs negotiating the route of the Apartheid Wall to more or less successfully accommodate localized Palestinian needs and thus finding themselves accomplice of the process as a whole, as Eyal Weizman argues throughout The Least of All Possible Evils (Verso, 2011).

Where I think that the notion of ethnic cleansing need to be taken seriously holds in the fact that whoever understands the fundamental crime that the 1948 Nakba (or the still ongoing forced displacement of the Bedouins of the Negev) constituted should not condone the forced displacement of anyone who is born and has lived their entire lives in a certain place — admittedly, this definition does not include the entire settler population, far from it. Of course, the current Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem have been built or retroactively legitimized by the successive Israeli governments in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and they are designed through extreme process of weaponization of architecture against the Palestinian people as I have argued many times. There is therefore no vision of an acceptable future that would not see them absolutely decolonized, as well as desegregated — their decolonization would mean very little if their current racial segregation would be replaced by a social one. Furthermore, given the racist ideology through which many of the settlement’s current residents seem to envision society, it is likely that an important part of them would not tolerate to live in a desegegrated environment and, for better or for worse, would willingly move out. Once this is said, we have to embrace the fact that anyone willing to live in a post-Apartheid condition should be authorized to stay as simple citizen of such a new society — the not-so-well-known case of the 200,000 French settlers who stayed their entire lives in Algeria and acquired the citizenship after the 1962 independence can be useful in this matter, despite some obvious differences.

This suggests an important question: if the notion of ethnic cleansing makes sense in the designation of a forced displacement of an ethnic group, whatever it might be, who is its perpetrator? In Netanyahu’s speech, the answer is clear: the new Palestinian State would be the perpetrator in this case, but in the two historical cases of settlements evacuation in the Sinai in 1982 and in Gaza in 2005, it was actually the Israeli army (ordered both times by Ariel Sharon then respectively Minister of Defense and Prime Minister) that forced out the few thousands of Israeli settlers from their homes and destroyed the settlements subsequently not to leave these infrastructures to Egyptians and Palestinians. Regardless, the satisfaction that we might have experienced during the so-called “disengagement” in 2005 Gaza drastically contrasted with the dreadful last decade of economic and food blockade, as well as recurrent bombardments, regular invasions and the thousands of Palestinian deaths they triggered should be an indicator for us to position ourselves against such forced displacements. The crucial point in the articulation of a vision of the future is therefore to define one where displacement is not thought through the spectrum of order and constraint, but rather through the enabling of all (including the 5 millions Palestinian refugees) to move according to their wish.

These questions and the necessity that we have to think of the future of Palestine through our own terms allow me to introduce the work that I have been doing for the exhibition Chapter 31 curated by Mai Kanaaneh and Nadia Jaglom (Sarha Collective) and recently displayed at the P21 Gallery in London (introductory text below).

Excavated Objects from a Post-Apartheid Palestine by Léopold Lambert (2015-2016) ///

See high-resolution photographs of the map in Arabic/Hebrew or its English translation.

The objects presented here are relics of a future; a future in which the various territorial and legal apparatuses forming the Israeli apartheid have been dismantled. In it, Palestine has become more than the “binational state” often wished for: it has become a multinational territory, whose open borders no longer discriminate which bodies are allowed to return to it, and which ones are to be prohibited from doing so. These objects tell us stories about new buildings that either memorialize the past of this territory, or organize its present. While the Museum of the Nakba, the Intifada Memorial, the Apartheid Museum and the Qalandiya Museum join Yad Vashem in the memorialization of the tormented history of Jewish, Arab and Bedouin Palestinians, the Jericho International Train Station, the Gaza Harbor, the Bedouin University of the Negev, the New Gaza University and many more infrastructural and academic buildings constitute the new nodes of Palestinian daily life. Trains and ferries keep Palestinians close to their neighbors and family members abroad: one hour to reach Beirut, Damascus or Amman from Jerusalem, three to reach Cairo from Rafah, one day to reach Istanbul from Haifa, etc. What used to be colonial settlements could have easily resumed their segregative function if left to the upper middle class of this new society. However, they were transformed instead into temporary hosting towns for the hundreds of thousands returnees, waiting to relocate to the newly built villages in the erased tracks of those evicted and demolished in 1948.

The story does not tell where these objects were found; they might even be the mere products of our imagination, but as Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada writes, “no change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first.” In order for imagination to become a revolutionary force, it needs to be reclaimed and decolonized by the same people from whom it had been captured.

As I am currently working on the next issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to the Police, I encountered this very interesting news from Seattle. Yesterday (September 15, 2016) evening, “Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and three City Council members said they’re abandoning plans to push through up to $149 million in funding for a brand new police station in North Seattle during this fall’s budget negotiations” (source: The Stranger). This decision follows the political work engaged by Black Lives Matter in general, and the inspiring campaign #BlockTheBunker started by the Seattle Black Book Club a few months ago in particular. The four points on this campaign’s agenda are remarkably clear and engaged in radical transformatory politics:

• #InvestInCommunity | Now that the money that would have been invested in the bunker is available: How will the City of Seattle invest in housing as well as the human, health and social services our communities continue to ask for?
• #NoNewYouthJail | Why is our city saying their hands are tied and that they must build a new youth jail, despite their goal of ending youth incarceration?
• #NoNewPolice | Why is our city planning to hire new officers, when we have yet to address the egregious training and accountability systems currently in place? Why be so irresponsible, when we haven’t even begun the work of addressing the DOJ decree? Why unleash even more officers into our already over policed communities?
• #BlocktheBunker | We know a delay is just a pause in the status quo: Why have there been no tours of the second 15,000 sq foot facility in the North End? Does our city even need a new building?

3D rendering of the proposed Seattle North Precinct police station designed by SRG Partnership

Although the term is not used by the campaign, the way it challenges the construction of “the bunker” is consistent with the vision of police abolitionists. This is particularly true when it comes to the transfer of the allocation of resources to the police towards local communities instead, in particular those that are usually at the end of the line for such allocation (neighborhoods primarily inhabited by the working class and communities of color), and which are also the privileged target of police violence.

It is not innocent that this campaign is fundamentally oriented against architecture: not only does the architecture of police stations crystallizes the degree of antagonism that the police carries for its surrounding communities, not only does it represent a deliberate and important expense for the city, not only it embodies an aesthetic of the police state as it thinks of itself, architecture, in the way it organizes bodies in space, is also in itself a form of policing as argued (somehow obsessively!) throughout this blog (see past article). The name of the campaign itself, #BlockTheBunker, is explicit about this opposition to architecture and its weaponization that the militarized environments constituted by police stations in the city.

3D rendering of the future 40th Precinct Police Station designed by BIG

The success of the campaign #BlockTheBunker in Seattle should inspire many others in the United States and elsewhere. For instance, in February 2016, the New York City Department of Design and Construction officially commissioned the design of the future 40th Precinct Police Station to BIG, one of the current most successful architectural firms in the world, mostly known for their didactic (if not patronizing) way to explain their projects to clients and the public, as well as for the ‘hip’ pictorial characteristics of their buildings. Given the consistent lack of concern from this architecture office for any political issues (which is itself a political positioning), we cannot even accuse them to be disingenuous when they write “the 40th Precinct will also house a brand new piece of city program: the first ever community meeting room in a precinct. With its own street-level entrance, the multipurpose space will contain information kiosks and areas to hold classes or events, encouraging civic engagement with the precinct” (source: Archdaily).

Comparative existing Harlem 28th Precinct (photo by Léopold Lambert) with the future Bronx 40th Precinct designed by BIG in New York.

I don’t think that this is disingenuous from my end to associate the existing Harlem 28th Precinct building with the one proposed by BIG a few miles North in the Bronx. Of course renderings tend to polish the aesthetic of a yet-to-be-built architecture, but this new building will have a lot of difficulties hiding the bunker characteristics of its architectural typology. I don’t think that this is disingenuous either to assume that a “a community meeting room” in a building like this one will not experience a strong affluence, regardless of the “civic engagement” of the neighboring communities — especially when such a civic engagement might consist in the protection of locals against the police. There could therefore be another #BlockTheBunker campaign against this building, favoring the resources engaged for a community building, rather than for a meeting room in a police bunker. BIG could even consult for it if they want (!) although cautiously as ‘hip’ has some drastic consequences in a city like New York, where gentrification is always looking for a new place to deploy itself.

Police station of Villiers le Bel in Paris northern banlieues (photo by Léopold Lambert)

In October 2015, exactly ten years after Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, two Black and Arab teenagers from Paris eastern suburbs died after being chased illegitimately by the police, which triggered the month of massive revolts of the banlieues youth, I posted a photographic research dedicated to the weaponized architecture of nine police stations in the northeastern Paris banlieues, six of which have been built after the 2005 revolts.  The particularity of these police stations is that they are clearly the output of a dedicated work by architectural offices, some of which even advertise their police project as part of their portfolio alongside libraries, collective housing, and offices. The antagonism that the police has for the banlieue racialized communities is fully expressed by these architectures that have their place in the history of military buildings. Architects are to be hold responsible for their contribution to such an antagonism — they may have not trigger it, but they definitely maintained, if not reinforced it.

Paris 5th arrondissement police station (photo by Léopold Lambert)

Building police bunkers after territorialized revolts is not new in France. The highly fortified and opaque base of the 5th arrondissement police station (see photo below), at the edge of the Quartier Latin (the inner Paris student district) is also a testimony of such a strategy. It was built a few years after the 1968 student and worker revolts and its fortified characteristics are now proving handy in the context of the ongoing state of emergency in France with the filtering of anyone entering the building by a preliminary outdoor checkpoint (on the right in the photo). In April 2016, the police station has been the target of one early non-authorized march by the movement Nuit Debout after that some of its members had been arrested and placed in temporary detention inside the building.

Architects have to face once again the fact that when it comes to the enforcement of unequal violence in our societies, they are more likely part of the problem than of the “solution.” Although I have argued at length that no architecture could be said to be non-weaponized, police stations are some of the most antagonizing buildings in societies where the police’s very function — the “law enforcement” — consists in making sure that the structural racism inscribed in explicit (the law) and implicit (the norm) social rules is operative. For this reason, architects should be at the forefront of campaign such as #BlockTheBunker and dedicate themselves to think architecture against itself.

Exceptionally, and for the political reasons I have explained here, the photographs presented here are under copyright and should be asked for a written authorization to be republished.

Two days ago, I had the opportunity to go back to Calais along with a small group of students and professors (Vibeke Jensen and Anders Rubing) from the architecture school of Bergen. This visit happened a few days after French Ministry of Interior Bernard Cazeneuve met with Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart, vowing to demolish the so-called “Jungle” and relocate its residents in various hosting centers throughout the country. Such announcement came a few days after another one, made by Robert Goodwill, the Immigration Minister of the new Theresa May UK government: two weeks ago, he announced that a new 4-meter tall wall was about to be built in Calais along the highway leading to the port — the construction started yesterday. This comes as an additional layer of militarization of the port’s vicinity that already counts numerous police cars, CCTV cameras and two to three layers of 4-meter tall barbed wire fences (see photographs below). The cynicism that consists in investing millions of euros/pounds into these drastic policing measures and their violence, rather than offering accommodation to the thousands who fled war — an important amount of the “Jungle” residents are now coming from Darfour — or other extremely dire situations, reach new levels with the construction of this wall, which is planned to be dressed with “plants and flowers on one side to reduce its visual impact on the local area” (source: The Guardian).

My arguments on the matter have not changed (see the report of the first trip, as well as of the second one): our position should be less articulated in humanitarian terms than in political ones. The premise of such a position consists in the categorical denial that the situation constitutes a crisis, on the contrary of what is described at length through the press and politician (left and right) speeches. The only crisis there is, is the one displaced persons themselves are experiencing. The second premise of this position is another refusal: one that goes against the collective Western imaginary that consider displaced persons as a negative currency, disincarnated statistics whose winner is the one that gets the least of it. It also turns around the liberal critique: the Calais’ “Jungle” is not a place symptomatic of the lack of action of the French and UK States, which makeshift dwellings never reached a satisfying level of comfort and dignity because of their residents’ lack of skills: it is a place symptomatic of the actual action of the French and UK States, which makeshift dwellings never reached a satisfying level of comfort of dignity because of the way their residents have been consistently prevented to undertake the construction of a proper urban entity. The antagonizing and patronizing aridity of the container camp, and its heavily controlled access (by palm recognition, through turnstiles) appears as the only architecture legitimized by the French State: a space where bodies are treated as mere statistics with only minimum needs, and where they can be controlled spatially. At a time where sulfurous candidate to the presidential primaries of the French Republican party and former President Nicolas Sarkozy affirmed (erroneously) that when one becomes French one’s ancestors becomes the Gauls — a fictitious people as a whole coined by the Roman invaders in the first century B.C. to designate the totality of the nations under Roman domination in the West of the Empire — we might want to use the trivial imaginary he implies (the popular graphic novel series, Asterix) of a Gaul village besieged by Roman invaders to construct a comparison with the situation of Calais’ “Jungle.” The Gauls may not look the way Sarkozy and other French nationalists might think in this case, but they would be well inspired to see in the resistance of this village against the drastic means deployed against them, the legitimacy they have no trouble to romantically attribute to those they believe to be their ancestors.

Map of Calais port in relation to the first so-called “Jungle” (2002-2009) and the ‘new’ one (2009- ) / Numbered dots indicate the location of the photographs below.

 Former so-called “Jungle” between 2002 (after the closure of the refugee camp of Sangatte) and 2009 when it was evicted by the French police.

This photographs shows the Southern part of the “Jungle,” destroyed at the very end of February 2016. Only the Ethiopian church (see below) was speared from demolition (the same cannot be said about the small Abu Bakr mosque) and remains as a testimony of this part of the village.

In the last week, I was lucky enough to present The Funambulist Magazine in Tokyo (October 7 at Vacant) and Hong Kong (October 13 at Kubrick) along with friends Christina Yi and Momoyo Homma on the one hand, and Tings Chak and Sonia Wong on the other (see the two posters at the end of this post). The following recordings were made during these two events but, due to a (classic) mistake of my own, the recordings do not include my own presentation in Tokyo (listen to the HK one instead), nor the first ten minutes of Christina’s presentation; I apologize to her and to you for such a silly mistake.

THE FUNAMBULIST IN TOKYO (OCT. 7, 2016) ///

Christina Yi on her contribution to The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “What’s In the Status? On Resident Koreans in Japan“

Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding “national” and “ethnic minority” literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is currently serving as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow at Waseda University, where she is working on a book manuscript that investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons in East Asia.

Momoyo Homma on her interview in The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “‘We Have Decided Not to Die’: The Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins“

Momoyo Homma is the Director of the Architectural Body Research Foundation (Arakawa + Gins Tokyo office). She studied and graduated from Musashino Art University before moving to Costa Rica in 1993 where she worked as a full-time professor at Casa del Artista (San Jose, Costa Rica). She then worked as an assistant program director, project “Al MARGEN” by ILPES (at that time), San Jose, Costa Rica. After coming back to Japan in 1998, she worked at Caribbean Friendship Association, Promo-Arte Latin American gallery (both Tokyo, Japan). In 2000, she firstly met ARAKAWA, and established ABRF, Inc. in 2002, where she is currently serving as the present post.

Special thanks to Yoshi Tsujimura for organizing, the Vacant Team for hosting.

THE FUNAMBULIST IN HONG KONG (OCT. 13, 2016) ///

Presentation of the form and contents of The Funambulist Magazine by Léopold Lambert.

Tings Chak on her contribution (with Sarah Turnbull) to The Funambulist Magazine 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments: “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.”

Tings Chak is a migrant justice organizer and artist trained in architectural design, whose work draws inspiration from anti-colonial, prison abolition, and spatial justice struggles. She is the author of Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, a graphic novel that grew out of the collective organizing work of End Immigration Detention Network and No One is Illegal – Toronto.

Sonia Wong discussing The Funambulist Magazine.

Sonia Wong is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. Her areas of interest include lesbianism, pornography, identity formation, and sexual subjectivity. She founded Reel Women Hong Kong in 2013, aiming at promoting female-created films and art works, as well as equality and gender awareness in society. Apart from organizing Reel Women Hong Kong Film Festival, her creative endeavors include poetry, short fiction, and visual arts. She has recently published her first bi-lingual poetry collection Unseemingly Lasting with the support of Renaissance Foundation Hong Kong.

Special thanks to Ming Ho for organizing and the rest of the Kubrick team for hosting.

POSTERS & MAGAZINE EXCERPTS ///

Christina Yi, The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “What’s In the Status? On Resident Koreans in Japan“

Interview of Momoyo Homma in The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “‘We Have Decided Not to Die’: The Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins“

Tings Chak and Sarah Turnbull, The Funambulist Magazine 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments: “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.” (excerpt)

I apologize for not having written many articles for the blog in the recent past. I’ll have some new one soon but, in the meantime, here are the first stanzas of a powerful and inspiring poem/play by Aimé Césaire defying the “blue-eyed architect.” The verse “…each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination” could well be used as frontispiece for The Funambulist — as a banner of course, but also as a continuous reminder for its editor, who happens to be a blue-eyed architect!

Aimé Césaire, And the Dogs Were Silent (1958, trans. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith) ///

ECHO: For sure the Rebel is going to Die. Oh, there will be no flags, not even black ones, no gun salutes, no ceremony. It will be very simple, something which in appearance will not change anything, but which will cause coral in the depths of the sea, birds in the depths of the sky, stars in the depths of women’s eyes to crackle for the instant of a tear or the bat of an eyelash.

For sure the Rebel is going to die, the best reason being that there is nothing more to do in this crippled world: upheld and a prisoner of itself… he is going to die as it is written implicitly in wind and in sand by the hooves of wild horses and the loopings of rivers…

Fair game for the morgue, it is not tears which befit you, but the hawks of my fists and my flintlike thoughts, my silent invocation to the gods of disaster

Blue-eyed architect
I defy you

beware architect, for if the Rebel dies it will not be without making everyone aware that you are the constructor of a pestilential world
architect beware

who crowned you? During what night did you exchange compass for dagger?

architect deaf to things, as distinct as a tree but as closed as armor, each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination.

For sure the Rebel’s going to leave the world, your world of rape in which the victim, thanks to you, is an unbaptized brute

architect gateless and starless Orcus without source without orient
architect with a peacock tail a crab scuttle words the blue of mushrooms and steel, beware.

This eighth issue of The Funambulist Magazine, dedicated to the police, can be read in continuity with Issue 04 (March-April 2016), which was focused on carceral environments. Its axiomatic editorial line is resolutely the same: just as there cannot be “better prisons,” there cannot be “better police,” at least not within the logics through which they are currently operating in a majority of the world’s societies. In this regard, the numerous murders of Native and Black bodies by the United States police, the violence of the Apartheid police in Jerusalem against Palestinians, the murderous operations of the Brazilian military police in the favelas, or the legalized abuse of power by the French and Turkish police during ongoing states of emergency; not as “police brutality” that would require reforms but, rather, as the very essence of policing itself, which calls for abolition.

The main dossier opens with a poem about police violence from Palestine to Ferguson written by Palestinian poet Jehan Bseiso. Articles are written by co-editor of Policing the Planet (Verso, 2016) Christina Heatherton, about the “broken windows” doctrine in the United States, doctoral student in Political Geography Sinthujan Varatharajah, about racial profiling in Germany, São Paulo anthropologist Susana Durão, about the ‘redemption’ programs for Brazilian police officers, and an anonymous contributor about the Egyptian police. The long format interview introduces the work of Mathieu Rigouste about the colonial genealogy of the French police from Algeria to the banlieues. The dossier ends with the presentation of two student projects by Whitney Hansley in Oakland and Joséphine Larere in Paris. In the recurrent sections that precede this main dossier, readers will find two edited versions of September blog articles about Calais and Caterpillar bulldozers in Standing Rock and Palestine, the political walk is proposed by Katherine Merriman in Islamic Harlem (New York), while the two guest columns are written by Ather Zia about Kashmir and Nick Estes about Standing Rock. I am extremely thankful to all of them, as well as to the Mapping Inequality team, Hamdi Abu Rahma, Jacob Burns, Dallas Goldtooth, and Jacob Myrick to have accepted to have their maps/photos illustrating these articles.

As usual, the means of purchasing the magazine are listed here:

• Printed + Digital Version (12 euros)
• Digital-Only Version (6 euros)
• Printed + Digital Monthly Subscription (5 euros per month)
• Digital-Only Monthly Subscription (2.50 euros per month)
• Printed + Digital Annual Subscription (60 euros per year for individuals, 200 euros for institutions)
• Find a partner bookstore near you!

If you are a student, you can email a photo of your student ID to info@thefunambulist.net and receive a free digital copy. A new version of the website is also being constructed at the moment and it will soon provide a greater range of options in the way to navigate through the reading and these options. I wish you an excellent reading, hoping that you will like it.

ACCESS THE NEW ISSUE HERE

Dear American Institute of Architects,

I did not think that you’d be the one to make me write down his name for the first time. Like Teju Cole, I thought that never pronouncing his name that he elevated to the rank of brand was the best way to fight him, but we are where are now, and there’s no way around it.

It took only a few hours after the definitive results of the elections for your CEO, Robert Ivy, to issue a statement affirming that the AIA “stand ready to work with him,” and that American architects “should work together to advance policies that help our country move forward.” Retrospectively, I suppose that only the speed with which you issued this statement was the truly surprising thing. After all, you represent a profession that embodies the dominant forms of power to many extents. It is one of the whitest in the United States (91.3% of American architects are white) and that, despite the (too) slow take over of women in architectural schools, white men in particular make ups 74.9% of licensed architects. We cannot necessarily assume that a majority of architects voted for him during these last elections; after all, an important part of them lives in big cities where he was mostly defeated; however, what we know for sure is that the overwhelming majority of bodies that compose this profession are not the ones who are put in great peril by the radicalization of the US administration — not that it was ever easy for them ever since this country was founded as a massive settler colonialist and slavery project.

But the overwhelming whiteness of the architects who you represent is only one aspect of the problem; another one (perhaps much bigger) is the actual product of your profession: architecture. Only a few demagogues might still declare that architecture is not the materialization of politics; nevertheless even more few architects would admit that their discipline is fundamentally violent and remains one the most effective weapons of control and incarceration available for police and military states. Many of your members are already busy displacing Black and Latinx populations from entire neighborhoods constructing buildings which foundations are as much the product of bulldozers as they are of the police. Others dedicate their efforts to host as comfortably as possible the banks and corporations of the 1% like the ones owned by the US President-Elect in shiny inaccessible and secured towers. Some others even participate in the elaboration of the carceral-industrial complex, building jails, prisons, solitary chambers, detention centers and other incarcerating political programs that could never exist without architecture to enforce them. What is more simple for architecture than to materialize four walls around a body?

And that’s where I’m heading to. You want to “work with him”? Well, you will. Architectural programs and their violence such as the ones cited above will indubitably increase, a few of your members will also be consulted in the (re)construction of a heavily militarized wall on the southern border, some others might work in close collaboration with the US army to reinforce its current occupations on foreign lands and start new ones; hell, you might even want create an exchange program with the architects of the Israeli Apartheid in the name of exchange of knowledge for common interests. Finally, some other of your members may be asked to design the carceral architectural typology of the “regrouping camps” (or whatever euphemistic terminology that will be designed to conceal the overwhelming violence of their agenda) for Muslim citizens/residents of the US, which constitutes nothing less than a credible scenario of the politics promised and soon-to-be-engaged by the President-Elect as one of his prominent backer implied two days ago providing the example of Japanese internment camps (see photo above) between 1942 and 1946 as a legitimate precedent (see also this fictitious description of what follows). What will you do then dear AIA? Is there a moment when “too much will be too much?” It does not take a diploma in history or psychology to know that when too much is not too much since the beginning, it will never be. Concentration camps might appear as a fat-fetched scenario at this moment, an alarmist hypothesis that might make us forget about the current actual issues that need to be addressed… but no camp of the kind is ever built without making their implementation appear as unavoidable and logical. The hypothesis of a US explicitly-white-supremacist administration certainly appeared to many of us as a similar improbable far-fetched scenario not such a long time ago, and look where we are now. The events of the present are always judged with the relativity of worse past events and worse hypothetical futures, rendering them acceptable in a twisted negotiation of the mind.

I know your discourse dear AIA. You’re the good guys “changing the system from the inside.” You take part in gentrification to make it less violent, and you only accept to design police stations or prisons to make them a bit more humane. Similarly, you “stand ready to work with him” to change a political program with which you partially disagree “from the inside.” No political programs like the one designed by the new administration can ever be implemented without the active participation of “good guys” like you, AIA and that makes you just as much responsible for them.

Don’t worry AIA, you still have good days coming; the writings of Adolph Loos, Le Corbusier, and Robert Venturi will continued to be taught in architecture schools for a while. They might even soon be joined by those of Michel Écochard, Oscar Newman, and Patrik Schumacher to add precision to the colonial architectures of the future. But, many students and young graduates already understood that they did not want to learn architecture from architects but, rather to learn it through the works of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis and Judith Butler. Those won’t be the architects you’ll want to represent dear AIA and many might even decide to be architects through other ways than design, but ultimately they are the ones who will take you down. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a true revolutionary architecture is an illusion, and architecture will always remain an instrument of power. New institutions like yours, representing updated dominant norms and political agendas, will not take long to emerge, and new smart, talented, bold and young architects will take their turn in organizing the resistance against it. You are doomed dear AIA; the question is whether you will disappear peacefully or, as your statement suggests, will you fully contribute to the United States’ last historical spasm of imperial violence.

Memorial to the 1973 student resistance against the military junta in Athens Polytechnic / Photograph by Léopold Lambert (July 2016)

A little more than two weeks after the U.S. presidential elections, many activists are dedicated to already organize forms of resistance before the new administration begins on January 20, 2017. University students and faculty in particular have pushed their respective institution to become sanctuaries for undocumented students who are likely to face deportation during this new administration (see inventory of the petitions here). In a call for such actions in Dissent, Mae Ngai writes “already, some twenty universities have responded with either full declarations of sanctuary or other declarations that do not use the word sanctuary but pledge non-cooperation with immigration enforcement, specifically prohibiting immigration agents from entering campuses and refusing to share information about students’ status, unless forced by warrants or court order.” Furthermore, Xavier Maciel and Aparna Parikh have assembled a map of these institutions that can be visible by clicking here.

The sanctuarization of campuses operates in parallel of the existing model of sanctuary cities in the United States and Canada that organizes a deliberate refusal of cooperation between municipal actors (including the police) and the federal immigration authorities. In other words, this means that any undocumented resident of such a city can freely practice the city without fearing that an interaction with the police or any other municipal officers eventually leads to their arrest and deportation. The 35 sanctuary cities in the United States are Tucson AZ, Berkeley CA, Coachella CA, Los Angeles CA, Oakland CA, Sacramento CA, Salinas CA, San Francisco CA, San Jose CA, Santa Ana CA, Watsonville CA, Aurora CO, Denver CO, New Haven CT, Washington D.C., Miami FL, Jacksonville FL, Chicago IL, Portland ME, Baltimore MD, Takoma Park MD, Cambridge MA, Chelsea MA, Somerville MA, Detroit MI, Minneapolis MN, New York City NY, Jersey City NJ, Newark NJ, Santa Fe NM, Portland OR, Philadelphia PA, Salt Lake City UT, Burlington VT, Seattle WA. The President-Elect has promised to defund these cities as part of his administration’s program of intimidation.

Although the scale of cities provides a scale that can virtually encompass the entire daily life of some of its residents and that cities seem to more and more embody the future of territorial governance (much more than nation-states), these calls for university campuses to become themselves sanctuaries are interesting in their capacity to mobilize the scale of architecture itself. Religious buildings (and later, embassies) have a long tradition of granting asylum to the bodies present within it. In France, one the key events in the history of violence deployed against undocumented bodies is to be found in the summer of 1996 when 1,500 police officers besieged the church Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, where 300 people had seek refuge for more than two months. Regardless of the fact that the church’s priest had authorized the precarious residents to stay in it and that no judge had legitimized the assault and arrest of people inside the church, the Minister of the Interior Jean-Louis Debré ordered this siege.

(left) Activists trying in vain to prevent the police from accessing the church Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle on August 23, 1996. (right) Main page of newspaper Liberation the next day quoting ironically the Minister of the Interior’s characterization of the siege saying that the police was treating undocumented arrested people with “humanity and heartily.”

In order to think of the application of the protection that religious buildings can grant (precariously as we can see) to university campuses and to extend this protection from undocumented persons to all students and faculty targeted by a given regime, we can think of the various historical armed interventions against campuses. For instance, the images of arrests of over 200 students of the University of Tehran in the 2009 Green Revolution is still fresh in our minds. In the United States, one of the key images of the suppression of the Occupy movement in 2011 was to be found in the cold and methodical use of pepper spray by police officers on the campus of the University of California in Davis (see the video). This intervention of the campus recalled an even more brutal one in another branch of the University of California, in Berkeley in 1969 when an helicopter from the National Guard (deployed on order by Governor Ronald Reagan who declared the state of emergency in Berkeley on May 15, 1969) dropped airborne teargas on the campus the day before a memorial for James Rector, a student killed by the police when defending People’s Park.

Students of the University of Tehran defending themselves against the police, then later against the Basij militia on June 14, 2009.

National Guard helicopter dropping teargas against student activists on the University of California campus in Berkeley on May 20, 1969.

Nevertheless, the historical event that arguably encompasses the most the issues related to organizing, defending, and sanctuarizing university campuses consists in the 1973 uprising of Greek students in the Polytechnic University and the subsequent piece of legislation that followed it. On November 14, 1973 students went on strike in resistance to the US-backed military junta ruling Greece since 1967. Three days later, the university was besieged by the army and a tank deliberately crashed into the entrance grid of the campus on which students were clinging. Although a later investigation affirmed that no one died on the campus, the army killed twenty-four students that night. The destroyed grid was kept as a memorial on the campus (see photo above) in order to commemorate the student resistance that contributed to end the rule of the junta half-a-year later. In 1982, considering the students’ political role against the military dictatorship, a piece of legislation was voted to grant Greek universities the ability to constitute themselves as sanctuary, preventing the police and, a fortiori, the army to penetrate on their campuses. The Polytechnic University campus itself was used numerous times as a sanctuary for its direct proximity to the neighborhood of Exarcheia, where many anarchist organizations — some of which took on themselves to organize the hospitality of displaced people from the Middle-East and East-Africa in the recent months — present in many anti-governmental demonstrations and regularly chased by the police. The law was however annulled during the George Papandreou administration in 2011 to allow the intervention of the police on campuses against demonstrators.

The Polytechnic campus and its entrance grid (right) destroyed by a tank of the military junta in 1973.

The various photographs illustrating this article show it to whom wants to read them: architecture cannot be neutral when it comes to the defensible space of sanctuaries. Campuses do not provide the same conditions for political resistance depending on the way they operate spatially and they interact with their environment. Although urban campuses designed to function against the rest of the city, or in fear of the city — we can think of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles or the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for instance — may appear at first glance as the ideal ones to materialize the limits of the bastion that a sanctuary should be, the securitarian logic of their architectures can only be reversed with great difficulty since this logic obeys to an hyper-rationalization that gives always an advantage to dominant forces, in particular when they were involved in the design of this architecture. Urban campuses are however arguably the most susceptible to provide the conditions of defense proportionally to the degree with which the campus is integrated within its neighborhood, rather than existing against it. Such an integration not only provide local solidarity; it also offers alternative access points and flight possibilities.

Although the narrative of a frontal siege of a university by the police as the historical examples presented here may appear as the most violent and spectacular attack that can be lead against the sanctuaries that universities can embody — depending on the geographical/legal context, these attacks occurs relatively often — it illustrates well how architecture should be embraced as a political weapon to serve political programs resisting the dominant ones. Thinking of architecture politically through the spectrum of appeased modes of existence might appear at first as the way to use this discipline for better use than conventional programs, but such a vision is dangerous in the way it refuses to see the forces of domination against some bodies contextualizing and, more often than not, materialized into architecture. It remains more than ever my conviction that the only appropriate architectural answer facing these forces is to deliberately embrace architecture’s intrinsic violence to serve, as one of many other disciplines, the forms of resistance against them.

Black and Puerto Rican students barricading the entrances of the City College of New York (Harlem) in 1969 to demand the admission of more students of color.

This last week, about 60,000 people had to flee from their homes in Haifa as forest fires were reaching the city outskirts. With the help of several countries’ firefighter crews (including four Palestinian ones), the Israeli firefighters now seem to have gained control of the fires. During the same week, about a dozen of smaller fires started in forests across the country, recalling to a lesser degree the situation in 2010, when a massive wildfire had burnt Mount Carmel (South of Haifa) and killed 44 people. Members of the Israeli government including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were quick on their feet to accuse Palestinian living in Israel (citizens deprived of the recognition of their Palestinian-ness) to have triggered these fires and they promised severe punishment for the accused supposed arsonists, describing “new forms of terrorism,” and suggesting stripping the accused’s citizenships and destroying their family homes (for more on the collective punishment that home demolitions constitute, see my article about it in the new issue of The Funambulist Magazine). The fact that the Israeli government intends to systematically blame Palestinians for every problems of the Israeli society, in particular when it is being accused of unpreparedness, should not surprise us. This article does not even intend to debunk these accusations and, on the contrary, even accepts them in order to fundamentally deny to the Israeli forests the status of natural innocence that the Zionist narrative pretends that they embody.

(below) Jewish National Fund money-collecting blue boxes: before 1948 to buy land in Palestine, after 1948 to grow forests in Israel.

As described in a previous article entitled “Make the Desert Bloom: Manufacturing the Israeli Territory/Narrative,” in order to understand the political role of the Israeli forests, one must study the history of the organization in charge of planting and maintaining them: the Jewish National Fund (JNF). It is a non-governmental organization controlled by the World Zionist Organization that, until the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, had been collecting money (thanks to small money boxes like the ones shown below) within the worldwide Jewish diaspora during the first half of the 20th century, in order to buy as many parcels of land as possible from the Palestinian farmers and landowners. In the three last months of the British Mandate on Palestine in May 1948, various Zionists paramilitary groups started besieging Palestinian villages, subsequently evicting and destroying them. This process of systematic and massive dispossession, displacement and destruction continued after May during the war that was claimed to legitimize the creation of the State of Israel on a large part of Palestine. 800,000 Palestinians (about half of the Palestinian population back then) thus became refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without any possibility to return to their villages and towns. As described many times on this blog, the successive Israeli governments’ strategy in order to manufacture a national narrative that does not include the massive and systematic violence that the Nakba actually constituted, consisted in minimizing and concealing the past presence of the Palestinian people on the land claimed by the State of Israel. The ruins of the evicted and destroyed Palestinian villages were thus demolished in the 1950s and in some instances, forest planted by the JNF were grown on their past location (like in Lubya as showed in the film The Village under the Forest by Mark J Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum). The double-story that a ruin is, by definition, able to unfold (the assertion of its past existence and the marks of its slow or accelerated destruction) was thus denied to the Palestinian narrative, thus adding an additional layer of dispossessive violence to the Zionist enterprise.

(above) Ruin remains of the villages of Bayyarat Hannun (left) and Yibna (right) / Excerpts of the book Les Absents (2016) by Bruno Fert.
(below) JNF’s largest forest, Birya before (1953) and after its plantation (2008)

Concealing the last remains of Palestinian ruins and, through them, the narrative they carried, was however not the only political aim of these newly grown forests. One of the important reasons that some Israeli forests are currently burning is that these forests are made of pine trees, well-known for their high degree of inflammability, in particular in a very dry environment as the climate in Palestine provides. The reason this type of trees were planted, rather than more vernacular species insists on the Ashkenazim dominating part of the Zionist imaginary.  The implementation of pine trees in Israel contributes to provide a visual representation of the Israeli claim of “exceptionalism” in the region, and was meant to appear as an extension of Europe (the Swiss mountains are often cited as an example) in a geographical context that the 19th-century orientalists had mostly described as arid and deserted — Palestine was more often described through its southern desert than through its northern continuity of the Lebanese and Golan fertile lands. Moreover, settler colonialism has yet to find a better way to assert and implement itself than through its usual operations of geoengineering that claim land in imposing a control on it.

(above) JNF “Tree Center” website inciting the Jewish diaspora to fund the planting of a tree for various occasions.
(below) The aforestation of the Negev desert: the Zionist imaginary of “making the desert bloom” at work / Excerpt of The Erasure Trilogy (2015) by photographer Fazal Sheikh

Whether some Palestinians actually contributed to the current fires — couldn’t it be arguably seen as a form of non-violent resistance as they are hypocritically encouraged to undertake by Western nations? — or it was instead the ghosts of the Nakba, as friend Karim Kattan suggests in an forthcoming novel, the current fires of Israeli forests cannot be read in the apolitical understanding of natural disasters (the further question being, do natural disasters still exist anywhere?) but, rather through the prism of Palestine’s political history. In this regard, it is hard not to appreciate the symbol of olive trees growing in the dead trunk of pine trees unfit for the climate in which they were forced to grow, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006). Through this specific symbol and the fires, we should perhaps refrain (however tempting it might be) from the idea of a natural order that would refuse to leave unpunished operations that challenged it but, rather, think that the depoliticization of what they represent fundamentally reinforces the dominant narrative. If we are to accept the newly defined paradigm of the so-called “anthropocene” (regardless of the ironic anthropocentrism and chronocentrism it constitutes), we need to refuse to be moralist ‘tree-huggers’ that consider the conventional forms of “nature” in a complete denial of the political reasons that brought them to existence. As always when it comes to thinking of the future of Palestine, we should refrain from nostalgia and, as such, we should not make the mistake of thinking than burning all the forests planted by the JNF and thus going back to a supposedly original flora would end the apartheid implemented through the Zionist project. However, when we see a pine tree burning in Israel, we can certainly distinguish a tiny part of this project burning through it. What we construct with the ashes is up to us.

The Funambulist presents:

A conversation centered around the issues discussed in various issues of The Funambulist which articulates a critical discourse about the politics of the designed/built environment in relation to the bodies.

Featuring Ana Naomi de Sousa, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Sarah Turnbull, Mohamed Elshahed and Léopold Lambert.

MOHAMED ELSHAHED, editor of Cairobserver, contributor to issue 1: Militarized Cities with the text “Cairo: Militarized Landscape.”
SARAH TURNBULL, criminologist, contributor to issue 4: Carceral Environments with the piece coauthored with Tings Chak “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.”
SINTHUJAN VARATHARAJAH, PhD student in political geography, contributor to issue 5: Design & Racism with the text “The Keys to Return,” and issue 8: Police with the text “Racial Profiling: Between Legal Actions and State Recognition.”
ANA NAOMI DE SOUSA, documentary filmmaker and journalist, contributor to issue 10: Architecture & Colonialism with a “political walk” in London at night.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, architect, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist.

This event is hosted by Float PR at the ACE Hotel (Ace Hotel: 100 Shoreditch High Street, London). RSVP on Facebook if you’d like

The photographic series analyzing the architecture of police stations in the Paris banlieues as representative and reinforcing force of the degree of antagonism from the police to the residents of a given municipality continues here, as well as in the current issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to the police.

The photographs and map presented here attempt to show that architecture also constitutes both a symbolic and real weapon for reinforcing the sustained antagonism developed by the police against the banlieue youth. In the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris and the western, white, middle-class banlieues, the architecture of police stations is mostly divided between heritage buildings or new, relatively transparent, and welcoming buildings. Conversely, in the northeastern and southern banlieues, where working-class and racialized neighborhoods are the most common, the architecture of the police stations, and in particular those built since the 2005 revolt, attests to and enables the police’s (and by extension, the State’s) antagonism towards the neighboring residents.

The most recently built police stations attempt to present themselves as authored works, designed by architecture offices that also build libraries, schools, housing, etc. However, the cultured aspect of these stations fails to hide their capacity to respond to the potentiality of a “siege” undertaken against them, in the police’s fantasy of a conflict that would involve no restraint. These stations’ ground floors do not have any windows, or when they do, they echo medieval arrow slits; the walls sometimes present various degrees of inclination, a well-known technique by 17th-century fortress architects; the entry sequences are controlled and uninviting; and the sidewalks in front of their entrances are made inaccessible to vehicles through the presence of metallic cones and furniture. The fact that the architecture offices that designed these police stations and, as such, contributed to the police infrastructure of the city do not necessarily advertise on their website such a contribution — to the notable exception of XTU, that proudly displays its design for the Plaine Saint-Denis police station on the first page of its website — can be reasonably interpreted as a partial understanding of their responsibility.

The following photographs are accompanied by the average income in the concerned municipality and the correlation between this number and the aggressiveness of the corresponding police station’s architecture is striking. For information, the annual minimum salary for a full-time activity is 13,500 euros (also the average income in Aubervilliers, La Courneuve, Stains and Garges-les-Gonesse). This series is a work-in-progress and will soon be augmented by more photographs illustrating the varying degree of weaponization of architecture depending on the municipality, its residents, and their average income.

All map and photographs by Léopold Lambert (2015-2016) licenced under a creative commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license ///

Map: Inventory of the Police stations in the Paris metropolitan area (limits of “Grand Paris” are the dashed white line). The numbers refer to the photographs below, to the exception of Mantes-la-Jolie, 20Km West out of the map.

01/ Police station of Massy (Essonne). Average income per year: 22,000 euros.

02/ Police station of Antony (Hauts-de-Seine). Average income per year: 28,500 euros.

03/ Police station of Châtenay-Malabry (Hauts-de-Seine). Average income per year: 23,000 euros.

04/ Police station of Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine). Average income per year: 18,000 euros.

05/ Police Station of Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine). Average income per year: 26,000 euros.

06/ Police station of Vanves (Hauts-de-Seine). Average income per year: 27,000 euros.

07/ Police station of Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis). Average income per year: 21,000 euros.

08/ Police station of Noisy-le-Sec (Seine-Saint-Denis): Average income per year: 16,000 euros.

09/ Police station of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis). Average income per year: 14,000 euros.

10/ Police station of Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis). Average income per year: 13,500 euros.

11/ Police station of (La Plaine) Saint Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis). Average income per year: 14,500 euros.

12/ Police station of La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis): Average income per year: 13,500 euros.

13/ Police station of Stains (Seine-Saint-Denis). Average income per year: 13,500 euros.

14/ Police station of Garges-les-Gonesse (Val d’Oise). Average income per year: 13,500 euros.

15/ Police station of Villiers-le-Bel (Val d’Oise). Average income per year: 14,000 euros.

16/ Police station of Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines). Average income per year: 15,500 euros.

My dear liberal friends,

I know; the term “liberal” probably worries you already, as it is generally used by people who think that your political positions (or the lack thereof) are either too “politically correct” (understand, respectful of others) or not “radical” enough. This tension from two sides is probably from where you proudly think of yourselves as the “balanced ones.” Balance as the eternal middle-point, always depending on the two “extreme” tropes, regardless of what the center of this tension may stand for. But I’m not here to attack you here, I “come in peace,” a notion that is particularly dear to your heart, as we’ll talk further. I am writing to you as it is my conviction that, for better of for worse, an important part of the future of Palestine will depend on you in the next decade or two. Of course, the actual “future of Palestine” belongs to Palestinians themselves (including the Palestinian Jews we currently call “Israelis”), but the conditions in which they’d be able to seize it depend partially on the extents of what you will be able to imagine, since you are indubitably a main actor in the construction of the collective imaginary of our societies.

Your vision of the situation in Palestine (understand the historical region in its entirety) has been driven by decades of symmetrical descriptions of it, opposing two homogeneous and equal camps. You have been reading the New York Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, or Haaretz for years and these newspapers provided a narrative that fit well with your desire for balance. It acknowledged the violence of the Israeli colonization of Gaza (before 2005), the West Bank, and sometimes in Jerusalem, but also recognizes to Israel “the right to defend itself” against the very handy notion of “terrorism” that can accommodate many things. It made you dislike the word “Zionism,” but it also made you wonder whether anti-Zionism and antisemitism are indistinct ideologies. But, let’s not make a caricature of yourself my dear liberal friends; you may very well have seen by yourself the colonial apparatuses at work in Palestine, or you might even live there if you are Israeli, and you might even call yourself “pro-Palestinian” (as if what was involved was a football game) in conversations or on social media. Your favorite drawing is then the four successive maps that show the drastic reduction of Palestinian land since the 1947 designed-to-fail UN partition plan and the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, to the few ‘islands’ left to the Palestinians after the 1993 Oslo Accords. One date in particular founds your indignation: 1967, when the Israeli army invaded the West Bank, East-Jerusalem, Gaza (as well as the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights). This army invasion relates to many others for you and the subsequent civil colonization that followed it is also simple for you to uncompromisingly condemn. This is why, a few days ago, you were happy to hear that the United Nations Security Council had voted Resolution 2334, condemning the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East-Jerusalem despite the attempts of the US President-Elect to avoid this vote, originally proposed by Egypt. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy too; such a condemnation was the result of decades of Palestinian activism in general, and of the BDS campaign in particular these recent years. It was also a courageous act of defiance against diplomatic bullying from the governments of New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal, which sponsored the resolution after the Sisi government withdrew it.

However, it is my conviction (as well as many others’, of course) that we should also refuse one aspect of the narrative reinforced by this resolution: the crystallization of the “1967 borders” (i.e. the borders between Israel and Jordan-and-Egypt-administered Palestinian territories from 1949 until the 1967 invasion) and the subsequent so-called “two-state solution” that emerges from their fetichization. Despite their role in the establishment of Zionism and the massive land expropriation from Palestinians farmers that they constitute, the settlements paradoxically might be the most useful obstacle to the creation of a skimpy Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Their condemnation (and the potential eviction that could virtually follow) by many governments, in particular Western ones, should therefore be interpreted as one of the necessary steps towards the creation of such a state, which would constitute for them the achievement of what they call “the peace process.” This notion of “peace” pleases you, dear liberal friends and, quite frankly, there is no absolute reason to blame you for it, but its invocation may blind you from the fact that there is no war in Palestine, ‘simply’ the administrative and military establishment of a racial hierarchy that we call apartheid. This apartheid is not merely segregating two essential groups that we call “Israelis” and “Palestinians” (or sometimes, even more erroneously, Jews and Muslims), since 1.7 million (20%) of Israeli passport holders are Palestinians, that the statuses of a Palestinian Jerusalemite or a member of the Palestinian Authority in, say Ramallah, is hardly comparable to the status of a permitless resident of Hebron’s old city, and even less so with a Palestinian refugee who lived all their life in a camp in Gaza or in Lebanon, and that the Jewish part of the Israeli society itself is divided in religious factions and, at a less official level, also experiences forms of structural racism — against the 700,000 Mizrahi or the 150,000 Ethiopian Israeli citizens for instance. This complexity, proper to any form of coloniality that always categorizes and hierarchizes bodies, is one of the main reason for a Palestinian state to bring nothing but the crystallization and relative retroactive legitimization of the violence of the Nakba in 1948, in particular when it comes to the denial of return for the 5 millions of Palestinian refugees of Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Furthermore, the accession for Palestinians to any state-like institutions has never prevented the Israeli army from mobilizing its arsenal against them whether in Gaza or in the West Bank — we can recall the siege on the Mukataa in Ramallah in 2002 for instance — but, on the contrary, allowed to establish a self-centered political and economic Palestinian elite that is keen to see itself ruling this small state rather than facing its responsibilities after the end of the apartheid.

In conclusion, dear liberal friends, I am inviting you to refrain from your usual “you’re dreaming!” or “it will never happen” that usually characterize your response to this vision when we describe it to you. On the contrary, see how simple it would be for the apartheid to end from a technical standpoint since it would replace the complex colonial categorization and hierarchization of bodies by the absolute equality of their rights — including in the right to return, about which the State of Israel proves everyday its simplicity by attributing the citizenship to all Jewish person who would like to ask for it. Not to give you too much importance dear liberal friends, but it seems that the realization of this simple vision depends on whether you’ll choose to believe in it or not.

Map above: fragment of one of the “Excavated Objects from a Post-Apartheid Palestine,” Léopold Lambert (2015-2016).

In the last week, I was lucky enough to present The Funambulist Magazine in Tokyo (October 7 at Vacant) and Hong Kong (October 13 at Kubrick) along with friends Christina Yi and Momoyo Homma on the one hand, and Tings Chak and Sonia Wong on the other (see the two posters at the end of this post). The following recordings were made during these two events but, due to a (classic) mistake of my own, the recordings do not include my own presentation in Tokyo (listen to the HK one instead), nor the first ten minutes of Christina’s presentation; I apologize to her and to you for such a silly mistake.

THE FUNAMBULIST IN TOKYO (OCT. 7, 2016) ///

Christina Yi on her contribution to The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “What’s In the Status? On Resident Koreans in Japan“

Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding “national” and “ethnic minority” literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is currently serving as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow at Waseda University, where she is working on a book manuscript that investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons in East Asia.

Momoyo Homma on her interview in The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “‘We Have Decided Not to Die’: The Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins“

Momoyo Homma is the Director of the Architectural Body Research Foundation (Arakawa + Gins Tokyo office). She studied and graduated from Musashino Art University before moving to Costa Rica in 1993 where she worked as a full-time professor at Casa del Artista (San Jose, Costa Rica). She then worked as an assistant program director, project “Al MARGEN” by ILPES (at that time), San Jose, Costa Rica. After coming back to Japan in 1998, she worked at Caribbean Friendship Association, Promo-Arte Latin American gallery (both Tokyo, Japan). In 2000, she firstly met ARAKAWA, and established ABRF, Inc. in 2002, where she is currently serving as the present post.

Special thanks to Yoshi Tsujimura for organizing, the Vacant Team for hosting.

THE FUNAMBULIST IN HONG KONG (OCT. 13, 2016) ///

Presentation of the form and contents of The Funambulist Magazine by Léopold Lambert.

Tings Chak on her contribution (with Sarah Turnbull) to The Funambulist Magazine 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments: “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.”

Tings Chak is a migrant justice organizer and artist trained in architectural design, whose work draws inspiration from anti-colonial, prison abolition, and spatial justice struggles. She is the author of Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, a graphic novel that grew out of the collective organizing work of End Immigration Detention Network and No One is Illegal – Toronto.

Sonia Wong discussing The Funambulist Magazine.

Sonia Wong is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. Her areas of interest include lesbianism, pornography, identity formation, and sexual subjectivity. She founded Reel Women Hong Kong in 2013, aiming at promoting female-created films and art works, as well as equality and gender awareness in society. Apart from organizing Reel Women Hong Kong Film Festival, her creative endeavors include poetry, short fiction, and visual arts. She has recently published her first bi-lingual poetry collection Unseemingly Lasting with the support of Renaissance Foundation Hong Kong.

Special thanks to Ming Ho for organizing and the rest of the Kubrick team for hosting.

POSTERS & MAGAZINE EXCERPTS ///

Christina Yi, The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “What’s In the Status? On Resident Koreans in Japan“

Interview of Momoyo Homma in The Funambulist Magazine 07 (Sept-Oct. 2016) Health Struggles: “‘We Have Decided Not to Die’: The Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins“

Tings Chak and Sarah Turnbull, The Funambulist Magazine 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments: “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.” (excerpt)

The post Audio Recordings of the Presentations of The Funambulist in Tokyo and Hong Kong appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

I apologize for not having written many articles for the blog in the recent past. I’ll have some new one soon but, in the meantime, here are the first stanzas of a powerful and inspiring poem/play by Aimé Césaire defying the “blue-eyed architect.” The verse “…each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination” could well be used as frontispiece for The Funambulist — as a banner of course, but also as a continuous reminder for its editor, who happens to be a blue-eyed architect!

Aimé Césaire, And the Dogs Were Silent (1958, trans. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith) ///

ECHO: For sure the Rebel is going to Die. Oh, there will be no flags, not even black ones, no gun salutes, no ceremony. It will be very simple, something which in appearance will not change anything, but which will cause coral in the depths of the sea, birds in the depths of the sky, stars in the depths of women’s eyes to crackle for the instant of a tear or the bat of an eyelash.

For sure the Rebel is going to die, the best reason being that there is nothing more to do in this crippled world: upheld and a prisoner of itself… he is going to die as it is written implicitly in wind and in sand by the hooves of wild horses and the loopings of rivers…

Fair game for the morgue, it is not tears which befit you, but the hawks of my fists and my flintlike thoughts, my silent invocation to the gods of disaster

Blue-eyed architect
I defy you

beware architect, for if the Rebel dies it will not be without making everyone aware that you are the constructor of a pestilential world
architect beware

who crowned you? During what night did you exchange compass for dagger?

architect deaf to things, as distinct as a tree but as closed as armor, each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination.

For sure the Rebel’s going to leave the world, your world of rape in which the victim, thanks to you, is an unbaptized brute

architect gateless and starless Orcus without source without orient
architect with a peacock tail a crab scuttle words the blue of mushrooms and steel, beware.

The post “Blue-Eyed Architect, I Defy You.” appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

This eighth issue of The Funambulist Magazine, dedicated to the police, can be read in continuity with Issue 04 (March-April 2016), which was focused on carceral environments. Its axiomatic editorial line is resolutely the same: just as there cannot be “better prisons,” there cannot be “better police,” at least not within the logics through which they are currently operating in a majority of the world’s societies. In this regard, the numerous murders of Native and Black bodies by the United States police, the violence of the Apartheid police in Jerusalem against Palestinians, the murderous operations of the Brazilian military police in the favelas, or the legalized abuse of power by the French and Turkish police during ongoing states of emergency; not as “police brutality” that would require reforms but, rather, as the very essence of policing itself, which calls for abolition.

The main dossier opens with a poem about police violence from Palestine to Ferguson written by Palestinian poet Jehan Bseiso. Articles are written by co-editor of Policing the Planet (Verso, 2016) Christina Heatherton, about the “broken windows” doctrine in the United States, doctoral student in Political Geography Sinthujan Varatharajah, about racial profiling in Germany, São Paulo anthropologist Susana Durão, about the ‘redemption’ programs for Brazilian police officers, and an anonymous contributor about the Egyptian police. The long format interview introduces the work of Mathieu Rigouste about the colonial genealogy of the French police from Algeria to the banlieues. The dossier ends with the presentation of two student projects by Whitney Hansley in Oakland and Joséphine Larere in Paris. In the recurrent sections that precede this main dossier, readers will find two edited versions of September blog articles about Calais and Caterpillar bulldozers in Standing Rock and Palestine, the political walk is proposed by Katherine Merriman in Islamic Harlem (New York), while the two guest columns are written by Ather Zia about Kashmir and Nick Estes about Standing Rock. I am extremely thankful to all of them, as well as to the Mapping Inequality team, Hamdi Abu Rahma, Jacob Burns, Dallas Goldtooth, and Jacob Myrick to have accepted to have their maps/photos illustrating these articles.

As usual, the means of purchasing the magazine are listed here:

• Printed + Digital Version (12 euros)
• Digital-Only Version (6 euros)
• Printed + Digital Monthly Subscription (5 euros per month)
• Digital-Only Monthly Subscription (2.50 euros per month)
• Printed + Digital Annual Subscription (60 euros per year for individuals, 200 euros for institutions)
• Find a partner bookstore near you!

If you are a student, you can email a photo of your student ID to info@thefunambulist.net and receive a free digital copy. A new version of the website is also being constructed at the moment and it will soon provide a greater range of options in the way to navigate through the reading and these options. I wish you an excellent reading, hoping that you will like it.

ACCESS THE NEW ISSUE HERE

The post The Funambulist Magazine 08 (Nov-Dec. 2016): POLICE Is Now Published appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Dear American Institute of Architects,

I did not think that you’d be the one to make me write down his name for the first time. Like Teju Cole, I thought that never pronouncing his name that he elevated to the rank of brand was the best way to fight him, but we are where are now, and there’s no way around it.

It took only a few hours after the definitive results of the elections for your CEO, Robert Ivy, to issue a statement affirming that the AIA “stand ready to work with him,” and that American architects “should work together to advance policies that help our country move forward.” Retrospectively, I suppose that only the speed with which you issued this statement was the truly surprising thing. After all, you represent a profession that embodies the dominant forms of power to many extents. It is one of the whitest in the United States (91.3% of American architects are white) and that, despite the (too) slow take over of women in architectural schools, white men in particular make ups 74.9% of licensed architects. We cannot necessarily assume that a majority of architects voted for him during these last elections; after all, an important part of them lives in big cities where he was mostly defeated; however, what we know for sure is that the overwhelming majority of bodies that compose this profession are not the ones who are put in great peril by the radicalization of the US administration — not that it was ever easy for them ever since this country was founded as a massive settler colonialist and slavery project.

But the overwhelming whiteness of the architects who you represent is only one aspect of the problem; another one (perhaps much bigger) is the actual product of your profession: architecture. Only a few demagogues might still declare that architecture is not the materialization of politics; nevertheless even more few architects would admit that their discipline is fundamentally violent and remains one the most effective weapons of control and incarceration available for police and military states. Many of your members are already busy displacing Black and Latinx populations from entire neighborhoods constructing buildings which foundations are as much the product of bulldozers as they are of the police. Others dedicate their efforts to host as comfortably as possible the banks and corporations of the 1% like the ones owned by the US President-Elect in shiny inaccessible and secured towers. Some others even participate in the elaboration of the carceral-industrial complex, building jails, prisons, solitary chambers, detention centers and other incarcerating political programs that could never exist without architecture to enforce them. What is more simple for architecture than to materialize four walls around a body?

And that’s where I’m heading to. You want to “work with him”? Well, you will. Architectural programs and their violence such as the ones cited above will indubitably increase, a few of your members will also be consulted in the (re)construction of a heavily militarized wall on the southern border, some others might work in close collaboration with the US army to reinforce its current occupations on foreign lands and start new ones; hell, you might even want create an exchange program with the architects of the Israeli Apartheid in the name of exchange of knowledge for common interests. Finally, some other of your members may be asked to design the carceral architectural typology of the “regrouping camps” (or whatever euphemistic terminology that will be designed to conceal the overwhelming violence of their agenda) for Muslim citizens/residents of the US, which constitutes nothing less than a credible scenario of the politics promised and soon-to-be-engaged by the President-Elect as one of his prominent backer implied two days ago providing the example of Japanese internment camps (see photo above) between 1942 and 1946 as a legitimate precedent (see also this fictitious description of what follows). What will you do then dear AIA? Is there a moment when “too much will be too much?” It does not take a diploma in history or psychology to know that when too much is not too much since the beginning, it will never be. Concentration camps might appear as a fat-fetched scenario at this moment, an alarmist hypothesis that might make us forget about the current actual issues that need to be addressed… but no camp of the kind is ever built without making their implementation appear as unavoidable and logical. The hypothesis of a US explicitly-white-supremacist administration certainly appeared to many of us as a similar improbable far-fetched scenario not such a long time ago, and look where we are now. The events of the present are always judged with the relativity of worse past events and worse hypothetical futures, rendering them acceptable in a twisted negotiation of the mind.

I know your discourse dear AIA. You’re the good guys “changing the system from the inside.” You take part in gentrification to make it less violent, and you only accept to design police stations or prisons to make them a bit more humane. Similarly, you “stand ready to work with him” to change a political program with which you partially disagree “from the inside.” No political programs like the one designed by the new administration can ever be implemented without the active participation of “good guys” like you, AIA and that makes you just as much responsible for them.

Don’t worry AIA, you still have good days coming; the writings of Adolph Loos, Le Corbusier, and Robert Venturi will continued to be taught in architecture schools for a while. They might even soon be joined by those of Michel Écochard, Oscar Newman, and Patrik Schumacher to add precision to the colonial architectures of the future. But, many students and young graduates already understood that they did not want to learn architecture from architects but, rather to learn it through the works of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis and Judith Butler. Those won’t be the architects you’ll want to represent dear AIA and many might even decide to be architects through other ways than design, but ultimately they are the ones who will take you down. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a true revolutionary architecture is an illusion, and architecture will always remain an instrument of power. New institutions like yours, representing updated dominant norms and political agendas, will not take long to emerge, and new smart, talented, bold and young architects will take their turn in organizing the resistance against it. You are doomed dear AIA; the question is whether you will disappear peacefully or, as your statement suggests, will you fully contribute to the United States’ last historical spasm of imperial violence.

The post Dear American Institute of Architects, This Is What You May Need to Build for Trump appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Memorial to the 1973 student resistance against the military junta in Athens Polytechnic / Photograph by Léopold Lambert (July 2016)

A little more than two weeks after the U.S. presidential elections, many activists are dedicated to already organize forms of resistance before the new administration begins on January 20, 2017. University students and faculty in particular have pushed their respective institution to become sanctuaries for undocumented students who are likely to face deportation during this new administration (see inventory of the petitions here). In a call for such actions in Dissent, Mae Ngai writes “already, some twenty universities have responded with either full declarations of sanctuary or other declarations that do not use the word sanctuary but pledge non-cooperation with immigration enforcement, specifically prohibiting immigration agents from entering campuses and refusing to share information about students’ status, unless forced by warrants or court order.” Furthermore, Xavier Maciel and Aparna Parikh have assembled a map of these institutions that can be visible by clicking here.

The sanctuarization of campuses operates in parallel of the existing model of sanctuary cities in the United States and Canada that organizes a deliberate refusal of cooperation between municipal actors (including the police) and the federal immigration authorities. In other words, this means that any undocumented resident of such a city can freely practice the city without fearing that an interaction with the police or any other municipal officers eventually leads to their arrest and deportation. The 35 sanctuary cities in the United States are Tucson AZ, Berkeley CA, Coachella CA, Los Angeles CA, Oakland CA, Sacramento CA, Salinas CA, San Francisco CA, San Jose CA, Santa Ana CA, Watsonville CA, Aurora CO, Denver CO, New Haven CT, Washington D.C., Miami FL, Jacksonville FL, Chicago IL, Portland ME, Baltimore MD, Takoma Park MD, Cambridge MA, Chelsea MA, Somerville MA, Detroit MI, Minneapolis MN, New York City NY, Jersey City NJ, Newark NJ, Santa Fe NM, Portland OR, Philadelphia PA, Salt Lake City UT, Burlington VT, Seattle WA. The President-Elect has promised to defund these cities as part of his administration’s program of intimidation.

Although the scale of cities provides a scale that can virtually encompass the entire daily life of some of its residents and that cities seem to more and more embody the future of territorial governance (much more than nation-states), these calls for university campuses to become themselves sanctuaries are interesting in their capacity to mobilize the scale of architecture itself. Religious buildings (and later, embassies) have a long tradition of granting asylum to the bodies present within it. In France, one the key events in the history of violence deployed against undocumented bodies is to be found in the summer of 1996 when 1,500 police officers besieged the church Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, where 300 people had seek refuge for more than two months. Regardless of the fact that the church’s priest had authorized the precarious residents to stay in it and that no judge had legitimized the assault and arrest of people inside the church, the Minister of the Interior Jean-Louis Debré ordered this siege.

(left) Activists trying in vain to prevent the police from accessing the church Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle on August 23, 1996. (right) Main page of newspaper Liberation the next day quoting ironically the Minister of the Interior’s characterization of the siege saying that the police was treating undocumented arrested people with “humanity and heartily.”

In order to think of the application of the protection that religious buildings can grant (precariously as we can see) to university campuses and to extend this protection from undocumented persons to all students and faculty targeted by a given regime, we can think of the various historical armed interventions against campuses. For instance, the images of arrests of over 200 students of the University of Tehran in the 2009 Green Revolution is still fresh in our minds. In the United States, one of the key images of the suppression of the Occupy movement in 2011 was to be found in the cold and methodical use of pepper spray by police officers on the campus of the University of California in Davis (see the video). This intervention of the campus recalled an even more brutal one in another branch of the University of California, in Berkeley in 1969 when an helicopter from the National Guard (deployed on order by Governor Ronald Reagan who declared the state of emergency in Berkeley on May 15, 1969) dropped airborne teargas on the campus the day before a memorial for James Rector, a student killed by the police when defending People’s Park.

Students of the University of Tehran defending themselves against the police, then later against the Basij militia on June 14, 2009.

National Guard helicopter dropping teargas against student activists on the University of California campus in Berkeley on May 20, 1969.

Nevertheless, the historical event that arguably encompasses the most the issues related to organizing, defending, and sanctuarizing university campuses consists in the 1973 uprising of Greek students in the Polytechnic University and the subsequent piece of legislation that followed it. On November 14, 1973 students went on strike in resistance to the US-backed military junta ruling Greece since 1967. Three days later, the university was besieged by the army and a tank deliberately crashed into the entrance grid of the campus on which students were clinging. Although a later investigation affirmed that no one died on the campus, the army killed twenty-four students that night. The destroyed grid was kept as a memorial on the campus (see photo above) in order to commemorate the student resistance that contributed to end the rule of the junta half-a-year later. In 1982, considering the students’ political role against the military dictatorship, a piece of legislation was voted to grant Greek universities the ability to constitute themselves as sanctuary, preventing the police and, a fortiori, the army to penetrate on their campuses. The Polytechnic University campus itself was used numerous times as a sanctuary for its direct proximity to the neighborhood of Exarcheia, where many anarchist organizations — some of which took on themselves to organize the hospitality of displaced people from the Middle-East and East-Africa in the recent months — present in many anti-governmental demonstrations and regularly chased by the police. The law was however annulled during the George Papandreou administration in 2011 to allow the intervention of the police on campuses against demonstrators.

The Polytechnic campus and its entrance grid (right) destroyed by a tank of the military junta in 1973.

The various photographs illustrating this article show it to whom wants to read them: architecture cannot be neutral when it comes to the defensible space of sanctuaries. Campuses do not provide the same conditions for political resistance depending on the way they operate spatially and they interact with their environment. Although urban campuses designed to function against the rest of the city, or in fear of the city — we can think of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles or the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for instance — may appear at first glance as the ideal ones to materialize the limits of the bastion that a sanctuary should be, the securitarian logic of their architectures can only be reversed with great difficulty since this logic obeys to an hyper-rationalization that gives always an advantage to dominant forces, in particular when they were involved in the design of this architecture. Urban campuses are however arguably the most susceptible to provide the conditions of defense proportionally to the degree with which the campus is integrated within its neighborhood, rather than existing against it. Such an integration not only provide local solidarity; it also offers alternative access points and flight possibilities.

Although the narrative of a frontal siege of a university by the police as the historical examples presented here may appear as the most violent and spectacular attack that can be lead against the sanctuaries that universities can embody — depending on the geographical/legal context, these attacks occurs relatively often — it illustrates well how architecture should be embraced as a political weapon to serve political programs resisting the dominant ones. Thinking of architecture politically through the spectrum of appeased modes of existence might appear at first as the way to use this discipline for better use than conventional programs, but such a vision is dangerous in the way it refuses to see the forces of domination against some bodies contextualizing and, more often than not, materialized into architecture. It remains more than ever my conviction that the only appropriate architectural answer facing these forces is to deliberately embrace architecture’s intrinsic violence to serve, as one of many other disciplines, the forms of resistance against them.

Black and Puerto Rican students barricading the entrances of the City College of New York (Harlem) in 1969 to demand the admission of more students of color.

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