Léopold Lambert – Paris on August 4, 2017
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This article is the fourth installment of a series of five that operate as a report of my most recent stay in Palestine in July. While the three first parts were set up in Jerusalem-Al Quds, this fourth one is dedicated to a city that did not exist a few years ago. Situated in the West Bank between Nablus and Ramallah (see map at the end of this text), the new city of Rawabi materializes a sum of crucial questions about the present and the future of Palestine. Developed by the Bayti Real Investment Company, which is owned in partnership by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company and the Palestinian company Massar International owned by charismatic Bashar Masri, the construction of Rawabi started in 2010 at the climax of the politics of development engaged by then Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, former economist for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such developments have particularly changed the face of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority in a deliberate indifference of the Israeli occupation and a consecration of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Furthermore, when it comes to these new neighborhoods built in the North of Ramallah (see the article “Constructing the Ramallah Bubble“) or Rawabi, it has become commonplace to compare their architectural aesthetics and their urban typology on top of hills (“rawabi” itself means “hills”) to the neighboring Israeli settlements — what I called in the past, an “architectural Stockholm syndrome.” As described by Tina Grandinetti in an article written for the second issue of The Funambulist Magazine, Suburban Geographies (Nov-Dec 2015)), the way architecture enforces the social segregation that a city like Rawabi produces is also manifest, and the many luxurious brands (Ferrari, Armani, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfinger, Mango, etc.) that ostensibly display “coming soon” signs on the storefront of their future stores in Rawabi, certainly contribute to it. Nevertheless, the questions that Rawabi triggers are too important to be dismissed by a superficial critique of it.

Complicit Indifference Versus Political Indifference ///

The first one is about the relationship to the Israeli Apartheid that necessarily conditions the existence of all project in Palestine. From the mouth of Fayyad or Masri (see the 2012 Dutch documentary “Rawabi: The Promised Palestinian City” for instance), the phrase “the occupation” comes back as a mantra, a seemingly unavoidable force with no apparent responsible entity for it: the occupation as a climatic condition. This is however not to say that all Palestinian project (be it architectural or anything else) should be explicitly and fully dedicated to constitute a resistance to the Israeli Apartheid (something I have been and probably continue to be guilty of, to a certain degree), since such an expectation would constitute a form of essentialization of Palestinianness, existing only through its resistive formation mobilized against Israel, which would ultimately reinforce the Zionist ideology that only acknowledges Palestinian presence as an antagonist creation contemporary of the creation of the State of Israel. This (often external) expectation was illustrated with humor by Sabrien Amrov when she wrote in a facebook post three days ago: “every time i tell academics I want to write about how Palestinians love, no one is interested. But if I say how Palestinians love as a form of resistance; then wow, that is hot.” The effective political forms of indifference to the Israeli Apartheid are those that (deliberately or not) exist and acquire agency without it, and not in spite of it. As such, we could (perhaps provocatively) argue that one of the most literal form of Palestinian indifference can be found in the strategies elaborated by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) platform, since it attempts to fundamentally separates itself from any economical or cultural ties with Israeli companies and governmental programs. In this regard, Rawabi constitutes the exact opposite form of Palestinian indifference by embracing the logic according to which “business is not politics” and therefore work with a significant amount of Israeli materials and companies “as long as they give [them] a good price” says Masri.

Statehood Politics ///

The second of the questions triggered by Rawabi can be found in its explicit politics as a symbol and a prelude to the establishment of a Palestinian State. In this regard, the first main problem posed by Rawabi is the politics of eminent domain that was mobilized by the Palestinian Authority when it seized 6 square kilometers of land from the neighboring villages of Atara and Ajul to allow the construction of the new city. On a land permanently marked by (and daily practiced through) the history of land dispossession that the Nakba and the Israeli occupation have created, and only a few hundred meters from the Israeli settlement of Ateret, this other form of authoritative dispossessive process incarnate a loaded violence that is (obviously) shut in the Rawabi official narrative — the destruction of an entire hill’s ecosystem in order to built a self-claimed “Green city” could be another one. Since 1994 and the creation of the Palestinian Authority following the Oslo Accords, Palestinians in the West Bank have experienced new forms of state violence (police violence, arbitrary arrests, land dispossession, etc.) that, for the past 27 years, had been exclusively coming from the Israeli occupation army — and, to a lesser degree, from the Jordanian and British states for the 47 years before that. The last 23 years (and the years that followed the Second Intifada in particular) have therefore offered a preview of what the Palestinian State could look like if it was established in the framework imagined by the Palestinian Authority, the so-called “International Community” and, despite opposite claims, the Israeli government itself (that expects to acquire through the establishment of the Palestinian State the legitimacy of its ethnocracy).

This state project is characterized by a spatial framework that make of the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), its primary and, perhaps, exclusive territory. The subject of the Gaza Strip, its 1.8 million inhabitants living for a large majority in extremely dire conditions (the Palestinian Authority being partially responsible for it), and the complexity linked to the territorial disconnection between both regions is never seriously discussed. And then, one can suddenly read about plans to establish a micro-Palestinian State in the Sinai peninsula for Palestinians of Gaza (Al Jazeera, July 2017). The Palestinian state project does not formulate either any vision for the fate of the 5 millions Palestinian refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Israeli government thinks of ways to strip Palestinian Israelis from their citizenship in a project of population transfer (The Electronic Intifada, July 2017) — it is interesting to note that a certain amount of Rawabi’s future residents are part of this population — which could be associated to the threats made by Senior Ministrer Tzachi Hanegbi who recently warned Palestinian Israelis of a third Nakba (+972, July 2017).

Rawabi constitutes an architectural prophecy of such a state: it is a sacrificial urbanity that symbolizes and enforces the acceptance of the price to pay by many for a few to access to the freedom of a complicit capitalized existence and become what Eva Schreiner calls “consumer citizens” in a paper dedicated to the new city (unpublished, 2013). But here again, we should not evacuate too quickly reality’s nuances in a peremptory judgment (especially one coming from the external position that I personally occupy). It is difficult not to be sensitive to the emotional words of future residents (or, at times, of Masri himself) interviewed for the Dutch documentary cited above, and one can read through these testimonies, the joy of a rare possibility of agency in conditions that always prevented it until then. Moreover, more than an accomplice to the Israeli Apartheid, Rawabi and its numerous problematic dimensions can be understood as a product of it. Colonialism in general and the Apartheid in particular do not operate through the binary strict characterization of bodies (“colonizers” vs. “colonized,” “whites” vs. “blacks”) through which we usually define them — such an absolutist scheme would unavoidably lead to its overthrow by a population that would have fundamentally nothing to loose from it. Colonial societies instead operate through a gradient of categorization of bodies corresponding to a proportionate degree of administrative violence to which they are subjected. The Israeli Apartheid violently enforces such a colonial hierarchy and reality is experienced differently between members of the diaspora, Palestinian Israelis, East Jerusalem residents, West Bank residents with a permit to work on the West side of the Apartheid Wall, West Bank residents who do not have such a permit, refugees in the West Bank, Gaza residents, refugees in Gaza, refugees abroad, etc. — this categorization is a non-exhaustive one (far from it) and ends up comprising as many ramifications as Palestinians. The social discrepancies created by this system (in the same manner than those created by the capitalist system) can therefore not be attributed to individual responsibilities but, rather, to the very structures of the system itself. As such, Rawabi may be more the ostentatious crystallization of such discrepancies than its cause.

GENERAL AND CLOSE-UP MAPS ///

All photographs below and above by Léopold Lambert (July 2017). Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on August 7, 2017
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

This is the last installment of this short series of articles about Palestine. The four previous ones were published as follow:
– The “Hebronization” of Jerusalem-Al Quds (July 23, 2017)
– The Walled Refugee Camp of Shu’fat in Jerusalem (July 25, 2017)
– Lifta, a Stone Evidence of the Nakba in Jerusalem (August 1, 2017)
– Rawabi, the Architectural Prophecy of an Unequal Palestinian State (August 4, 2017)

Although when talking about Palestine, I always insist on the wholeness of its territory, which includes Israel itself, I have not been consistent in my practice of this territory, since the only part of Israel where I spent some time during my two trips of 2010 and 2015 was West Jerusalem. Part of me saw this as a form of solidarity with the majority of Palestinians who do not have a permit to access the other side of the Apartheid Walls in the West Bank and Gaza , but this practice bared even less consistency since Jerusalem-Al Quds was a significant exception to this rule and that any access to Palestine at all could be legitimately seen as a privilege in regards to the denial of such an access to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, banned activists, and citizens of the sixteen Muslim-majority countries in MENA and Asia that are considered by the successive Israeli governments as “enemy states.” This time, I therefore spent some time in Jaffa-Tel Aviv, ten years after my first visit there. This decade of absence sharpened my feelings when observing the progression of a urban phenomena we may call gentrification but that should in no way be considered outside of the continuum of settler colonialism logic — both processes being inseparable as we will see further. In this regard, it is important to recall the history of Jaffa as part of this continuum.

The book White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (The MIT Pres, 2015) written by Sharon Rotbard is instrumental to understand this history, and how “there is […] no difference between neighborhood politics, city politics, national politics, and global politics.” Rotbard goes back as far as 1799 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s siege on Jaffa as the precursor of an antagonism between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. In a “colonial delirium,” Napoleon wrote a proclamation that foreshadows the Balfour Declaration one hundred and eighteen years later, in which he invites the “Israelites,” “rightful heirs of Palestine,” to “conquer [their] patrimony,” reinforcing the thesis according to which Zionism as a colonial program is originally a non-Jewish European invention. Jumping forward in time, Rotbard notes how the British army’s Operation Anchor was the first of many occurrences when urban planning and warfare were used in concert as a means of dominating and controlling the Palestinian population in Jaffa. Taking advantage of the state of exception triggered by the 1936-1939 Great Arab Revolt against British rule and Jewish immigration to Palestine, Operation Anchor started on June 16, 1936 with the evacuation of the old city’s population, followed three days later by the destruction of two hundred and thirty-seven Palestinian Arab buildings to create an avenue to the harbor.

Towards the end of the British Mandate that will culminate in the Nakba on May 15, 1948, Zionist paramilitary groups started their attacks on Jaffa on December 2, 1947, thus making the middle and upper Palestinian Arab class flee from the city. Consequently, the local economy collapsed. The full-scale attack on Jaffa by the Etzel (aka Irgun) Zionist paramilitary group started on April 25, 1948 and ended the day before the establishment of the State of Israel:

This began with a rain of mortars over the city, sustained right up until the old Arab capital fell. According to Palestinian accounts, the bombardments were coupled with radio broadcasts in Arabic in which the Etzel promised the civilian population that their fate would be similar to that of the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, who had been massacred a few days earlier on April 9, by the Etzel and Lehi’s [Stern Group] fighters.

Manshieh, Jaffa’s northern neighborhood, was obliterated and the rare photographs available serve as evidence of the absolutist violence of the ethnic cleansing. On the ruins of the Palestinian neighborhood, the southern part of Tel Aviv was built in the following years, and one building in particular vividly recounts this violence. The Etzel Museum, on the side of Manshieh’s beach, consists of an ugly dark glass box built directly on the ruin of a former Palestinian building in a literal architectural statement of domination. Its architects’ statement, quoted by Rotbard, is particularly indicative of their embrace of the ideology conveyed by the building: “from the shattered walls of the old building grow dark glass walls, […] schematically completing the building to what it once was, […] an attempt to freeze the special moment and time of the day when Jaffa was liberated.” If it was not a museum dedicated to what is considered by the British colonial authorities as a terrorist group, one could almost think of this building as a political artwork, revealing the Palestinian ruins on which the State of Israel is built, when many of these ruins have been destroyed and hidden by seeded forests all over the territory after 1948. A year later, Jaffa was annexed to Tel Aviv and remains under military occupation to this day since the Israeli army has established many barracks and other facilities in the Palestinian city.

In the 1960s, Israeli urban plans were drawn to renovate Old Jaffa that can best be characterized as a form of orientalization of the city, presenting it as a picturesque fragment of a past (that precedes the Palestinian existence in the Israeli nationalist narrative) in opposition to its modern counterpart, the so-called “White City.” Significantly, in these Israeli designed urban plans for the Palestinian city, Rotbard notes, the 1936 military transformation of the city was maintained, thus lending an additional level of legitimacy for the military to plan urban fabric.

Today, the military occupation of Jaffa is still present — the military radio, “Galei Tzahal,” headquarters for instance, are situated on Dror street, a hundred meters south of Old Jaffa — but in a similar way that the transfer of Israel’s civil population to settlements in the West Bank has considerably anchored and sustained the occupation, the gentrification of Jaffa by Tel Aviv real estate developers and residents is finalizing the denial of Palestinian past and present existence in what used to be the vibrant Palestinian city. Using a predatory system of state ownership of the land described by Imogen Kimber in a 2015 Middle East Eye article, Palestinians of Jaffa are experiencing a continuous process of dispossession that progresses towards Ajami, the southern neighborhood of Jaffa. Luxurious and semi-luxurious condominium buildings are built in and around Old Jaffa, with the active complicity of European architects, such as British designer John Pawson, featured on the ostensible posters of the so-called “Tel Aviv The Residences” project, currently in construction, advertise obliviously by architecture blogs such as Dezeen. Nearby, one of the ubiquitous Israeli real estate developing company called Home Land is rather explicit in its name about the project to which it contributes. As for Jaffa’s market that marks the northern entrance of the Old City, it has been turned into a grotesque setting of trendy cafes and antique stores, where one regularly encounters Israeli flags and American birthright groups gulping down the Israeli nationalist narrative served on a platter to them.

Of course, comparing the capitalist construction of residential buildings in Jaffa and the military-monitored construction of settlements in the West Bank make only sense if their violence is understood through different degrees; yet, what the gentrification of the Palestinian city shows us in the context of the Israeli Apartheid, is that gentrification, whether it happens in Brooklyn, in Paris, or in Rio de Janeiro, is always tied to forms of state structures of violence towards targeted populations. As a capitalist process, gentrification operates by definition against the most impoverished residents, but processes of inherited impoverishment intrinsic to this system as well as the colonial continuum of these societies adds to this economic violence, a racialized one. We should therefore not think of the gentrification of Jaffa as an exceptional phenomena, but rather as the exacerbated violence (and therefore easier to distinguish) of a process at work in many cities of the world.

The other element of possibly relevant comparison between Jaffa’s Israel luxurious new developments and Jerusalem and the West Bank’s settlements is a complex one that I tried to (perhaps, clumsily) articulate in the past (see this January 2016 article): the spatial colonization of Palestinian land on both side of the Apartheid Wall, beyond its extreme dispossessive violence, tends to reduce the specificities of the different regimes of the Apartheid. Of course, such a uniformization is strategically conceived in the framework of Zionism; yet it significantly diminishes the possibility of a segregated ‘sacrificial’ Palestinian State(s) (described in the previous article about Rawabi) and, as such, can be appropriated by the struggle for decolonization and equality. Using Jaffa-Tel Aviv as a paradigm in her thesis “Advancing the Struggle for Urban Justice to the Assertion of Substantive Citizenship: Challenging Ethnocracy in Tel Aviv-Jaffa,” as well as in a 2015 conversation for The Funambulist podcast, Dena Qaddumi speaks of “the right to Tel Aviv” for Palestinians that she understands as controversial but also necessary to address for the construction of a consistent political framework. The complexity of this question — it is difficult to think that any of the Apartheid apparatuses operating today is likely to ultimately serve their dismantling — is likely to be proportional to the decolonial outcome it could allow.

I would like to finish this series of the article with the emotion that was mine when encountering a few trees on the shore of Ajami (southern Jaffa) in a relatively new park whose small hills leaves these trees unprotected from the Mediterranean wind. Looking South (see photograph above), delusionally trying to distinguish Gaza, where Palestinians currently only have 2 hours of electricity per day, amidst extremely hot temperatures, surviving against all odds when Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Sisi’s Egypt somehow unite as wardens of what has been called “the largest open-air prison in the world.” Looking East at Jaffa itself, its sustained dispossession and, further, Jerusalem-Al Quds and the West Bank where the occupation applies its methodical violence in the daily lives of all. Looking North at the crying absence of the remains of the Palestinian villages evicted and destroyed in 1947-1948 and the fate of Palestinian Israelis considered as “a demographic problem” and a human currency in what many do not seem to see the cynicism of calling “peace talks.” These trees hit me as a symbol of Palestinian resilience: they bend but never break.

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I am happy to announce that the 13th issue of The Funambulist Magazine, entitled “Queers, Feminists & Interiors” is now published and available online and very soon in our partner bookstores. This issue presents a critique of the normative violence of gender in the specific context of indoor architectures. It engages a dialogue between trans perspectives on public bathrooms (Paul B. Preciado and Myka T. Johnson & Jamie Marsicano) or the capitalist workplace (João Gabriell), the demagogic blindspot of femonationalism when violence against women is deployed in domestic spaces (Sara Farris), the clandestine alternatives to white “gayborhoods” for queer Arabs in France (Mehammed Amadeus Mack), the impossibility for young Hong Kong lesbians or, to an even higher degree, female migrant domestic workers to access “a room of one’s own” (Sonia Wong and Tings Chak), the violence of the norm in the design of all rooms and furniture (Léopold Lambert), or the far-from-neutral space of the coming out (Paola Paredes). The non-topical part of the issue also presents articles on the demilitarization struggle in Hawai’i (Laurel Mei-Singh), the Moroccan political movement of the Hirak in the Rif (Soraya el Kahlaoui), and life as a Dane of color in stigmatized and gentrifying neighborhoods (Aysha Amin).

READ MORE, ORDER A DIGITAL OR PRINT+DIGITAL COPY, OR ACCESS THE ONLINE VERSION (subscribers).

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert
Part-time assistants: Noelle Geller & Flora Hergon
Contributing copyeditor: Maxwell Donnewald
Contributing translators: Sarina Vega (Spanish), Maxwell Donnewald (French)
Contributors: Laurel Mei-Singh, Soraya el Kahlaoui, Aysha Amin, Naomi Stead, Paul B. Preciado, Myka Johnson & Jamie Marsicano, Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Sonia Wong, Tings Chak, João Gabriell, Sara Farris, Paola Paredes, Alison Brunn, and Lesley Labonne

See the index and the section “behind the scenes” after the cover.

THE FUNAMBULIST “BEHIND THE SCENES”:

This thirteen issue of The Funambulist Magazine begins our third year of publication. One of the things we wanted to bring to this new beginning is a small platform to give you regular updates about what is happening “behind the scenes” of the publication. In July 2016, I had the opportunity to give a talk entitled “Political Friendships” at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, which aimed at presenting the logistics behind the magazine (the office, the reception of a little less than a thousand printed copies every other month, the subsequent trips to the post office, etc.) and, more importantly, the political and ethical decisions that The Funambulist’s daily operation involves. Some were fairly evident because directly linked to the editorial line of the magazine: who should be commissioned to write about what? Where are they located? How do they challenge the imposed hierarchy of knowledge holders? Which geographical areas have been described at length and which ones, not enough? Etc.

Less obvious aspects of the daily practice were also introduced. How much of the budget can be dedicated to commissioned articles, photographs, and drawings? What should be the price of the magazine and how can this price be divided by two when selling it in bookstores of Southern Europe and the Global South? How to learn to negotiate to be paid and “run a business” while keeping a high degree of critique towards capitalist logics? Etc.

None of the answers of these questions can be the source of a resting satisfaction. An important number of geographies have been described in the first thirteen issues, but Latin America, the Carribeans, and East Africa were only ‘given’ a handful of articles. Commissioned contributors and photographers are paid for their work, but the sums are nowhere close to meet their actual efforts and the time spent to produce it. Bookstores in Mexico, Portugal, Nigeria, or Hong Kong get to sell the magazine for 50% of the normal price, but the latter (12 euros) remains prohibitive for most people.

Sometimes, the right decision appears in the form of a compromise. Some other times, the “right thing to do” (such as refusing to use a much cheaper printer because it operates in places where the welfare of the workers
is not verifiable) is more obvious, despite the illusion of dilemma that the prospects of an easier option produce. In a system that perseveres each day in pushing for such easier, more profitable options, we believe that a balanced economy, operating under our own political terms can be reached, despite the many difficulties that it implies.

But who is this “we?” As of today, it is Noelle Geller and Flora Hergon, who work part-time in assisting me in the editorial and logistic process of the magazine at the office in Paris. It is also Maxwell Donnewald who, on the other side of the ocean (New York), copy-edits and proof-reads the majority of texts published in the magazine. Closer from us (London), Sofia Ilyas and the small company she founded, Float PR, give us some occasional help, while Marlow Perceval and Francis Redman, the designers and programmers of the website, take care of its cogs and devices. Finally, this “we” is also incarnated by the many friends who are often solicited to write articles, find student works on a given topic, give their opinion about which cover works best, request for the third time that their university take a subscription, or more simply, listen to the occasional hardships of this daily practice.

This is the reason behind the title of the 2016 talk “Political Friendships” mentioned at the beginning of this short text. What such a title tries to convey is the shared passion and solidarity that the 155 contributors to the magazine, the editorial team, the various bearers of support (be it money, encouragements or hugs) to the project, and, I dare to think, the subscribers and occasional readers, construct through and for the political struggles in which we are involved. My hope and ambition for this editorial project is for the various problems involved by its daily construction to be transcended by the force of such friendships, and the political effects to which it humbly attempts to contribute. As for this small tribune, my hope for it is that it will provide an additional layer to your reading of the following pages; a usually invisible one, made of the hundreds of small (and less small) decisions taken on a daily basis to finally reach this point of presentation once every two months.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on September 14, 2017
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

Last month, I was lucky enough to be able to visit several islands of the Okinawa Prefecture (including Okinawa Island itself) and thus to see for myself the movements of resistance against the large US military presence in the ‘main’ archipelago (see map below) after having heard about it from past and future contributors to The Funambulist magazine, Wendy Matsumura (read her article about Okinawa in The Funambulist 9 (Jan-Feb 2017) Islands) and Lisa Torio. The following text, map and photographs thus constitute a small report of this too short visit, which may gain significant substance in the complementary listening of Wendy’s interview about the history of Okinawa for The Funambulist podcast’s 124th episode, published in parallel of this article.

Because the terms that designate territories, administrations, and people bear a certain complexity in their occasional overlapping, I propose to define them here in a small lexicon that, hopefully, will gain in clarity what it will lack in literary style.
– Ryukyu Islands (also known as Nansei Islands): geographic chain of 198 islands that range from Kyushu (Japan’s most southern of its four main islands) to the island of Hateruma, only a couple of hundreds kilometers off shore of Taiwan.
– Ryukyuan: indigenous people of the Ryukyu Islands. Although historically related to Ainus, recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people within the country’s citizenry, Ryukyuans are not recognized as such. As discussed in the interview mentioned above, the complexity of the Ryukyuan indigineity is such that it may be easier to define it by what is is not: it is neither an identity strictly comparable to other indigenous nations of the Pacific, nor one that has been totally assimilated by the Japanese ‘continental’ ethnicity. Ryukyuan also refers to the Okinawan language, spoken by less than a million people in the world.
– Ryukyu Kingdom: former independent monarchic regime of Okinawa from 1429 to 1879.
– Government of the Ryukyu Islands: former civil administration of Okinawa during the US occupation between 1945 and 1972.
– Okinawa: this name can designate the Japanese administrative prefecture that is composed by the central and southern archipelagos of the Ryukyu Islands — the northern ones are part of the Kagoshima Prefecture — or the largest island of the Ryukyus, or the second largest city (140,000 inhabitants) of this island after Naha, its capital (320,000 inhabitants). In the case of this article, the simple mention of Okinawa will refer to the prefecture.

In The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community (Duke 2015), Wendy Matsumura gives a Marxian reading of the various movements organized by the people of Okinawa from the 1879 annexation of the three archipelagos composing the Ryukyu Kingdom by Japan during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) to the beginning of the 1930s. These movements may have put less efforts in their opposition to the annexation itself than against the economic treatment of Japan towards Okinawa, which was more eager to massively exploit the agricultural and taxation productions of the islands, than to fully integrate its people and their collective identity to the national project.

In 1945, 185,000 soldiers of the US army and the Marine Corps invaded Okinawa and fought a battle that killed more than a quarter of the prefecture’s civilian population. Although it would be exaggerated to say that the people of Okinawa already found themselves between the violence of the US and Japan at that time, one has to however insist on the mass ‘suicides’ that the Japanese army forced onto the local population when it became clear that the main island would be lost. Similarly, the Japanese army forcefully displaced part of the civilian population of the most southern archipelago (Yaeyama) from one island to another, despite the high risks of malaria that displaced people would experience on what was then the inhabitable island of Iriomote.

After the armistice, the US military occupied Okinawa — the first governor was General Douglas McArthur himself — and started to seize a massive amount of landfarm. Okinawan were removed from their land and their houses were destroyed by military bulldozers. In the 1950s, the US military base land area corresponded to 14% of the prefecture and 42% of cultivated areas. In 1971, after fifteen years of local protests, the US reached an agreement with Japan and the so-called “reversion” became effective in 1972. The terms of the Sato-Nixon agreements were however received with outrage by the people of Okinawa as the military territorial presence was to mostly remain. Here again, it is important to recognize the responsibility of the Japanese government that collaborated and continue to collaborate in the continuous US military presence, while also acknowledging the influence the US had in the drafting of the new Japanese Constitution in 1947 that stipulate in its Article 9 that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” The Japanese army is thus contained to strict defensive mission — with a slippery interpretation of what defensive can mean by nationalist governments such as the current Abe administration — and is thus dependent on the US to play a role in the geopolitical world scene, rather than adopting a more reserved attitude.

In 1995, one hundred thousand people protested the US military presence after the abduction and rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three US soldiers. In response, the US and Japanese governments implemented the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) to reduce “the impact of the activities of US forces on communities in Okinawa.” Activists affirm however that SACO’s “actual and hidden intention […] was restructuring and re-strengthening the bases” (Voice of Takae, 2013). Twenty-two years later, the US military bases still occupy a significant portion of Okinawa island and archipelago (see map above), and political organizers from localities adjacent to the bases, and from other parts of Okinawa Island have concentrated their resistive presence on two sites.

The first one was initiated by the people of Takae, whose village is surrounded by the largest military perimeter of the island, Marines’ Camp Gonsalves (more descriptively called “Jungle Warfare Training Center”), and that experienced the crash of an Osprey aircraft in the vicinity of its elementary school. This type of aircraft, which can take off in the way an helicopter does, is one of the main focuses of the resistive movement. The suspension of the construction of heliports (and the roads to it that they entail) in the middle of the precarious ecosystem embodied by the jungle, as well as the end of the use of the Ospreys and the danger that their lack of reliability constitutes, are two immediate demands that the Takae villagers and the people standing in solidarity with them have been making for the last eight years — we might call them “island protectors” in reference to other indigenous environmentalist struggles. The Yanbaru jungle is not the only environmental dimension that the villagers struggle to protect. 60% of the island’s fresh water comes from the perimeter of the US military bases, where eleven dams (see photos of one below) retain this water within a military area, with all the risks of contamination and toxicity that this entails. Every day for the last eight years, at least one person has therefore taken their shift at the tent standing in front of one of the base entrances, where a squad of police officers from the conservative municipality of Osaka — local police officers were believed to be potentially too sympathetic with the island protectors — continuously stand in silence. A squad of Japanese police officers defending a US military gate and the militarized jungle behind it: the image is quite evocative of what Okinawans are up against.

The second site of continuous protest is situated in Henoko, a town in the vicinity of the second largest base of the island, Marines’ Camp Schwab, where protests are organized every day to prevent the extension of the base. These protests have the particularity to be organized on land, in front of one of the base’s entrances, as well as on sea (with the help of kayaks), where the marine ecosystem is also threatened. Newcomers to the protest site are ostensibly photographed (see photos below) from the other side of the fence by what seems to be security officers from the Marines’ Provost Marshall Office. Buses from Naha comes every day to add remote protesters to the local ones.

US military bases are not the only one present in Okinawa. The so-called “Japanese Self-Defense Forces” also count multiple bases on the Okinawan ground, including one within the Naha civil airport itself, where commercial planes run along military ones (see photos below). The Rising Sun Flag seen by most other nations of the region as a Japanese imperialist symbol and worn on Japanese soldiers’ uniforms, is illustrative of what the suppression of Article 9 of the Constitution currently attempted by Prime Minister Abe would mean for Okinawa: the shift from an imperialist foreign army presence to a nationalist army one. US military bases would be re-used for the newly formed offensive Japanese army and the gigantic military target forced onto Okinawa would remain. This is why the island protectors are not solely assembled against US imperialism, they are also fighting Japanese nationalism through an explicitly pacific agenda, as well as pushing for an environmentalism that share more similarities with indigenous political struggles than with the Western ecological paradigm.

For more, read some of Wendy Matsumura’s and Lisa Torio’s texts:
– Wendy Matsumura, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, Duke University Press, 2015
– Wendy Matsumura, “Okinawa: The Cold War Creation of a Model Jungle” in The Funambulist 9 (Jan-Feb. 2017) Islands
– Lisa Torio, “Can Indigenous Okinawans Protect Their Land and Water From the US Military?” in The Nation (December 20, 2016)
– Lisa Torio, “Abe’s Japan Is a Racist, Patriarchal Dream” in Jacobin (March 28, 2017)

All photographs above and below by Léopold Lambert (August 2017) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Lisbon on October 26, 2017
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The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is currently organizing a design competition for architecture students in the United States and Canada in partnership of the steel lobby represented here by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). As usual, in this kind of partnerships, the lobby’s product does not solely constitute the main element that is required to be used in the designed projects, it is also ‘generously’ promoted by the ACSA in a paragraph entitled “Advantages of Steel” that ratifies the ambiguity between the neutrality they are expected to manifest in a brief not explicitly characterized as an ad space and the sponsorship of a material lobby. Although there would be a lot to write about these practices, the subject of this article is elsewhere.

The Opportunity: challenges architecture students to create a more humanitarian design of a Detention Center by emphasizing family and community rather than isolation. Steel offers great benefits in this endeavor, as it allows for longer spans and more creative light filled spaces.

These two lines of brief are then followed by an online page describing the specifics of the competition. The first sentence is eloquent: “The Steel Competition seeks to understand the potential of an architecture of alterity by positioning a third-space between difference and the same by redefining ICE, or an Immigration and Custom Enforcement Facility to create a more Humanitarian Design of a Detention Center” (my emphasis). Language is important and the idea of creating a position that would neither be “different” or “the same” appears as a symptom of what Orwell calls “newspeak” in 1984 (1949): the encompassing of all truth discourses in one sentence to deactivate language’s signification and enforce the status quo.

When one reads further, the language of humanitarism begins to appear. We learn that 65.3 millions of people are currently displaced worldwide, and that “according to the UNHCR statistics, one person for every 113 is currently displaced from their communities because of conflict, resulting in the largest number of asylum-seekers looking for a better, safer life than ever recorded in history.” The next sentence then set the tone: “For the asylum-seeker or immigrant, the in-between grey area is where the question is being addressed: does this person or family have jurisdiction to be on another countries soil?” Besides the inaccurate use of the term “jurisdiction” here (perhaps it was decided that using the word “rights” would have mobilized an imaginary of social struggles that would have not served the brief), we understand that despite the tragic reality that the figures just described, the hospitality of displaced people in countries that appear in the brief as independent in the reasons that triggered these displacements cannot be implemented, hence the need for the existence of detention centers. The last sentence of the brief finishes to crystallize the newspeak call for projects: “How can we look at the design of a Detention Center—a nonplace that exists between immigrant and citizenship, or difference and the same—as a way to architecturally humanize displacement?”

It is important to understand that the extreme ambiguity of language here (“a nonplace […] between […] difference and the same,” “architecturally humanize displacement”) is less due to the poor writing skills of the brief’s authors and much more about the way the packaging of the information is made to erase the complicity of architects with the program itself and made them feel instead as humanitarian workers, whose role is not to question the structure in which they operate, but rather propose a punctual help to those who experience its violence. The terms of structure should however invite us to think otherwise, as this term belongs to the lexical field known of architects. However, if we do not limit the definition of architects to the narrow understanding of a diploma-sanctioned profession, but rather extend it to all actors whose technical expertise in terms of space organization is mobilized to materialize the spatial order we call a building, we can see how political programs of this kind could not be implemented (durably) without their contribution.

Architects’ general capacity for outrage is a somehow laudable one, and we’ve seen it when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) only waited a few hours after the current US President’s election to declare its will to work in concert with his administration (see past article), or when architects were consulted to build the rest (many seem to forget that a third of it already exists!) of the militarized border wall between the US and Mexico; yet, the formulation of the outrage is at least as important than the outrage itself. Too often, this formulation occupies the space Western ideology leaves on purpose to its own critique in order to gain more legitimacy, and therefore ultimately reinforces that against what it claims to be fighting. As always when it comes to the architects’ contribution to carceral facilities, the question should be less about whether or not they should accept such commissions than to examine the ways through which architecture is almost always exclusively materializing the social order in which the carceral condition is not simply a part but also an unsurpassable dimension.

But this competition does not just allow us to wonder about architects’ responsibility in the enforcement of this social order; it also inadvertently allows us to ponder on what is humanitarianism. The very notion of “humanitarian Detention Center” that constitutes the explicit program of this competition could indeed appear to many as a contradiction in itself, a detention center being, by definition, at odds with the notion of humanitarianism. I however would like to insist that not only there is no contradiction contained in the association of these terms, but that the latter even expresses the core of Western militarized humanism. Humanitarianism does not consists in a political struggle against the violence of its structures. Rather, it claims to embody an apolitical position that mitigate this violence when, in fact, it makes this violence disappear from regimes of visibility, legitimizes it, and ultimately reinforces these structures to which it is fully part of. What these considerations for architects and humanitarians only leave as tenable option, is their contribution to the dismantlement of the social order and its violence that they materialize. In this regard, solidarity with political movements that aim at abolishing all forms of carceral institutions constitutes a good start.

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Léopold Lambert – Rotterdam on November 3, 2017

The competition organized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) sponsored by the steel lobby that proposed to architecture students to design a “humanitarian detention center” as described in the previous post of this blog has been cancelled a couple of days ago. Although we live in times when each victory should be acknowledged and somehow celebrated, those of us who voiced their outrage should not rest on the satisfying comfort of a very minor achievement considering the ubiquity of the policing and carceral system to which architects fully contribute and spatially materialize. This text is however not another of my many semi-abstract essays about architecture’s violence but, rather, an emotional (tearful, really) call to mobilize against a much more embodied situation than one of a fictitious architecture competition. This morning, I indeed receive a message from Imran Mohammad, a 23-year old contributor to the magazine, who has been in detention in the Australian detention center on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for the last four years, after having fled the genocide of Rohingya by the Myanmar army and having been detained in Indonesia for two years. Following the current dire situation of the camp, I had asked him (stupidly not fathoming the gravity of the situation) how were things there. I reproduce his poignant response here:

Hi dear Leopold,
I have not moved to the new facilities yet, I am still with the others in the old original centre. Everything is horrifying here, it is a drastic situation. We have no power, no water and no food. I don’t check my phone all the time, it is extremely hard to recharge as there are only a few solar chargers in the centre. 
Lots of love.
Imran

One of the two Australian centers on foreign soil (the other one being on Nauru. cf. Alison Mountz, “Australia’s Enforcement Archipelago” in The Funambulist 9 Islands), the Manus camp had been ruled in April 2016 by the Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court as breaching the constitution’s right to personal liberty and was therefore illegal and should be closed. A legal settlement “was reached on the provision that the Australian government denied any and all liability for the mistreatment and false imprisonment of people on Manus Island” (B. Doherty & C. Wahlquist, June 2017).

The definitive closure of the camp occurred this Wednesday (November 1, 2017), when the Australian security guards left the premises, and that water, food and electricity supplies were cut off. The former detainees were ‘offered’ by the Australian authorities to relocate to another facility in Lorengau, Manus’ main town. 600 refugees however refused to do so (see the powerful video of their pledge to stay in the camp until being offered dignified and safe conditions of life), emphasizing the absence of any guarantee of security to protect them against the attacks of some of the locals, as it has happened in the past (including from the Papua New Guinea armed forces themselves who shot at the camp in April 2017), and underlining the absolute denial of rights they are experiencing. They have consequently appropriated the space of the camp in a radical inversion of architecture’s violence, from the highest architectural crime that containment and incarceration constitute to the use of the same walls to defend themselves against potential attackers. We should however not romanticize this appropriation: the situation, described as “horrifying” by Imran, is the only tenable option in the drastically limited agency given to refugees, while calling for a dignifying relocation to a “safe society.” The digging of a well and toilets, the collect of water in empty trash containers and of tree fruits for food, or the use of solar cells to charge cell phones to keep communication outside of the camp and the island, are not to be commented as the manifestation of ingenuity or creativity that certain people patronizingly describe in their fascination for self-constructed or appropriated neighborhoods around the world: they constitute instead the mere efforts for survival against state violence, be it implemented through border control, policing, incarceration, or the abandonment of people in a place of extreme vulnerability after forcefully displacing them there.

The feeling of utter powerlessness regarding the fate of the Manus survivors experienced 14,000 kilometers from them should not blind us from European and American responsibility on the matter. The drastic anti-immigration policies implemented by the Australian State, whose violence is only equated by the ones deployed on Aborigene lives, were not created in a vacuum. They emerge from the structures of European settler colonialism, both in its management of populations and borders, and although the detention camps of Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island implement particularly extreme and deadly conditions in the enforcement of these policies due to their remote situations, the global political programs of border militarization and incarceration are what is at stake here. As for the very reasons that leave very little choice to people but to flee from the places where they live, they are often direct or indirect consequences to past and recent histories of European and American colonialism and imperialism. There is therefore a crucial need to participate to the political struggle against the racialized inequality regarding rights to movement and safety in general, and to formulate in particular an unequivocal statement of solidarity with Manus refugees and the activist support networks in Australia (and perhaps in Papua New Guinea) organized to support them and amplify their voice.

I would like to thank another contributor to The Funambulist, Michelle Bui, who gathers and propagates information and actions in relation to Manus, and who introduced me to Imran. For much more incarnated account on the situation, you can read the texts written daily by Behrouz Boochani for The Guardian or other texts written by refugees themselves, like Imran or Shamindan Kanapadhi.

The post The Struggle of the Left-to-Die Refugees in the Detention Camp of Manus Island appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

We are happy to announce that the 14th issue of The Funambulist Magazine, entitled “Toxic Atmospheres” is now published and available online and very soon in our partner bookstores. This issue draws on the concepts of “being-in-the-breathable” (Peter Sloterdijk), “the weather” (Christina Sharpe), and “combat breathing” (Frantz Fanon) to resolutely politicize what is usually approached through an environmentalist perspective. The toxicity described throughout its pages are the atmospheric conditions of colonialism, imperialism, and/or capitalism. This includes the use of weaponized chemical agents such as teargas (Dariouche Kechavarzi-Tehrani) or agent orange (Ylan Vo), colonial and nationalist political programs testing and mobilizing nuclear weapons (Samia Henni) or energy (Lisa Torio), methane pollution as a part of US settler colonialism (Sonia Grant), the hegemonic designation of toxicity by European pharmaceutical companies (Chanelle Adams & Sarah Boisard), the need for Black microclimates of emancipated air (Christina Sharpe), a story on waste management in Lebanon (Jessika Khazrik), and a curing center on the US-Mexico border (Alexandra Cortez). The issue also contains political reports about the occupied Golan Heights (Aamer Ibraheem), LGBT organizing in Thailand (Patnarin “Trong” Wongkad), and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and Australian detention camps (Imran Mohammad).

READ MORE, ORDER A DIGITAL OR PRINT+DIGITAL COPY, OR ACCESS THE ONLINE VERSION (subscribers).

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert
Part-time assistants: Flora Hergon & Noelle Geller
Contributing copyeditor: Maxwell Donnewald
Contributors: Aamer Ibraheem, Patnarin “Trong” Wongkad, Imran Mohammad, Dariouche Kechavarzi-Tehrani, Ylan Vo, Samia Henni, Lisa Torio, Sonia Grant, Chanelle Adams, Sarah Boisard, Christina Sharpe, Jessika Khazrik, and Alexandra Cortez.

See the index and the section “behind the scenes” after the cover.

THE FUNAMBULIST BEHIND THE SCENES

We continue our examination of colonial structures with this fourteenth issue. The last issue, “Queers, Feminists & Interiors,” was well received and we recently had the opportunity to listen to João Gabriell speaking eloquently about his contribution “Congratulations, You’re Hired! Navigating the Capitalist Workplace and its Violence as a Trans Person” to this issue, as part of a series of events dedicated to Black masculinities at the bookstore Les Mots à la Bouche in Paris.

We took a particular pleasure preparing this issue for you, commissioning pieces from exceptionally young writers from various places of the world (Jawlan, Lebanon, Japan, Thailand, and many more). Although this issue does not embody the most unequal geographical repartition of the entire series — far from it — the repeated absence of articles situated in Latin America (with the exception of Alexandra Cortez’s project situated on the border between El Paso, NM, and Ciudad Juarez) has reached a problematic point — only eight locations in Latin America and the Caribbean have been mobilized in the first 13 issues — for which we have to apologize. Although we’ve been granted the indulgence of our friends involved in the various political struggles in these territories so far, we want to address this problem and call for contributions about various forms of decolonial analyses/organizing in the Caribbean and Latin America, in addition to the ones we’ll commission ourselves.

If you read this text, it is likely that you either ordered this specific issue or subscribe to the magazine, and we thank you very much for your support. We would like however to urge you to invite your friends and colleagues who may be interested in the magazine’s content to subscribe as well, since most of our funding comes from this monthly income.

In exchange of your support, we take the engagement — as we did since this endeavor started — to always do our best to comply with a high ethical standard when it comes to the way the magazine generates and redistribute its economy. As written in the last issue’s “behind the scenes” section, this standard is far from perfect: it means that commissioned contributors (authors of guest columns and articles) and photographers are paid for their work, but the sums are nowhere close to their actual efforts and the time spent to produce it. Similarly, bookstores in Colombia, Portugal, Nigeria, or Hong Kong get to sell the magazine for 50% of the normal price, but the latter (12 euros) remains prohibitive for most people.

Sometimes, the right decision appears in the form of a compromise. Other times, the “right thing to do” (such as refusing to use a much cheaper printer because it operates in places where the welfare of the workers is not verifiable) is more obvious, despite the illusion of dilemma that the prospects of an easier option produce. In a system that perseveres each day in pushing for such easier, more profitable options, we believe that a balanced economy, operating under our own political terms can be reached, despite the many difficulties that it implies.

This however means that we are transforming an already difficult economic situation — ask any other independent media editor about it! — an even more arduous one with, at the moment, little visibility of the future. We therefore need economic support proportionate to the very generous feedback we are regularly getting in relation to the content of the magazine. This is neither a cry for help, nor a call for charitable spirits but, rather, an invitation to think of the ways such content can be produced durably and with the growing ambition of the ideas we support.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 10, 2017
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The New York Times’ radical reasonableness offers us a clear vision of the ways one can continuously adapt its position to the political context as to be in position of respectful negotiation with the status quo. On Tuesday (November 8, 2017), the newspaper published an article entitled “Eight Ways to Build a Border Wall” that presents the eight prototypes recently built on the southern United States national border which mark the beginning of the construction promised by the current president. The article unapologetically associates veneer drone footage to comparative shots of the prototypes with titles such as “Concrete or No Concrete,” “Opaque or Transparent,” or “Tube or No Tube?” that we would more eagerly associate with a kitchen-customizing multiple-choice form on a home improvement website, than with a serious examination of the political instrumentalization of architecture’s violence. In presenting a wall project it opposed during the 2016 presidential campaign in the sensational form of a commercial brochure with which US citizens are invited to shop, the NYT brings a tremendous legitimacy to this political project. Rather than examining the very ideological and societal axioms of such a project or insisting on the shattering fact that 10,000 people died attempting to cross this border (killed by heat stroke, dehydration, or by US militias), this article instead analyzes exclusively the “how” of the Wall in the usual adjustment to the new status quo.

The NYT is, of course, not the only newspaper in the world that holds such a position of continuous readjustment to what they like to think as “the center.” Europe itself counts many equivalents that contributed to the political shift that has seen left-wing political parties of these last twenty years ponder how to solve the “immigration problem,” a question drafted and imposed by right-wing movements that succeeded to impose their invariable axiom — “there is an immigration problem” — without being challenged in its core. In a state like the US, built on settler colonialism and that currently provides very little in terms of welfare for the bodies present on its territory, we can be candidly surprised that such a political axiom would be so ubiquitously accepted. And yet, the current US president has been elected after having particularly pushed forward one of the most literalist aspects of his program, which happens to be an architectural project: the materialization and militarization of a line on a map (a concept inherent to the settler colonial politics practiced on both sides of it) that represents a border with the state of Mexico fixed in this location only since 1884. Something that was rarely mentioned during the 2016 US presidential campaign was that the wall that would militarize the border was not a new idea and already existed over 1,000 kilometers of border after the Georges W. Bush administration undertook its construction in 2006.

Back then, the NYT had proposed to thirteen architects to take part in a “reflection” on the design of this wall reported under the name “A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs” (in 2008, I had already written about it in an article entitled admittedly-not-so-subtly “How Far Can the Bullshit Go?”). Some architecture offices had declined the offer because “they felt it was purely a political issue,” but others, such as renowned Californian architect, Eric Owen Moss, had answered the call and proceeded to propose an architectural design for this “more beautiful” wall. In his report of the challenge in the NYT (June 18, 2006), William L. Hamilton had written the following: “Eric Owen Moss, an architect in Los Angeles, was more specific with his border as beacon of light. In his design, a strolling, landscaped arcade of lighted glass columns would invite a social exchange in the evening, much like the “paseo,” popular in Hispanic culture. ‘Make something between cultures, which leads to a third,’ Mr. Moss said. ‘Celebrate the amalgamation of the two’.”

It is easy to critique Moss’ position, his romanticist and essentialist rhetoric, and his office’s grotesque design. Similarly, the title of the challenge itself (whether it was introduced to architects under this name or not) has the capacity to mobilize a wide outrage for its radical candidness — in March 2016, during the US presidential campaign, a proposal for a design competition, entitled more soberly “Build the Border Wall?” and its relay in the mainstream architecture platform Archdaily, had triggered (legitimately) infuriated reactions from a certain amount of architects. Of course, beauty has the potential to normalize violent architectures and, in this regard, one can think of the (true or fictitious) story graffiti-artist Banksy told about his experience of painting on the Israeli Apartheid Wall: when an old Palestinian man allegedly told him that he was making the Wall beautiful, Banksy thanked him, to what the old man replied: “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.” Yet, we should not emphasize the importance of beauty’s normalizing capacities; after all, the architectures of the Israeli apartheid are unanimously recognized as ugly, but such a qualification never compromised their existence.

We nevertheless ought to focus on the other projects sent as a response to the NYT design challenge to realize that the most problematic characteristics of such a call are less to be found in the transformation of the wall from ugly to beautiful, than in its transformation from inert to productive. In his report, Hamilton had written, “Four of the five who submitted designs proposed making the boundary a point of innovative integration, not traditional division — something that could be seen, from both sides, as a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier.” From James Corner’s “solar energy-collecting strip that would produce what he described as a ‘productive, sustainable enterprise zone’ that attracted industry from the north and created employment for the south” to Calvin Tsao’s “enterprise zone […] as a series of small, developing cities,” we can see how the productivity and usefulness are regarded as mitigating the violence of the border when, in fact, they make it more durable by creating new dependencies on its existence. They also reproduce the North/South exploitative relationships at a local scale involving a border porosity for some (as well as goods and capitals) while making it impermeable for others as Alex Rivera potently illustrates in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer about the maquiladoras of a near future.

After having written my not-so-subtle article in 2008, I remember subsequently debating about this question with US architect and professor Ronald Rael, who, back then, was already engaged in the research work that has been recently published in the form of a book entitled Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (University of California Press, 2017). Although Rael’s approach to the wall is drastically more complex and critical than the capitalist and technocratic “solutions” offered by the architects cited above, part of his design hypotheses regarding the Wall are also attempting to make it more productive, as well as to “institutionalize through models and drawings, events that are already occurring on the wall” (source). In an interview given for another NYT article, he aptly expresses the contradiction in which he finds himself: “[Rael] makes the argument that we should view the nearly 700 miles of wall as an opportunity for economic and social development along the border — while at the same time encouraging its conceptual and physical dismantling” (Allison Arieff for the New York Times, March 10, 2017). This contradiction is the same than the one analyzed by Eyal Weizman in “The Best of All Possible Walls” (The Least of All Possible Evils, Verso, 2011) when he describes the legal action of some Palestinian lawyers and activists in the Israeli High Court of Justice in Jerusalem arguing for alternative routes for the Israeli Apartheid Wall during its construction in 2004. Weizman’s entire book is dedicated to what he calls “humanitarian violence” in its subtitle: “Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.” We can try to define this violence as the consequence of actions undertaken in an effort to mitigate a given violence but, in their compromising negotiation with that it claims to be fighting against, ends up bringing a greater legitimacy and inertia to it than if these actions had not been initiated in the first place.

The NYT’s editorial line could not be more at odds with this concept and, as such, provides one of its most illustrative examples. It is however important to observe that the fundamental difference between the NYT’s positioning and that of the Palestinian lawyers and activists that Weizman describes in their legal attempts to slightly divert the Apartheid Wall’s route in order to locally save the access of farmers to their fields and the junction of houses with the rest of Palestinian towns, is to be found in the fact that Palestinians are the first concerned by the Wall and, as such, have a legitimacy to recognize the inertia of the status quo and negotiate with it even if it brings more weight to it. On the contrary, the NYT represents the interests of a significant part of the US establishment that can afford to live with the political program of the current president when they do not benefit from it one way or another. Its negotiation with this political reality can therefore not act as the catalyst for reform that it would like to embody; on the contrary, it rather produces the profound and durable legitimization of it.

The post The New York Times and the U.S. Border Wall: A Love Story appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 18, 2017
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The screen tells us that it is 12:43pm. Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert are hanging out on the small playground of the Cité des Muguets in Chanteloup-les-Vignes (distant northwestern Paris banlieue). Their trivial conversation is interrupted by a voice coming from the car that entered the background on a higher level. “Sirs, sirs!” says the voice. “Hello sirs, it’s for the TV!” says a white female journalist from the window of her car, while her colleague has the entire upper part of the body out from the backseat window, filming the whole scene while his body remains inside the car. “Did you participate to the riots last night? Did you break something? Burnt some cars?” she continues.

– Saïd: “Hey Madam, do we look like thugs to you, or what?”
– Journalist: “Ah no, I never said…”
– Vinz: “Oh yeah? What do we look to you Madam?”
– Jounalist: “Oh, nothing, I just…”
– Hubert: “Why don’t you get off from the car? We’re not in Thoiry here!”

The tone quickly escalates and the young characters of Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic 1995 film, La Haine (written with Saïd Taghmaoui), are caught on tape insulting and throwing a stone at the TV crew — the view through the camera is the only shot from we have as spectator of the journalists’ point of view — a footage that, without doubt, would be used in a televised show that evening, deprived of the context of its production and the reason of their insults. “What’s Thoiry?” ask Vinz later. As Hubert then explains, it is a zoo (only 15 kilometers away from Chanteloup-les-Vignes) that one visits in cars — the full name of the zoo is “Safari Zoo of Thoiry.”

On November 7, 2017, a 27-year-old Black male resident of the Cité du Val Fourré in Mantes-la-Jolie (25 kilometer further West of Chanteloup-les-Vignes) was arrested by the police and handcuffed to a truck radiator in his transfer to the police station (see the photographic series about banlieue police stations to see a picture of it). His hand and arm were severely burnt from the heat and when screaming his pain, the police officers only responded with racist slurs. This news would have gone unnoticed from the French press, like so many other instances of racist police violence; yet, the young man filed a complaint for “acts of police violence with a racist dimension,” which forced most of French media to write about it. In order to illustrate their articles, a certain amount chose generic images of unrecognizable police officers; others, however, wanted to situate their articles and undertook to either photograph the Val Fourré, or use some from their stocks. These pictures strike for their remoteness from the social housing neighborhood. Some are taken from a few dozen meters outside of it (L’Humanité, Le Parisien) with practically no one visible on them, others are as far as a dozen kilometers (Evasion FM). All (to the slight exception perhaps of L’Humanité) convey the point of view of a hidden sniper in a war zone that reminds of the scene of La Haine that opens this text.

In January 2015, a few days after the assassinations of Charlie Hebdo journalists and the antisemitic murders of four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris, Fox News described how in eight areas of the French capital, shariah law was applied making of these neighborhood “no-go” zones for any non-Muslim person, including the police themselves. It did not take long for the quasi totality of the French press and politicians to be balanced between laughter and outrage at such allegations. Parisians who reside, work or pass by these areas every day deemed “ridiculous” that professional journalists could lie so bluntly.

However, if one pays attention to the limits of these areas designated by Fox News, one can recognize the contours of what used to be officially defined as “Sensitive Urban Zones” by the French government between 1996 and 2014, the overwhelming majority of which being outside the Paris municipality area, in the banlieues (see map on the right). Although designated as areas in which the French state intends to dedicate prioritized funds to improve the conditions of life of their residents (for further explanations, read the recently published article about them by Tanvi Misra), the “prioritization” that one can only observe on the ground is manifested by the police deployment and violence against these residents, most of whom are racialized subjects of a society that never undertook the decolonization of its structures — the police being the manifestation of one of their sharpest dimensions.

On the contrary of the laughter and outrage that Fox News harvested on this side of the ocean, the way the quasi-totality French press (admittedly, with a varying degree of deliberateness) characterizes the banlieues on a daily basis does not seem to be questioned nor challenged by the predominantly white viewers who never or rarely set foot in any of these neighborhoods. In May 2016, the magazine version of Le Figaro, one of the three main national newspapers, published a reportage entitled “Molenbeek sur-Seine: In Saint-Denis, Daily Islamism.” Beyond its demagogic and insulting use of the name of the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek (see past article) and the blatant lies that the articles has to offer (debunked one by one in a brilliant counter-investigation led by Sihame Assbague and Widad Ketfi), one can see that the imaginary conveyed by the cover of the magazine (visible in an important amount of newspaper kiosks of France the week of publication) is one of antagonist contrast between Christianity (i.e. whiteness) with the background embodied by the Saint-Denis basilica, and Islam, manifested here by two women wearing dark hijabs that many readers will associate to burqas, banned in French public space since 2012. It does not take a PhD in photographic analysis to realize that the parallel lines of the basilica facades indicate that the photograph was taken from great distance with a narrow-angle lens, which brings us back to the comparison of press photographers with military snipers.

One year later (May 2017), the newspaper Le Parisien published a similar reportage using the language of investigation, designating the Paris neighborhood of La Chapelle as a no-go zone (admittedly, it does not use that word) for women, because of the presence in the public space of an important amount of men (“groups of dozens of men on their own, illegal vendors, drug dealers, migrants and smugglers”). Here again, beyond the femonationalist (see the podcast interview with Sara Farris) demagogy that motivates the use of what is presented as a consensus in France (the equal right to the city for both men and women) to present a racist narrative, one can focus on the press’ stigmatization of areas of the city where white bodies find themselves in minority. The fact that La Chapelle is situated within the Paris municipality (and therefore is known and experienced by more middle-class white citizens that banlieue municipalities would) and that many of the racialized bodies that use its space can be perceived through a humanitarian narrative (many are East African asylum seekers, unhelped and policed by the authorities) may explain why counter-narratives to the one presented by the press were easier to emerge in this case — one must however acknowledge Leïla Khouiel and Nassira el Moaddem’s hard work of to present a clear counter-investigation.

The “No-Go Zone” imaginary cannot emerge by itself; it needs to be fed every day of images and commentaries that insist on the dangerous otherness that the residents of the depicted areas constitute. The violence that these images suggest or show deprived from any context, constitutes a spectacular smokescreen used to hide the deeper violence in relation to these neighborhood: the social and racial segregation that they materialize and the colonial continuum that this segregation reveal. What would happen if journalists would get off their car and leave their ‘sniper’ equipment? One cannot know for sure and there is no doubt that territorialized stigmatization would require more to be dismantled, but what’s more certain is that the press’ visual production could no longer create so easily imaginaries of zoos or warzones.

Addendum: In the case that it was not clear already, I use the term of “stigmatization” here, not merely to refer to territories and populations that would be considered poorly by the rest of society through this process but, rather, to insist that such characterization is what contributes to a continuity of colonial structures and the legitimization of police violence deployed against them.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on January 10, 2018
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On January 1, 2018, Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was indicted by the Israeli military court of Ofer (occupied West Bank) where she has been detained since her abduction by the Israeli army on December 19. Many things have already been written about her and it did not take long before she became a symbol of Palestinian resistance. If we exclude the numerous malevolent characterization of her person, and only consider the benevolent ones, we can see how some of them are problematic in what they silently imply. The insistence on her age (16 years old), the fact that she is a woman, or much worse that she’s fair-skin and blonde can become harmful when it suggests an idea of innocence that other Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli military prisons would not share. Similarly, the narratives that insisted on the fact that Ahed Tamimi’s cousin had just been shot a rubber bullet in the head before she slapped an Israeli soldier, or that she had actually been slapped first by him are important insofar that they remind instances of the violence of the apartheid and the occupation that the Tamimi family endures (that’s what this article is about); yet, they offer a problematic plea when/if they insists on this information to suggest, here again, her innocence. Ahed Tamimi is not innocent. She is not innocent of what the Israeli court accuses her, and she is not innocent in the way we might commonly say that a child is innocent. The Israeli apartheid has striped and continues to stripe any form of innocence that one could expect a child to be entitled to as we have powerlessly witnessed in the most dreadful hours of the 2014 Israeli bombardments on Gaza and the killing of three Palestinian children on the beach (see past article).

It is therefore important to let the appropriate and legitimate voices talk about her person and we others can dedicate our efforts describing and challenging what she is fighting against. Her village, Nabi Saleh, home of over 500 Palestinian residents, is situated two dozens of kilometers North-West of Ramallah in the West Bank. After the 1995 application of the Oslo Accords (signed eight years before Ahed Tamimi was born), Nabi Saleh was placed in the intermediary zone between Area A (18% of the West Bank organized in “islands”) in which the Palestinian Authority gained a theoretical autonomy — the Second Intifada among other events proved that there was, of course, no territory beyond the Israeli army’s control — and Area C (61% of the West Bank), where the Israeli occupation army exercises a continuous sovereign power. Situated in Area B, Nabi Saleh is therefore under the Palestinian Authority sovereignty for civil matters, and under a joint Israeli army-Palestinian Authority police force sovereignty for so-called “security.” The village is thus one out of many for which the Oslo Accords changed virtually nothing for their residents who have keep seeing Israeli soldiers entering their neighborhoods or even their homes — in this regard, a photo showing Israeli soldiers inside the Tamimi’s house has circulated in that matter; because I could not track down its date and source I did not wish to include it, but you can see it here — ever since the invasion of the Jordanian-ruled West Bank in 1967 by the Israeli army (see past article).

A particularity of Nabi Saleh consists in its proximity with the Israeli settlement of Halamish, where over 1,500 settlers live, despite the violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention that the existence of such a civil infrastructure on occupied territory embodies (see the other map towards the end of the article). Between them, the Road 465 that circulates exclusively in Area C and allow the optimized circulation of Israeli vehicles from Tel Aviv, as well as the gigantic US-built Nahshonim military base situated on the immediate west part of the Green Line, to settlements situated between Ramallah and Nablus. Although the access to this road is authorized to Palestinian cars on ‘normal’ days (a small part of it links Birzeit to the new town of Rawabi), the road is regularly patrolled by Israeli army vehicles and its passage through the Apartheid Wall is sanctioned by the Rantis military checkpoint that grants access only to cars bearing a yellow plate (the Israeli license color) with all passengers presenting either an Israeli passport or a work permit, the latter being potentially denied at the discretion of the soldiers.

(top) the two obstructable and heavily controlled roads leading to Nabi Saleh. (bottom) Road 465 and the Israeli settlement of Halamish.

Nabi Saleh is connected to Road 465 by two 100-meter-long and 400-meter-long small roads. Their worn-out asphalt strongly contrasts with the well-maintained one used by Israeli vehicles. But, more importantly than their material state, these two short paths that used to link the villagers to Birzeit University, Ramallah, and the rest of the south West Bank are monitored by an Israeli military watchtower and blocked by concrete and stone blocks. Despite the road being accessible a couple of hundreds of meters away from its limits, Nabi Saleh, as well as other nearby villages’ residents therefore have to head North to Salfit in order to drive back “down” to go South when they want to go to other parts of the West Bank, multiplying distances and transportation time that are already important.

Travel comparison of a similar trip Nabi Saleh-Ramallah for a Palestinian car and the Israeli settlements of Halamish and Psagot by an Israeli car. (note that the duration for the Palestinian car assumes that checkpoints are ‘unmanned’ at the time)

Between 2010 and 2016, the Nabi Saleh villagers and people standing in solidarity with them organized weekly protests — similarly to the village of Bil’in further south-west in the West Bank — against the land expropriation that the Israeli settlement enacted and, more generally, the conditions of the occupation. On December 9, 2011, Mustafa Tamimi, Ahed’s cousin, was killed during one of these protests by an Israeli soldier who deliberately shot him a tear gas canister in the face. Several other Palestinian protesters were killed since 2011, 50 were permanently disabled and 300 other were wounded. The day before Ahed Tamimi slapped an Israeli soldier right outside her family’s house — that’s what motivated her abduction by the Israeli army — her cousin Mohammad had been shot at point blank with a so-called “rubber bullet” in the head by an Israeli soldier suppressing another protest. He spent 72 hours in a medically-inducted coma and woke up disfigured.

One can see how Ahed Tamimi, her family, and the village of Nabi Saleh are less Palestinian symbols for the exceptionalism they would embody, than for what they share with all Palestinian people, families and villages/towns whose lives are (partially) characterized by their daily experience of the Israeli apartheid and their forms of coping or resistance to it. Ironically, when the Tamimi family members and other Nabi Saleh residents drive to Ramallah, they have to pass by another symbol, albeit a very different one: the new Palestinian town of Rawabi, the paradigmatic embodiment of the Palestinian Authority’s dream of a state they can rule on, despite the exclusionary violence that their diminished and selfish vision implies against refugees, Gaza residents and, to a lesser degree, Palestinians living in Israel as well as members of the diaspora (read more in past article). Rawabi incarnates also a drastic social segregation between the Palestinian bourgeoisie that, for some of them, acquired wealth through various forms of negotiation with the apartheid — although we should be careful to insist that no negotiation of the kind could fully undo the status of colonized — while others, like the Tamimis and other residents of Nabi Saleh simply refused any sort of negotiation, regardless of how even more precarious it would make their lives. Consequently, when we say “Free Ahed Tamimi!” we do not request or negotiate her liberation based on any idea of innocence; instead, we affirm that, despite being detained in jailed, she (like all other Palestinian political prisoners) is in fact free, since her refusal to negotiate better apartheid conditions makes the entire military-judicial apparatus deployed around her null at a symbolic level. That may be part of what strikes us in the videos of her slap and of the other confrontations she had with Israeli soldiers: what we call “courage” is nothing else the full experience of this freedom that humiliates the humiliating state apparatus, that surprises the “most-prepared army,” and, eventually, that decolonizes the colonized.

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Léopold Lambert – Philadelphia on February 19, 2018
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Tomorrow, Tuesday 20th February, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) will host a lecture by current Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Besides the fact that inviting such a figure of the political establishment is problematic for the personal agenda necessarily carried by a sitting mayor engaged in a “lecture tour,” as well as for the total absence of a need to hear more from hyper-mediatized personalities who already accumulate hours and hours of interventions on mass-media, we should be particularly outraged at this invitation of Emanuel in an architecture institution. It is ironic to think that, at a time when Steve Bannon, Eric Trump or Milo Yiannopoulos are invited to discuss their fascist ideology on United States’ campuses, Harvard’s department of architecture may have imagined that inviting Emanuel, a member of the Democratic Party and former Chief of Staff of President Obama, constituted a bold political positioning against the current state of U.S. politics. Emanuel’s politics are however an embodiment of the status quo and its violence against Black and Brown bodies in the U.S..

The fact that the city of Chicago is currently being sued by a class-action undertaken by Black Lives Matter activists calling for a court oversight of the Chicago police could have been an indication of the insult that this invitation constitutes for all of those who dedicate their energy struggling against structural racism in U.S. cities. Instead, the lecture’s brief uncritically reproduces a text most-likely sent by Emanuel’s public-relation office, which mentions the mayor’s “achievements” for the city of Chicago — as well as the fact that “he is married to Amy Rule, and [that] they have three children” for some reason that are difficult to understand! — as a comparison with the page featuring his February 12 UCLA lecture brief attests (see below).

The passage of this brief highlighted above mentions Emanuel’s “comprehensive public safety strategy” and his “smarter policing strategies.” One has to appreciate the extent of the uncontested hypocrisy that such a statement represents. The “smarter policing strategies” evoked here do not seem to account for what a report of the U.S. Department of Justice itself has called a “‘pattern and practice’ of unconstitutional abuses, including the use of excessive force, especially against people of color” (Mother Jones, 2017). In 2015, massive protests had also demanded Emanuel’s resignation as investigations had established that a video of Black teenager Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a white police officer on October 20, 2014 had been deliberately hidden from the public by the mayor’s office while Emanuel was running for reelection, as Bernard Harcourt explains in this New York Times article.

Admittedly, Emanuel did not transformed the Chicago Police Department into the enforcement force of structural racism it currently is. Using the most extreme instance of its brutal recent history, between 1972 and 1991, the CPD has tortured over a hundred Black men in the West Chicago Homan Square facility, as The Guardian revealed in 2015. However, he brought and still brings his contribution to this history; most recently in projecting the creation of a $95 million new police academy in the Black neighborhood of West Garfield Park, not far from Homan Square, which continues to be used by the CPD, despite the atrocities committed in it. Activists gathered under the slogan “No Cop Academy” are currently organizing against the construction of this facility and advocating for the re-attribution of its funds to the local communities of Chicago.

This police academy project, just like the various forms of displacement of low-income Black and Brown populations of Chicago (in particular in the South) caused by a municipally-encouraged gentrification, should particularly resonate to architecture students and architects for their profession’s complicity with such programs. As such, Emanuel’s lecture in an architecture education institution is not simply to be considered as political propaganda for a potential run at the Presidency in 2020 (his insistence on how his model for Chicago should be extended to the rest of the U.S. is a strong hint for it), but rather as the normalization of various forms of municipal racist structures and the recruitment of architects in this project. Given the lack of acute politicization that architects often manifest and their disproportionate demographics (91% of registered architects in the U.S. are white when 28% of this country’s population is not), chances are that they will be easily seduced by a discourse that will introduce itself as the alternative to the current U.S. administration, when it is in fact its more reasonable version.

A letter signed by the Harvard Urban Planning Organization, the GSD African American Student Union, as well as a certain amount of personalities related to the GSD or not is currently circulating. It does not miss the opportunity to remind the future role students will play in municipal politics: “As future and current designers, urban planners, policy-makers, organizers, and educators, we cannot disregard the people who are in danger because of Rahm Emanuel’s administration.” We can only hope that the signatories will manage to be heard by the students and faculty who will attend the infamous lecture as some have succeeded to do during the February 12 lecture in UCLA.

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Léopold Lambert – Barcelona on May 10, 2018
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This article was originally written in French for the second issue of Aman Iwan L’eau fait la pirogue (2018). When translated into English for a design/art magazine that should remain nameless, it was censored and “put on hold.” Consequently, I am publishing it here.

To observe that water is a luxury inaccessible to many has become a cliché of the humanitarian discourse. What this narrative tends to leave asides are the political systems determining the unequal conditions in access to water, whether it is capitalism and its privatizations, or colonialism and its ethnic segregation of this access. Similarly, the so-called “international community” can, at times, recognize the illegally of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (cf. Resolution 2234 voted by the UN Security Council in December 2016) but does not seem to consider the totality of the territorial, social, administrative, judiciary, policing, and resource-management apparatuses that constitute the Israeli apartheid in Palestine – the term “Palestine” designates here the historical region that now includes Israel, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

Before even evoking water as a resource necessary to human survival, we can address the access to the three seas of Palestine (the Mediterranean Sea, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee) as fundamentally restrained through the various apparatuses that restrict Palestinian movements:
– All Israeli citizens – this includes the 1.8 million of Palestinians – have a total access to the coasts of these three seas, to the exception of the coast along the Gaza Strip since the 2005 Israeli disengagement. They even have full access to the East coast of the Sea of Galilee since the invasion and subsequent occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
– The 260,000 Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem, as well as the 140,000 Palestinians of the West Bank owning a working permit allowing them to cross the checkpoints of the Apartheid Wall also virtually benefit from such a full access to the coast, without being authorized to live there.
– The 2.3 million of Palestinians living in West Bank without a permit – it includes 750,000 refugees – have no access to the seas. Despite the fact that 30% of the Dead Sea is situated in the West Bank (50% in Jordan and 20% in Israel), its coasts are controlled by the occupation army and the Israeli settlements. Crossing the border to Jordan give them a virtual access to the sea, but the long hours of wait and humiliation at the border checkpoint of Allenby Bridge operated by Israel make such practice particularly unlikely.
– The 1.85 million of Palestinians living in Gaza (65% of whom are refugees) have only access to the Mediterranean coast situated within the Strip, and fisher boats are prevented to go any further than nine nautical miles (16.7 kilometers) offshore by the Israeli Navy.

– The 3.1 million of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon do not have access to any part of Palestine since their (or their parents or grandparents) violent expulsion by Zionist paramilitary groups in 1948.

Such a non-exhaustive breakdown illustrates well how the Israeli apartheid does not solely divide the peoples of Palestine in two: Israelis and Palestinians, but also how within these two categories, it implements layers of hierarchization depending on essentialized bodies’ location or social/political statuses.

The access to running and domestic water is also particularly symptomatic of the way the apartheid is inscribed in the daily lives of everyone in Palestine. In November 2016, the World Bank published an alarming report on the situation of drinkable water in Gaza, insisting on the fact that only 3 to 10% of Palestinians living there have access to such water. The always-growing density of this small 365-square-kilometer territory, the Israeli blockade in collaboration with Egypt since 2007, as well as the massive bombardments and invasions of 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014 have transformed the Gaza water infrastructure into a very fragile and decrepit. The aquifer itself is contaminated and Palestinians have to get their drinking water from small private desalination infrastructure, creating an additional layer of social inequality.

The 320 million of cube meters that the West Bank aquifers contain are, on the other hand, exploitable, but since the 1967 invasion and the military occupation that followed, they are managed by Israel. 80% of this water are put aside for Israelis (including the 400,000 settlers who live in the West Bank) despite the fact that they also benefit from the coastal aquifers, as well as others situated in Israel. This is how the Palestinians of the West Bank, despite benefiting for 90% of them to running water, have to restraint themselves to 70 liters of water per day, which contrasts with the 300 liters Israelis use per day, as well as the 100 liters per day that the World Health Organization recommends. Each year, dozens of wells dug by Palestinians are demolish by the Israeli army and their owners are judged in military courts.

Although we, architects, describe more often the architectural embodiment of the Israeli apartheid, water provides us with a particularly potent illustration. It involves as much the massive territorial dispossessions that Palestinian experience since 1948, the spatial and administrative control of occupied territories, and other more discreet and domestic aspects of a colonized daily life. Far from the episodic spectacular violence through which we tend to describe Palestine, the discreet violence that control, police, affect, and restrain each aspect of life, including the most fundamental necessities that water embodies, is perhaps a much more acute description of life as experienced by Palestinians every day.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on May 21, 2018
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Article originally written in 2016 for an architecture book (hence the pedagogical tone to describe the space of the French colonial continuum) that was never published. 

In January 1, 2016, the “Grand Paris,” (Greater Paris Authority) became an official governance entity. Despite the exclusions of key banlieue (suburbs) municipalities from its territory and the many foreseeable issues that will emerge from it, the creation of the Grand Paris affords the opportunity to rethink the territoriality of the city, in particular the social and racial segregation that the Northern and Eastern banlieues have been materializing since the 1950s. Allocating these segregated spaces to its working class, in particular the one formed by racialized populations, most of whom are former colonized people or their descendants, the French State has since then maintained the banlieue population in a state of subcitizenry, often materialized and enforced through their architecture. One of the things that the fragmented governance of municipalities over a greater authority however enabled is the high local decisional degree (see such an agency in the article/map about the distribution of social housing in the Greater Paris). This is particularly the case of the so-called “banlieues rouges” (red suburbs); these multiple towns of North and South Paris that have been repeatedly electing a communist mayor during the second half of the 20^th century. Ivry-sur-Seine, a 60,000-inhabitant municipality situated on the immediate South-East periphery of Paris municipality, is one of these “banlieues rouges.” Since the end of the Nazi occupation, its residents have indeed consistently elected mayors members of the French Communist Party.

One of the particularities of such municipalities is to bring a significant emphasis on social and affordable housing to accommodate their population, often in situation of economic precariousness. The large residential complex situated at the very center of Ivry-sur-Seine’s town was partially thought through this agenda in a municipality that counts 38% of its total housing as social one — since 2000, a piece of legislation forces municipalities of more than 3,000 inhabitants to count at least 20% of social housing on its territory before the same legislation was updated in 2013 to bring this percentage to 25% before 2025. Although the most radical elements of Ivry’s architecture (social housing and co-property) are well-known to be the design of architect Jean Renaudie (1925-1981), the patriarchal history of architecture often forgets the fact that none of this architectural project would have been possible without the continuous work of Renée Gailhoustet (1929- ), first as the architect of the towers Raspail, Lénine, and Spinoza (1963-1970), then as the architect-in-chief of the town, in charge of the master plan of the 105-hectare complex, who asked Renaudie to design three of the ten buildings involved — the seven others being designed by Gailhoustet herself. Such a common omission attests of the struggle that female architects had (and continue to have) to undertake in order to see their work recognized to the same degree than their male counterparts.

Admittedly, the three architectures designed by Renaudie in collaboration with Gailhoustet strike for their audacity: the buildings Danielle Casanova, Jeanne Hachette, and Jean-Baptiste Clément, named respectively after a Communist resistant to the Nazi occupation during WWII, a 16^th-century French heroin, and a member of the 1871 Paris Commune. The multiplicity of sharp angles, the bare concrete, and the complexity of both public and private sections strongly contribute to the uniqueness of produced spaces advocated by Renaudie. The reception of this aesthetic is somehow ambiguous: opinions of the residents and neighbors often diverge but many seem to attribute a certain sense of ugliness to the complex, while members of the so-called “creative class” appreciate its complexity. This led the population of the co-property to switch from a ‘regular’ low middle class to young families of designers and architects, which foresees a gentrifying process exceeding the limits of Paris municipality. All however appreciate the fact that no apartment has an alter ego. In the case of the Casanova building, this uniqueness strongly contrasts with the typical plans of banlieue social housing that tends to repeat dozens of times the same simplistic layout.

This notion of plan is interesting to investigate since the buildings designed by Renaudie are resolutely insisting on the creative complexity of their planar layout, while the others, designed by Gailhoustet seem to have brought a more intense emphasis on their sections. Consequently, the Renaudie buildings have a labyrinthine quality, while the connection between the various floors are often more simple. On the contrary, Gailhoustet’s buildings involve a more ‘rational’ plan but take advantage of the multiple changes of levels to produce uniqueness. In both cases, the limits between semi-public and private spaces, in particular the generously planted gardens, are significantly blurred, thus allowing the city to penetrate within the residential complex.

The ground of the complex is one its important components in both its continuity and discontinuity. While the ground of the street permeates at time within the buildings through either interior or exterior stairs or slopes, distributing each floor through semi-public pathways, the discontinued ground of the terraces and rooftops made of a cultivable earth allow small and mid-size trees and vegetation to contrast with the concrete through their breathing porosity. As such, the complex radically differentiates itself from the model of that time: the podium. One kilometer north of the complex, the residential tower neighborhood of Les Olympiades in Paris’s 13^th arrondissement, built during the same years than the Ivry complex, used such a paradigm and organized itself around a large internal podium. The complexity of the Ivry layout strongly contrasts with such a simplistic typology. It is as if each triangle of its ground corresponded to fragments of a larger podium that acquired their autonomy and, with it, a difference of height. Furthermore, this fragmentation of the ground allows natural light to penetrate in the lower floors where such a thing is usually impossible under a large podium.

The flat ground of the Place Voltaire is also worth noticing. This octagon square is the negative space formed by the buildings designed by Renaudie, as well as the more recent library bearing the name of poet Antonin Artaud who died and was buried in Ivry in 1948. This public space is simultaneously a meeting point for children and teenagers chatting, playing football or doing a one-wheeler on their scooters, as well as a passage for the residents to access the subway station. It is the core of the residential complex and, by extension, of the city center as the City Hall plaza nearby seems more dedicated to a contemplation of the heritage building of the City Hall than to gather residents in a practice of the polis.

The Ivry-sur-Seine residential complex has also been instrumental beyond its territorial limits. After the end of the operation, Gaihoustet was commissioned with ten additional projects, including eight in the Paris banlieues. Her residential project in the city center of the charismatic city of Saint Denis (north banlieue) in particular, strikes for its numerous similarities with Ivry. Similarly, Renaudie’s methods demonstrated in Ivry, were later applied on other large scale residential projects, in particular in the context of large residential complexes in Givors and Saint-Martin-d’Hères in the South of France. Although their aesthetics is clearly identifiable, both architects’ projects manifest the uniqueness of each (public, semi-public, and private) space created through their architecture as demonstrated in Ivry. Built in spaces essentialized by Parisians as insecure and generic, such uniqueness comes as an additional affirmation that the banlieues are the actual site of creation in French cities, contrasting with the authoritarian and militarized, repetitive and frozen urban schemes such as the Hausmannian one in Paris.

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (2014-2018) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on June 17, 2018
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This article, like a few others, is the report of walk done this morning in Nanterre around the location of two of the Algerian shantytowns that the northwestern Paris banlieue has hosted in the early 1960s. In visiting their past location and their direct environments, we encountered four commemorative plates related to France’s colonial history, which are more descriptive through what they keep shut rather than through what they say.

The first one was found on the former location of the largest shanty town in Nanterre: La Folie. No trace is left of what was the home of 10,000 people and one of the key site of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) towards the end of the Revolution (1954-1962). The Hauts-de-Seine Prefecture, situated in part on the former self-built town, even gathers an important amount of police vehicles that recalls the police harassment that most its inhabitants were experiencing on a daily basis. Stuck between the prefecture and an insurance company headquarters, a small piece of vacant land suggests the absence of memorialization of La Folie shantytown.

This is where we encounter the first commemorative plate. Situated next to a staircase next to the insurance company building, this is where one would expect to find a trash can. The granite plate (of reasonable proportion, one has to admit) reads: “To the memory of the numerous Algerians killed in the bloody suppression of the October 17, 1961 pacific demonstration.” Here again, the silence is louder than the words uttered. The fact that many of the Algerians killed during the massacre of October 1961 (see the extensive article about this historical episode in past article) were living in this very space cannot be guessed based on the surroundings of the plate. The language also fits with the French State’s description of this event, reluctantly acknowledged decades after the massacre: the amount of Algerians killed is to be left unknown (historians have estimated between 200 and 300 of them) and, more importantly, the perpetrators are not to be cited. Charles De Gaulle as President, Michel Debré as Prime Minister, Roger Frey as Minister of the Interior, and the infamous Maurice Papon as prefect of police of Paris in charge of annihilating the FLN in the French capital are not cited, nor are the thousands of police officers mobilized to suppress the pacific demonstrations of Algerians in Paris gathered against Papon’s implementation of a curfew on their sole persons during the state of emergency. In France, the designation of responsibilities on commemorative plates is relatively new. Only in the 1990s did plates start to incorporate the active complicity of the French police to the arrest and deportation of the 76,000 Jews during the Nazi occupation. When it comes to colonial and slavery crimes, those responsible are never pointed.

The second plate is located about 50 meters further, also on the location of the former shanty town. This one incorporates the names of all the people it means to commemorate. However, these names are not those of Algerians living in La Folie. They are instead names of French soldiers from Nanterre killed in the colonial wars in Morocco, Tunisia and, of course, Algeria between 1952 and 1962. Only the study of historical aerial photographs allows to understand that this monument is situated at what used to be the very core of the self-built town of La Folie. While the names of each (drafted for most of them) French soldiers who died fighting for France to keep its colonial grasp in North Africa is celebrated, the lives of Algerians who inhabited this site and, for some of them, were massacred by the colonial order in the streets of Paris, are invisibilized.

The third plate takes us to the site of another shanty town, located along the Seine River at the northwestern limit of Nanterre. Here again, visitors and residents are given no clue that this park, situated between a highway and a residential neighborhood, contains an extremely telling political geology when it comes to the territorial management of colonial and ‘postcolonial’ populations. The plate is indeed small and discreetly situated in a small street between two recently built residential buildings; however, its content was produced in dialogue with former residents, which gives it a much more expressive memorialization. It reads “The “White City” is the name that was given to the transit quarter Gutenberg by its residents. Erected in 1971, the 200 housing units shared between 16 buildings situated where the highway currently is, hosted 182 families, all coming from the Nanterre shantytowns. Although the duration of the transit quarters was scheduled to be between 3 to 5 years, the white city were for its residents a space of shared life, irrigated by human warmth, as well as a fraternity and solidarity spirit at all times.” The plate also shows a photograph of the “White City,” but not of the shantytown that the transit quarters replaced.

This set of historical aerial photographs offers an understanding of the political geology of this small piece of Nanterre territory: in 1960, the shantytown was standing in a relatively rural area. No latter than two years later, a transit quarter called André-Loucet was built in its immediate vicinity. In 1966, we can see the construction of a permanent social housing complex that still exist today under the name “Cité Komarov” (after the Sovietic cosmonaut, as it was often the case in communist municipalities). In 1971, the transit quarters Gutenberg, or White City is built while the shanty town has been destroyed. The two transit quarters, although designed to exist only for a few years to host the shantytown residents, can be seen to exist until the mid 1980s, i.e. respectively twenty years and fifteen years after their construction. Although the thermal conditions of these buildings were certainly better than the self-built houses of the shantytown, the transit quarters are characterized by the absolute lack of urban quality and the optimization of a policing of space contrasting with the labyinthine urbanism of the shantytown. This is however where important contributions to French antiracism activists occurred in the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Mogniss H. Abdallah’s 2012 Rengainez, on arrive!). Finally, the infrastructure (first a railroad bridge in the late 1970s and a highway bridge in the late 1990s) and the construction of a park in the 2010s achieve to dissimulate the past existence of the shantytown and the transit quarters.

On our way back to the train station, we encounter a middle school and, on its fence a fourth plate that reads “To the memory of ABDENNBI GUEMIAH, Victim of intolerance when he was 19 years old, former student of the André Doucet middle school.” Anyone not familiar with the history of the neighborhood could not possibly guess what this plate is referring to. Abdennbi Guemiah was a resident of the White City and local antiracist activist. On October 23, 1982, he was shot and killed by a neighbor with a hunting gun, like several other Arab and Black youths have in the 1980s. In 2014, a street in Nanterre is named after him, but here again, the terminology of “victim” and “intolerance” is invoked, rather than the one of murder and racism. As for the three first plates, commemoration here is made through a deafening silence.

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (June 2018) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on July 9, 2018
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Yesterday, Sunday 8th July 2018, the architecture collective Adresse and the political organization La Révolution est en marche (The Revolution In Action, a name as a commentary to President Macron’s political party, La République en marche) led by activist Hadama Traoré were gathering a few dozens of residents of Aulnay-sous-Bois (northeastern Paris banlieue municipality), as well as their supporters to present the architectural project they designed as an alternative to the planned demolition of a building known by many in Seine-Saint-Denis: the “Galion.” Built in the 1960s and adopting a longitudinal architecture bridging over a street, it is the most charismatic building of the cité des 3000 that was aimed to host the workers of the Citroën factory nearby, and was recently the site of several demonstrations to demand that truth be made in the death of local 24-year-old Tunisian French, Yacine, whose family suspected the police to have disguised the evidence of its responsibility. Almost a year later, graffiti reading “Vérité Pour Yacine” (Truth for Yacine) and posters calling for mobilisation are still plethora in the 3000, including on the walls of the Galion itself.

Its colonial name notwithstanding, the Galion is a building that constituted for many years the commercial center of not only Aulnay but also of the neighboring municipalities — a friend from La Courneuve present yesterday was telling me that she would often come with her family to do groceries on Sunday afternoons like yesterday’s — as well as the homes of 180 families who were living in the social housing units of the upper floors and who have been evicted and rehoused in the recent years. Aulnay is currently the site of deep territorial modifications as part of the “Grand Paris” project: the construction of a new subway line a few dozens of meters from the Galion and, like for many other banlieue municipalities, a transformation of housing that develops various forms of gentrification. The destruction of the Galion is a fundamental part of this policy; hence the importance of the fight led by Hadama Traoré to have it renovated and transformed for Aulnay’s current inhabitants, rather than destroyed to make room for new wealthier ones, attracted by the future proximity with the subway.

Traoré has therefore asked for the help of young architects (Selim Zouaoui, Karima Lebsir, as well as a few others) who grew up in the banlieues and were recently trained in architecture schools in Paris before forming the collective Adresse, which aims to work on a range of banlieue architectural projects in collaboration with current residents. They therefore presented their proposition for the Galion project yesterday, along with the artists with whom they collaborate (Joel Degbo, Nathalie Muchamad, and two others, absent yesterday) in order to work with the residents and neighbors’ plural memories linked with the Galion. Intrigued locals as well as relatives, friends, and supporters of Traoré thus gathered and listened to an introduction of the project from the perspective of political activism (Traoré), architecture (Zouaoui) and art (Degbo & Muchamad).

At that point, it ought to be strongly noted that architectural projects that claim to collaborate with local residents are to be always considered with high suspicion. More often than not, this revival of a trend born in the 1970s (whose clear failures and dangers seem to have been gone unnoticed by many architects since then), constitutes a way for outsider architects or artists (often paid by local municipalities that favor a simulacrum of politics) to construct the illusion of legitimacy while the inhabitants’ interests are put in the background, if considered at all. This often comes from the idea that architects have of themselves: their education oriented around the aim of “problem-solving” — something I regularly rant against — often combined with the privilege of their person within society — in the West, architects remain overwhelmingly white and from middle or upper-class backgrounds — makes up for projects that, at best, produce nothing and, at worst, participate to the processes of racial and social exclusion that gentrification and the colonial management of territory constitute.

Although a collective like Adresse and their collaborators should always remain cautious of such a risk — architecture being a discipline that enables the exercise of power, the legitimacy for one to practice it can never be total — their positioning strongly contrasts with the one adopted by those described above: their incarnated knowledge of the banlieues is natural and internalized as they grew up and continue to live in them for some — such knowledge incites them more to humbleness than arrogance — and their close collaboration with and for the political organization of La Révolution est en marche makes it impossible for them to adopt the usual apolitical attitude of architects who positively refuse to see the antagonist relationship of power between the authorities (municipalities, regions, the state, etc.) and predominantly-racialized residents living in economically precarious conditions. The discourse itself is resolutely different: when Zouaoui declares “it is our memories that are being destroyed when they destroy our buildings as they do everywhere” (quoted from memory), it is far from a universal “us” that he is mobilizing but, instead, one that gathers the multitude of banlieue residents whose families were once colonial subjects of a country whose political representatives and dominant population (“they”) have since never ceased to impose their side of this historical relation, while denying or obliterating subaltern narratives. This collaboration, on the contrary of many others, could therefore establish an important precedent whose effects would go far beyond the narrow range of the discipline of architecture: one that would actually prove effective against the dominant political and urban segregative and dispossessing project to which so many of Adresse‘s fellow architects take part.

All following photographs by Léopold Lambert (July 8, 2018) ///

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Ella Martin-Gachot – Paris on July 12, 2018
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On June 19, 2018 Samia Henni, Hassina Mechaï, and Léopold Lambert participated in a round table discussion organized in parallel of the opening of Samia Henni’s exhibit “Discreet Violence : L’architecture et la guerre française en Algérie” at La Colonie in Paris. After having been presented in Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Johannesburg, the exhibit made its French premiere. The round table was opened by an introduction by Kader Attia, Algerian French artist and founder of La Colonie. You can listen to a recording of the full round-table discussion here, split up into 5 parts (introduction, the three different presentations, and the public debate). Nb. the recordings are all in French.

During the round table, Samia Henni, who recently published her book Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria, presented her work on the politics of suppression of slums in Algiers that the French colonial authorities had implemented during the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) and the application of these practices in Paris, particularly in the suburb of Nanterre. Samia spoke of the connections between the “Sections administratives urbaines” (Urban Administrative Sections) in Algiers and the “Société nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs algériens à Paris” (National Company for the Construction of Housing for Algerian Workers in Paris) and of the interchangeability of French civil servants between the colonized land (Algeria) and metropolitan France.

Following Samia’s presentation, Léopold Lambert gave a spatial history of the massacre of Algerians by the Paris police on October 17, 1961 in Paris. October 17 marks an important date in the trajectory of the French “état d’urgence” (state of emergency) that constitutes the topic of his next book. Using various geographical and historical sources, Léopold demonstrated the fact that the event, which is usually perceived as a localized and isolated moment of violence on the part of the Parisian police against Algerian protesters, was actually the result of the mobilization of numerous spaces and temporalities in and around Paris, while providing the context (also explored by Samia) of Maurice Papon’s time as Police Chief for the Seine region and of the state of emergency declared in 1961 (lasting until 1962).

To conclude the presentation part of the round table discussion, Hassina Mechaï discussed the book she co-wrote with Sihem Zine, L’état d’urgence (permanent) or (Permanent) State of Emergency. From a legal point of view, the authors questioned the usefulness, effectiveness, and impacts of this exceptional “state” that, since October 2017, has been integrated into French common law. Hassina spoke of previous states of emergency, like that of 1961-1962, and of the people she met while doing research, who are living the searches of their apartments and businesses, the house arrests, the closing of places of worship, and the pervasive discrimination that go along with this legislation.

After these rich presentations, the discussion was opened up to the audience. Three-time contributor to the Funambulist Françoise Vergès offered her insight on the politics of decolonial space. Another member of the crowd stood up and shared with us that he is himself a survivor of the October 1961 massacre. Later on, we moved upstairs for the opening of the exhibit, with Samia Henni elaborating on the different photographs and archival material.

Please do visit the exhibit which will stay at La Colonie until July 14, 2018. For a more detailed description of the exhibit, see below.

Brief of the exhibition: During the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) or the Algerian War for Independence, civil authorities and the French military intensely reorganized the urban and rural territory of Algeria, radically transforming its built environment, rapidly implanting new infrastructures, and strategically creating new businesses in order to protect France’s economic interests in Algeria and to keep the country under French colonial dominion (in place since 1830).

“Discreet Violence” presents only one of these territorial transformations: the construction of camps under military control, mildly baptized as “reunification centers”, in rural Algerian areas. These spaces were a result of the creation of areas where free fire was prohibited, and they produced a massive forced displacement of the Algerian population. Special military units, called “Sections administratives spécialisées” (or Specialized Administrative Sections), supervised the evacuation of the prohibited zones, the “reunification” of the Algerian population, the construction of temporary and permanent camps, the conversion of several permanent camps into villages, and the daily surveillance of Algerian civilians. The goal of this “reunification” was to isolate the Algerian population from the influence of members of the national liberation front and to hinder potential psychological and material help.

Based on French military photographs françaises and on films produced by the propaganda teams of the Service cinématographique des armées (SCA) or Cinematographic Army Service and other private and public sources, “Discreet Violence: architecture et guerre française en Algérie” presents certain aspects of the evacuation of the rural Algerian population, the process of the construction of these camps and living conditions in the camps. The exhibit describes the way in which the French colonial regime attempted to divert the military aims of the camps following a media scandal in 1959. It unveils the intrinsic relationships between architecture, military measures, colonial politics, and the planned production and distribution of visual recordings. Today, the SCA has become the institution of defense audiovisual communication and production (ECPAD) and is still active in war zones where the French army involved.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on July 18, 2018

Dear readers,

For the first time, I am making a call aiming at hiring two free-lancers (potential interns may apply too) to work part-time for The Funambulist! Following is what I hope to be a precise-enough description of the researched profiles for these two significantly different positions. The Funambulist is a structure with a small budget and staff but, as I often argued, it is crucial for me that the ethical standard of the magazine’s production be as high as its contents; as such, if you believe that this call contains unfair components, feel free to let us know:

FIRST POSITION:
Part-time assistant working from the office in Paris ///

• 12 to 14 hours per week, 4 afternoons a week, for at least 6 months starting the end of August (depending on the applicant’s schedule, location, and physical ability to access the 5th-floor office, some of these weekly hours of work could be done remotely).
• the job consists mostly in the management of the magazine’s logistics: processing orders, and subscriptions, organization of the files, email exchanges with subscribers, bookstores, and institutions, as well as attending to part of the online communication on social networks.
• a smaller part of the job will consist in taking part in the editorial process and decisions, as it is understood that this job is also an opportunity for the applicant to learn about the making and sustaining a politically-driven magazine.
• the applicant should be enthusiastic, trustworthy, and rigorous. They should also have an acute knowledge of the contents of the magazine and its editorial line.
• the applicant should speak fluent English; skills in French, or in any other language constitute a significant plus but are not required.
• skills in software such as illustrator, photoshop, indesign, or premiere/imovie constitute a significant plus, but are not required.
• the job is paid 600 euros per month (specific skills regarding the communication part of the job, in particular video-editing, could increase this rate).
• interviews for the position will happen throughout August, and will take place at The Funambulist office in Paris.

SECOND POSITION:
Part-time sales-representative working remotely ///

• this mission will consist in defining and implementing strategies to increase the magazine’s reach and incomes internationally. This includes (although not exclusively) the increase of institutional subscriptions and potential new readers.
• the applicant is expected to spend at least 10 hours a week working on the mission.
• the mission does not require to be situated in a particular geography of the world — the access to an already-established network of contacts constitutes however a significant plus.
• the applicant should have a form of training in the domain of sales, as well as experience in the publication world, and will have to work within the ethical framework defined for the mission.
• the applicant should be self-motivated, inventive, and responsive. Importantly, they should also have an acute knowledge of the contents of the magazine and its editorial line.
• the selected applicant will be paid 600 euros per month in addition of commissions on sales to be negotiated.
• interviews for the position will happen throughout August, and will happen through video conference.

All applicant may apply with a cover letter and a CV (the former being more important than the latter) sent at info@thefunambulist.net. Selected applicants will be invited to interview for one of the two positions. All applicants will receive an answer, but they might need to exercise patience.

Thank you very much.

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Léopold Lambert – Yugawara on August 9, 2018
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I recently traveled to Algeria to do some researches for my next book dedicated to the space of the French state of emergency; I am hoping to write a few of these non-rigorous articles about it soon but, in the meantime, I would like to write a short piece about a national liberation struggle against the French colonial empire we usually evoke less often than the Algerian Revolution: the Moroccan liberation struggle. One moment of this struggle is of particular importance when evoking the relationship between colonialism and architecture, in particular when comparing it with the strategies adopted by the successive French governments in Algeria in the years that will follow this specific moment. The event considered here consists in two days of strike and protests organized by the Moroccan worker union confederation (UGSCM) and the main Moroccan nationalist party (Istiqlal) in December 1952, described precisely by Jim House in an essay entitled “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale?” (The Impossible Control of a Colonial City?”, Genèses vol. 86, 2012). Although this article is partially motivated by the attempt to translate some components of House’s depiction of the 1952 strike (what the first part of this article is dedicated to), it also finds its motive in the absence in his paper of consideration for the massive urban transformation that the colonial authorities were undertaking at that time. This, as well as what it tells us about architects’ responsibilities in the colonial counter-revolution, will therefore make for the second part of this article.

An Anti-Colonial Event in Casablanca’s Carrières Centrales ///

On December 5, 1952, Tunisian nationalist and union member Ferhat Hached is assassinated in a plot that seems to involve the French colonial authorities in Tunisia. As a transnational response, the Moroccan UGSCM and the Istiqlal organize a general strike in Morocco on December 7. This strike finds its core in the shantytown of the Carrières Centrales (now Hay Mohammadi) in Casablanca where over 130,000 colonized people reside. Some of them moved here from rural areas of the country; others were displaced in 1938 from the city center after a typhoid epidemic was used by the authorities as a pretext to destroy smaller shantytowns adjacent to the “European quarters” and expel their residents outside of what were then the city limits. The massive shantytown that therefore exists in the beginning of the 1950s is considered by the French authorities as a political threat to the colonial order — we will see in the second part in what the subsequent counter-revolutionary strategy consisted. Consequently, a specific suppression plan has been created to respond to any anti-colonial movement in the Carrières Centrales: in addition to the French and Moroccan (the latter being under the orders of the makhzen) police officers, the colonial authorities have imagined several layers of military reinforcements such as Moroccan or Senegalese tirailleurs (infantrymen), goums (Berbere military units), and other branches of the colonial army.

The strike originally organized by the Istiqlal is called a “mouse strike.” It consists in simply refusing to leave home to go to work. In the evening of December 7 however, town criers circulates in the shanty town to declare that the strike is forbidden and that everyone will have to open their shops like any regular day. Moments later, the police open fire on residents who were throwing stones at them in response to the interdiction. Demonstrators gather in front of the local police station; some are shot and killed. Police officers then undertake to search the shantytown and enters systematically into the houses, while nationalist activists are arrested. The next day, settlers who live close by are evacuated and more shot are fire by the police in the neighborhood, killing in particular a 15 year-old boy who was digging a trench inside his house to protect his family. In the afternoon of December 8, a massive march is organized, leaving the Moroccan poor neighborhoods and heading to the city center, towards the Union House, where a meeting is scheduled. When later describing the events, the French press evoke the “attempt to invade the European city.” The police fires and kill at least 14 people in the march. Many others are arrested. Some are released in small numbers among a crowd of settlers who proceed to assault them. Meanwhile, important military reinforcements are called to circumscribes poor Moroccan neighborhoods. Scout planes fly at low altitude above these neighborhoods in an effort that has as much to do with surveillance than it has with intimidation. Similarly, light tanks and machine guns parade around the Carrières Centrales. Within the neighborhood itself, the Moroccan police force residents to open their shops and destroy those that remain close, in what prefigures the French response to the FLN-organized general strike in Algeria five years later.

During the days that follow, thousands of police officers and soldiers are deployed in Moroccan neighborhoods, and 1206 people are judged guilty of harming the state orders by the colonial courts. Some of the arrested protesters are tortured by electricity in police stations — here again prefiguring the following years of the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). 51 French union members, close from the Moroccan Nationalist movement are also deported back to France. As it is often the case with colonial massacres (the state having a strong interest to prevent the archive to exist), the number of protesters killed during these days of suppression remain unclear, but is believed to be between 100 and 300. (Jim House, “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale?“, 2012).

Architects and the Counter-Revolution ///

As mentioned above, the information provided by Jim House in his essay are extremely valuable, but also miss to mention how the Carrières Centrales were simultaneously the site of a drastic urban transformation that remains today well-known in the history of architecture. The political and historical account therefore fails to involve architecture and, unsurprisingly, most of the architectural account fails to involve the violence of colonialism or does so with too little insistence. During his tenure as director of the Morocco Department of Urban Planning (1946 to 1952) French architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard designed a master plan for the Carrières Centrales, along with his collective, whose name, GAMMA for Groupe d’Architectes Modernes Marocains (Group of Moroccan Modern Architects), deceives about which kind of architects were involved (“Moroccan” here means French and Western in Morocco, such as Shadrach Woods or Georges Candilis).

As mentioned above, this master plan and its recognizable 8×8 meter grid, as well as his (more or less orientalist) attempts to adapt it to the Moroccan population, belongs to the canonical history of architecture. In the rare occasions that the political context of this project is mentioned (not ‘simply’ the French colonial order in Morocco, but also the suppression of the Moroccan Nationalist movement), such a context is understood as the background of the project, rather than its very essence. This is, in my opinion, a fundamental dimension to understand, not simply the role of architecture here; not even only the relationship that architecture maintains with colonialism, but even more broadly, the very function of architecture in its crystallization and enforcement of political orders (and, in a very few occasions perhaps, disorders).

In other words, we should not simply be struck by the fact that the 1952 massacre happened while the urban transformation of the shanty town was happening — if anyone knows of any photographs that would show the strike in relation to the construction site, please contact me! — we should consider this transformation as the colonial effort to shut the anti-colonial movement down, as it will later be the case in Algeria in the late 1950s with the construction of massive housing complexes by the French authorities as the second counter-revolutionary wave (after and simultaneously with the legal and military one) against the anti-colonial Revolution. Of course, the project itself is not in response to the 1952 strike but, rather, it constitutes a preemptive response to such a political struggle. Affirming this is not a proposal to reread history through the prism of a colonial conspiracy involving architects and urban planners at every level of military and administrative decisions. I have not personally read of any account involving Ecochard and the military regarding the counter-revolutionary characteristics of his urban design and do not know if any exist — nor did I for Fernand Pouillon in Algiers a few years later. However, the degree of intentionality manifested by architects when it comes to participating to the colonial order is secondary when the clients consist precisely in the guardians of such an order, and that architects consist in members of the settler society. Furthermore, through its extreme valuing of rationality, modern architecture, perhaps more than any others, embody the ideal spatial paradigm when it comes to population control (see this 2014 article about Brasilia for instance) and the framing of most aspects of the daily life of its residents. The various modernist housing complexes built by the French colonial authorities in Morocco and Algeria should therefore be seen at both political and operative levels for what they are: architectural counter-revolutionary weapons.

Architecture and the Anti-Colonial Revolution /// 

As expressed countless times on The Funambulist, I am convinced that architecture has a propensity to embody the colonial order. Its intrinsic violence easily materializes the walls that the colonial state necessitate to sustain itself, and nothing is easier than to extrude a line traced a map where borders are colonial constructions. A part of me still believes that an anti-colonial design can be achieved if somehow one accepts to embrace such an intrinsic violence in favor of an anti-colonial agenda. Nevertheless, the relationship between architecture and the anti-colonial revolution is never greater than when the order embodied by the former is subverted (voluntarily or not) in favor of the latter. Although the liberation of Morocco occurred in 1956 and that it is doubtful that such a process had been already achieved by then in the Ecochard grid in the Carrières Centrales, the visit of the modern architecture of current Hay Mohammadi certainly suggests such a subversion in the difficulty we might even experience trying to recognize it. Of course, the subversion here was mostly based on the appropriation of a domestic space for daily needs, not on the political anti-colonial effort; yet, just like settler architects do not need to voluntarily contribute to the colonial order to actually do so, colonized and post-colonial residents (Hay Mohammadi remains a proletarian neighborhood today) do not need to voluntarily subvert this order to actually do so. If we may conclude with an ultimate comparison with Algiers, the Casbah did not need to be politically transformed to constitute an ideal spatial condition for the Algerian Revolution, its continuous existence in discrepancy with colonial logic, as well as its embodiment of a multitude of rational processes (in opposition to a uniform one, always manifested in a master plan), made it this way. May the following photographs in comparison to the previous one of the Ecochard grid therefore represent less the effectiveness of a past anti-colonial struggle, than the symbol of its potentiality in the present or the future in the subversion to the colonial order they incarnate.

Acknowledgments: this article could only be written today because of an invitation in Hay Mohammadi by friends Karima El Kharraze and Hélène Harder in 2016, and the generous introduction to the proletarian history of the city by Karim Rouissi. I also take advantage of this extra paragraph to say that I have, of course, read several texts on the matter by Marion Von Osten, and I am therefore necessarily influenced one way or another by her work in this article; yet, I remain unable to articulate an answer to it as her discourse seems to be formulated more for the purpose of architecture history than for the history of colonialism and anti-colonial movements approached through the perspective of architecture as I’m interested to do.

All following photographs in Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca by Léopold Lambert (2016) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 10, 2017
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The New York Times’ radical reasonableness offers us a clear vision of the ways one can continuously adapt its position to the political context as to be in position of respectful negotiation with the status quo. On Tuesday (November 8, 2017), the newspaper published an article entitled “Eight Ways to Build a Border Wall” that presents the eight prototypes recently built on the southern United States national border which mark the beginning of the construction promised by the current president. The article unapologetically associates veneer drone footage to comparative shots of the prototypes with titles such as “Concrete or No Concrete,” “Opaque or Transparent,” or “Tube or No Tube?” that we would more eagerly associate with a kitchen-customizing multiple-choice form on a home improvement website, than with a serious examination of the political instrumentalization of architecture’s violence. In presenting a wall project it opposed during the 2016 presidential campaign in the sensational form of a commercial brochure with which US citizens are invited to shop, the NYT brings a tremendous legitimacy to this political project. Rather than examining the very ideological and societal axioms of such a project or insisting on the shattering fact that 10,000 people died attempting to cross this border (killed by heat stroke, dehydration, or by US militias), this article instead analyzes exclusively the “how” of the Wall in the usual adjustment to the new status quo.

The NYT is, of course, not the only newspaper in the world that holds such a position of continuous readjustment to what they like to think as “the center.” Europe itself counts many equivalents that contributed to the political shift that has seen left-wing political parties of these last twenty years ponder how to solve the “immigration problem,” a question drafted and imposed by right-wing movements that succeeded to impose their invariable axiom — “there is an immigration problem” — without being challenged in its core. In a state like the US, built on settler colonialism and that currently provides very little in terms of welfare for the bodies present on its territory, we can be candidly surprised that such a political axiom would be so ubiquitously accepted. And yet, the current US president has been elected after having particularly pushed forward one of the most literalist aspects of his program, which happens to be an architectural project: the materialization and militarization of a line on a map (a concept inherent to the settler colonial politics practiced on both sides of it) that represents a border with the state of Mexico fixed in this location only since 1884. Something that was rarely mentioned during the 2016 US presidential campaign was that the wall that would militarize the border was not a new idea and already existed over 1,000 kilometers of border after the Georges W. Bush administration undertook its construction in 2006.

Back then, the NYT had proposed to thirteen architects to take part in a “reflection” on the design of this wall reported under the name “A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs” (in 2008, I had already written about it in an article entitled admittedly-not-so-subtly “How Far Can the Bullshit Go?”). Some architecture offices had declined the offer because “they felt it was purely a political issue,” but others, such as renowned Californian architect, Eric Owen Moss, had answered the call and proceeded to propose an architectural design for this “more beautiful” wall. In his report of the challenge in the NYT (June 18, 2006), William L. Hamilton had written the following: “Eric Owen Moss, an architect in Los Angeles, was more specific with his border as beacon of light. In his design, a strolling, landscaped arcade of lighted glass columns would invite a social exchange in the evening, much like the “paseo,” popular in Hispanic culture. ‘Make something between cultures, which leads to a third,’ Mr. Moss said. ‘Celebrate the amalgamation of the two’.”

It is easy to critique Moss’ position, his romanticist and essentialist rhetoric, and his office’s grotesque design. Similarly, the title of the challenge itself (whether it was introduced to architects under this name or not) has the capacity to mobilize a wide outrage for its radical candidness — in March 2016, during the US presidential campaign, a proposal for a design competition, entitled more soberly “Build the Border Wall?” and its relay in the mainstream architecture platform Archdaily, had triggered (legitimately) infuriated reactions from a certain amount of architects. Of course, beauty has the potential to normalize violent architectures and, in this regard, one can think of the (true or fictitious) story graffiti-artist Banksy told about his experience of painting on the Israeli Apartheid Wall: when an old Palestinian man allegedly told him that he was making the Wall beautiful, Banksy thanked him, to what the old man replied: “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.” Yet, we should not emphasize the importance of beauty’s normalizing capacities; after all, the architectures of the Israeli apartheid are unanimously recognized as ugly, but such a qualification never compromised their existence.

We nevertheless ought to focus on the other projects sent as a response to the NYT design challenge to realize that the most problematic characteristics of such a call are less to be found in the transformation of the wall from ugly to beautiful, than in its transformation from inert to productive. In his report, Hamilton had written, “Four of the five who submitted designs proposed making the boundary a point of innovative integration, not traditional division — something that could be seen, from both sides, as a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier.” From James Corner’s “solar energy-collecting strip that would produce what he described as a ‘productive, sustainable enterprise zone’ that attracted industry from the north and created employment for the south” to Calvin Tsao’s “enterprise zone […] as a series of small, developing cities,” we can see how the productivity and usefulness are regarded as mitigating the violence of the border when, in fact, they make it more durable by creating new dependencies on its existence. They also reproduce the North/South exploitative relationships at a local scale involving a border porosity for some (as well as goods and capitals) while making it impermeable for others as Alex Rivera potently illustrates in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer about the maquiladoras of a near future.

After having written my not-so-subtle article in 2008, I remember subsequently debating about this question with US architect and professor Ronald Rael, who, back then, was already engaged in the research work that has been recently published in the form of a book entitled Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (University of California Press, 2017). Although Rael’s approach to the wall is drastically more complex and critical than the capitalist and technocratic “solutions” offered by the architects cited above, part of his design hypotheses regarding the Wall are also attempting to make it more productive, as well as to “institutionalize through models and drawings, events that are already occurring on the wall” (source). In an interview given for another NYT article, he aptly expresses the contradiction in which he finds himself: “[Rael] makes the argument that we should view the nearly 700 miles of wall as an opportunity for economic and social development along the border — while at the same time encouraging its conceptual and physical dismantling” (Allison Arieff for the New York Times, March 10, 2017). This contradiction is the same than the one analyzed by Eyal Weizman in “The Best of All Possible Walls” (The Least of All Possible Evils, Verso, 2011) when he describes the legal action of some Palestinian lawyers and activists in the Israeli High Court of Justice in Jerusalem arguing for alternative routes for the Israeli Apartheid Wall during its construction in 2004. Weizman’s entire book is dedicated to what he calls “humanitarian violence” in its subtitle: “Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.” We can try to define this violence as the consequence of actions undertaken in an effort to mitigate a given violence but, in their compromising negotiation with that it claims to be fighting against, ends up bringing a greater legitimacy and inertia to it than if these actions had not been initiated in the first place.

The NYT’s editorial line could not be more at odds with this concept and, as such, provides one of its most illustrative examples. It is however important to observe that the fundamental difference between the NYT’s positioning and that of the Palestinian lawyers and activists that Weizman describes in their legal attempts to slightly divert the Apartheid Wall’s route in order to locally save the access of farmers to their fields and the junction of houses with the rest of Palestinian towns, is to be found in the fact that Palestinians are the first concerned by the Wall and, as such, have a legitimacy to recognize the inertia of the status quo and negotiate with it even if it brings more weight to it. On the contrary, the NYT represents the interests of a significant part of the US establishment that can afford to live with the political program of the current president when they do not benefit from it one way or another. Its negotiation with this political reality can therefore not act as the catalyst for reform that it would like to embody; on the contrary, it rather produces the profound and durable legitimization of it.

The post The New York Times and the U.S. Border Wall: A Love Story appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on September 17, 2018
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A first version of this article was published in French on Mediapart (September 17, 2018).

On July 3, 2018, Aboubakar Fofana, nicknamed “the wolf” for his loneliness, died. This young Black man had been stopped by a squad of CRS (a branch of the French police) in the middle of his neighborhood of Le Breil, a close banlieue of Nantes in France. After a moment of panic; he was killed by a bullet shot from close range from one of the police officers. This murder is to be considered along with the politics of existence of the banlieues.

The horrible dimension of this story comes as much from the tragedy of a 22-year-old life, violently interrupted in terribles circumstances, as the sinister familiarity that it triggers in us — this familiarity was pointed out by Aboubakar’s cousin himself when I met him last Friday. The first component of this familiarity is the one that consists for media to simultaneously describe the scene basing their story solely on the police narrative, and contribute to denigrating the victim’s past and personality to suggest a certain legitimacy to his death. The second is a scene of crime deserted by the investigators in such a way that any additional items later found will be deemed unacceptable. Similarly, the testimonies of the neighborhood witnesses — I met one who had done a declaration at the IGPN (the police of polices) — does not appear in the investigation; some people who had filmed fragments of the event were even intimated to delete their videos. It is also the murderer’s narrative that claims self-defense before admitting having lied et since then claiming an accident. Following him in this version, the Nantes court charged him (before releasing him) with “volontary violence having lead to death without the intention to trigger it” instead of first-degree murder. Finally, it is the familiarity of the victim’s family’s dignity that, despite all, called for an appeasement in the neighborhood during the revolt described below; an additional responsibility imposed onto those who do not have the luxury to only represent themselves. His cousin’s discourse is also conciliatory: “it could have happened to anyone,” “we’re not saying anything else than one cop killed him.”

Words of dignity here again; nevertheless, it is impossible not to observe how the relation to the police is primarily a racial and geographical one. People of color who live in the banlieue experience an immensely more precarious situation than the one experienced by white people in the city-centers of France. This is what, beyond local solidarities with Aboubakar’s family, makes this murder inseparable from the banlieue youth’s condition (in particular young Arab and Black men) and what made them revolt (joined by a few militants from the ZAD) against the police that came back with much reinforcements during the week that followed the murder: stones and burnt cars/trash cans against teargas, flashballs and a multitude of police trucks.

When encountering the mini shopping mall of the neighborhood that has been partially burnt during the revolt, one thing strikes: on two wooden panels temporarily placed where windows used to be, a photo of a Mission Dolores Park in San Francisco, which has evidently been glued again after the fire. It might be derisory to talk about it in the context of this article, but the striking contrast it presents might say something about the politics experienced by the Breil neighborhood.

This photo is part of a series one can find on numerous building walls in the neighborhood, in more or less large format. They show various scenes of life in numerous countries of the world. A few posters tell us about where they come from and confirm what was guessable: it is a project by a Nantes-based white photographers’ collective who do not live in the neighborhood. A visit on their website tells us that they are great travelers whose interests have to do with “the human” and “marginalized populations,” and that some of them collaborate with NGOs. The displayed photos in Le Breil therefore appear as the markers of an economic privilege and the liberty of global circulation, which can only appear as a provocation in a neighborhood where unemployment reaches 40% and where very few people can afford to travel. Furthermore, the photos of so-called “marginalized populations” from various places in the world seem to suggest to the inhabitants that their situation is not as bad as they may think. “We know a thing or two about poverty; they should not show it to us but rather to the people of the city center” says one of the two residents who welcomed me in the neighborhood. Of course, it is useless to take it out on these young photographers. After all, they are only a few of these numerous artists in France to whom municipalities have asked to lead “cultural animation” missions in the banlieues, without ever challenging the fact that very few of these neighborhoods are given the means to develop their own projects. The greater responsibility comes back to the authorities that organize such exhibitions whose endogenous character from the neighborhood reveals the paternalistic dimension of the relation that the municipality has with it.

Another thing strikes when reading the photographic exhibition’s brief is the implicit concept of participation with the neighborhood residents. This concept also appears in large letter on a billboard by the Affordable Housing Cooperative in the context of the “Participatory Housing” initiative by the Nantes municipality. “Here, design your future tailored apartment with us and your neighbors” read the sign. “Here” designates the sole square of the neighborhood. It has been left abandoned by the authorities (probably in anticipation of this project), but the mid-height walls that remain are used by several young men to gather and chat. The simulacrum of democracy that these so-called “participatory” real estate operations thus allows the transformations to which the neighborhood is subjected to claim a certain legitimacy.

In the 1990s, it was a group of housing units built in the 1960s to host families of harki (Algerians who have fought the Algerian Revolution on the French colonial side) that had been demolished to be replaced by houses mostly owned by white middle-class people. During the so-called “renovation” of the neighborhood in 2014 — “just a layer of fresh paint on the facades” says one of my hosts — a football fields and two basketball courts were destroyed to leave room for new buildings, thus reinforcing a density deemed already too dense by the residents, and reducing the amount of spaces of sociality. What is left are only poorly-maintained grass leftover between parking lots and buildings, a small football field “for the kids” and a few grass squares in front of the kindergarten. One could have had imagined an access to the neighboring sport complex but the wall that separates it from the neighborhood (recently challenged with hammers by the local youth) has been renovated and a blade of metallic teeth has even been added at its top, thus preventing anyone from climbing it.

In the banlieues, potential spaces of gathering are considered as threat to the so-called “public order.” It is therefore not surprising that authorities would attempt to get rid of them even if, of course, other reasons than the securitarian ones might come into play. The price of real estate in Nantes for instance is experiencing a dramatic increase. The part of the city where Le Breil is located is not close to the city center, but it is nonetheless subjected to the consequences and various real estate operations are to be expected in the neighborhood. The fetish of the so-called “participation” is often one of their incarnation, which can also allow implicated architects to deresponsibilize themselves from their roles in this capitalist violence since they convince themselves that they bear a certain democratic character.

Of course, a certain amount of considerations developed in this article do not seem to reach the same gravity than the one that characterize the murder of Aboubakar Fofana. However, it is crucial to consider what we in France keep calling sordidly “une bavure” (euphemism for police mistake; see note below for more considerations about this term) in both locally and nationally (and internationally) and both historically and presently. The political conditions that allowed such a murder to occur are the same that allows for the investigation to be botched and that no one in Le Breil has heard anything about it since July despite the promises of a second autopsy, gun expertise and reconstitution. It is also worth noting — as I heard it from the residents — that France’s political, economic, cultural, and social centrality on Paris may be also at work in activism whose language, political perspective and representativeness are monopolized by Paris-based movements — this article is not an exception. What happens in Le Breil, that is, the murder of “the wolf” and what followed it, but also the political conditions of existence of this banlieue neighborhood should therefore mobilize us all who claim to struggle against police violence. As always, this mobilization should simultaneously be specific — only pressures seem to push forward a judicial case that is otherwise lost in advance — and general, as this murder belongs to a system whose dismantlement cannot be negotiated.

To consult videos and reports of these last two months in Le Breil, as well as to follow the political life of the neighborhood, you can follow Breil Jeunesse Solidarité.

Note about the term “bavure”: although this term is commonly understood as simultaneously a saliva dribble (literal translation) and a police blunder (with the same degree of euphemism), a genealogy of the concept reveals that it comes from the historical police branch “Brigade Aggression Violence” whose acronym is BAV and that was particularly active in France during the decolonial struggles of the 1950s. As such, the colonial dimension of what a “bavure” is makes sense.

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