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Title: Thoughts on the City Author: Anonymous Date: Summer 2003 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #13, cities, urbanism, militarization, the city Source: Retrieved on 21 August 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy13.pdf Notes: from Green Anarchy Issue 13, Summer 2003
The necessity for space is eminently political. The places in which we
live condition the ways in which we live, and inversely, our
relationships and activities modify the spaces of our lives. It’s a
question of daily experience, and yet we seem incapable of drawing the
tiniest result from it. One only needs to take a walk through any city
to understand the nature of the poverty of our way of life. Almost all
urban space responds to two needs: profit and social control. They are
places of consumption organized according to the increasingly strict
rules of a market in continuous expansion: the security market. The
model is that of the commercial center; a collective privatized space,
watched by the people and instruments provided by the appropriate
agencies. In the commercial centers, an increasingly “personalized”
sociality is built around the consumer and his family; now, one can eat,
play with children, read, etc. in these neon places. But if one enters
without any money, one discovers that it is a terrifying illusion of
life.
The same thing happens, more or less, in the metropolises. Where can one
meet for discussion, where can one sit without the obligation to
consume, where can one drink, where can one sleep, if one has no money?
For an immigrant, for a poor person, for a woman, a night in the city
can be long. The moderates, comfortable in their houses, don’t know the
nocturnal world of the street, the dark side of the neon, when the
police wake you up on the benches, when everything seems foreign and
hostile to you. When the middle classes are enclosed in their bunkers,
cities reveal their true faces as inhuman monsters.
Cities increasingly come to resemble fortresses, and houses, security
cells. Social war - the war between the rich and the poor, the governors
and the governed - is institutionalized in urban space. The poor are
deported to the outskirts in order to leave the centers to the offices
and banks (or to the tourists). The entrances of the cities and a great
many “sensitive” areas are watched by apparatuses that get more
sophisticated every day. The lack of access to determined levels of
consumption – levels defined and controlled by a fixed computer network
in which the data of banking, insurance, medical, scholastic and police
systems are woven together – determines, in the negative, the new
dangerous classes, who are confined in very precise urban zones. The
characteristics of the new world order are reflected in metropolitan
control. The borders between countries and continents correspond to the
boundaries between neighborhoods or to the magnetic cards for access to
specific private buildings or, as in the United States, to certain
residential areas. International police operations recall the war
against crime or, more recently, the politics of “zero tolerance”
through which all forms of deviance are criminalized. While throughout
the world the poor are arrested by the millions, the cities assume the
form of immense prisons. Don’t the yellow lines that consumers have to
follow in certain London commercial centers remind you of those on which
some French prisoners have to walk? Isn’t it possible to catch a glimpse
of the checkpoints in the Palestinian territories in the militarization
of Genoa during the G8 summit? Proposals for a nightly curfew for
adolescents have been approved in cities just two steps away from ours
(in France for example). The houses of correction reopen, a kind of
penal colony for youth; assembling in the inner courtyards of the
popular condominiums (the only space for collective life in many
sleeping quarters) is banned. Already, in most European cities, the
homeless are forbidden access to the city center and beggars are fined,
like in the Middle Ages. One may propose (like the Nazis of yesterday
and the mayor of Milan today) the creation of suitable centers for the
unemployed and their families, modeled after the lagers for undocumented
immigrants. Metallic grids are built between rich (and white)
neighborhoods and poor (and... non-white) neighborhoods. Social
apartheid is advancing, from the United States to Europe, from the south
to the north of the world. When one in three blacks between the ages of
20 and 35 get locked up in cells (as occurs in the United States), the
proposal for closing the city centers to immigrants here can pass almost
unobserved by us. And many may even applaud the glorious marine military
when it sinks the boats of the undocumented foreigners. In an
interweaving of classist exclusion and racial segregation, the society
in which we live increasingly looks like a gigantic accumulation of
ghettoes.
Once again the link between the forms of life and the places of life is
close. The increasing precariousness of broad layers of society proceeds
at the same pace as the isolation of individuals, with the disappearance
of meeting spaces (and therefore of struggle) and at the bottom, the
reserves in which most of the poor are left to rot. From this social
condition, two typically totalitarian phenomena are born: the war
between the exploited, which reproduces without filters the ruthless
competition and social climbing upon which capitalist relationships are
built, and the demand for order and security, produced and sponsored by
a propaganda that is perpetually hammered home. With the end of the
“cold war”, the Enemy has been moved, both politically and through the
media, into the interior of the “free world” itself. The collapse of the
Berlin Wall corresponds to the construction of the barriers between
Mexico and the United States or to the development of electronic
barriers for the protection of the citadels inhabited by the ruling
classes. The criminalization of the poor is openly described as a “war
of low intensity”, where the enemy, “the exotic terrorist”, here becomes
the illegal foreigner, the drug addict, the prostitute. The isolated
citizen, tossed about between work and consumption through those
anonymous spaces that are the ways and means of transport, swallows
terrifying images of treacherous young people, slackers, cut-throats –
and an imprecise and unconscious feeling of fear takes possession of
individual and collective life.
Our apparently peaceful cities increasingly show us the marks of this
planetary tendency to government through fear, if we learn how to look
for them.
If politics is defined as the art of command, as a specialized activity
that is the monopoly of bureaucrats and functionaries, then the cities
in which we live are the political organization of space. If, on the
other hand, it is defined as a common sphere for discussion and
decisions regarding common problems, then one could say that the urban
structure is projected intentionally toward depoliticizing individuals
in order to keep them in isolation and lost in the mass at the same
time. In the second case, therefore, the political activity par
excellence is revolt against urban planning as police science and
practice; it is the uprising that creates new spaces for encounter and
communication. In either sense, the question of space is an eminently
political question.
A full life is a life that is able to skillfully mix the pleasure of
solitude and the pleasure of encounter. A wise intermingling of villages
and countryside, of plazas and free expanses could render the art of
building and dwelling magnificent. If, with a utopian leap, we project
ourselves outside of industrialism and urbanization, in short outside of
the long history of removal on which the current technological society
is built, we can imagine small communities based on face-to-face
relationships that areas linked together, without hierarchies between
human beings or domination over nature. The journey would cease to be a
standardized transport between weariness and boredom and would become an
adventure free of clocks. Fountains and sheltered places would welcome
passers-by. Wild nature could once again become a place of discovery and
stillness, of tremors and escape from humanity. Villages could be born
from forests without violence in order to then return to being
countryside and forest. We can’t even imagine how animals and plants
would change when they no longer feel threatened by human beings. Only
an alienated humanity could conceive of accumulation, profit and power
as the basis for life on Earth. While the world of commodities is in
liquidation, threatened by the implosion of all human contact and by
ecological catastrophe, while young people slaughter each other and
adults muddle through on psycho-pharmaceuticals, exactly what is at
stake becomes clearer: subverting social relationships means creating
new spaces for life and vice versa. In this sense, a “vast operation of
urgent demolition” awaits us.
Mass industrial society destroys solitude and the pleasure of meeting at
the same time. We are increasingly constrained to be together, due to
forced displacements, standardized time, and mass-produced desires; yet
we are increasingly isolated, unable to communicate, devoured by anxiety
and fear, unable, above all, to struggle together. Any real
communication, any truly egalitarian dialogue can only take place
through the rupture of normality and habit, only in revolt.
In various parts of the world, the exploited refuse every illusion about
the best possible world, turning their feeling of total spoliation
against power. Rising up against the exploiters and their guard dogs,
against their property and their values, the exploited discover new and
old ways of being together, discussing, deciding and making merry.
From the Palestinian territories to the aarch (village assemblies) of
the Algerian insurgents, uprisings free spaces for social
self-organization. Often the rediscovered assembly forms are like
applications of old traditions of face-to-face relationships, hostile to
all representation, forged in the pride of other struggles, to the
current agenda. If violent rupture is the basis of uprisings, their
capacity to experiment with other ways of living, in hope that the
exploited elsewhere will stoke their flames, is what renders them
lasting, since even the most beautiful utopian practices die in
isolation.
The places of power, even those that are not directly repressive, are
destroyed in the course of riots not only because of their symbolic
weight, but also because, in power’s realms, there is no life.
Behind the problem of homes and collective spaces, there stand an entire
society. It is because so many work year after year to pay off a loan
simply to keep a roof over their head that they aren’t able to find
either the will or the space to talk with each other about the absurdity
of such a life. On the other hand, the more that collective spaces are
enclosed, privatized or brought under state control, the more houses
themselves become small, grey, uniform and unhealthy fortresses. Without
resistance, everything is degraded at a startling speed. Where peasants
lived and cultivated the land for the rich as recently as fifty years
ago, now the people of rank live. The current residential neighborhoods
are the most unlivable of the common houses of thirty years ago. Luxury
hotels seem like barracks. The logical consequences of this
totalitarianism in urban planning are those sorts of tombs in which
Japanese employees reload their batteries. The classes that exploit the
poor are, in their turn, mistreated by the system that they have always
zealously defended.
Practicing direct action in order to snatch the spaces for life from
power and profit, occupying houses and experimenting with subversive
relationships, is a very different thing from any sort of more or less
fashionable alternative juvenilism. It is a matter that concerns all the
exploited, the left-out, the voiceless. It’s a question of discussing
and organizing without mediators, of placing the self-determination of
our relationships and spaces against the constituted order, and of
attacking the urban cages. In fact, we do not think that it is possible
to cut ourselves out any space within this society that is truly
self-organized where we can live our own way. Our desires are far too
excessive. We want to create breaches, go out into the streets, speak in
the plazas, in search of accomplices for making the assault on the old
world. Life in society is to be reinvented. This is everything.