Thoughts on the City: Progress never destroys as thoroughly as when it
builds.
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, where two million people have been imprisoned in twenty
years), 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. Within them, every common sphere for discussion and decisions
regarding common problems is vanishing. Indeed, the urban structure is
projected intentionally toward separating individuals in order to keep them in
isolation and lost in the mass at the same time. Anti-political action is
necessary, a revolt against urban planning as police science and practice; it
is the uprising that creates new spaces for encounter and communication. This
is why we say that 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 forced 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 are 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, mass-produced
desires. And 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 in order 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, 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, like
Indians on reservations. Our desires are far too excessive. We want to create
breaches, go out into the streets, speak in the plazas, in search of accomplice
for making the assault on the old world. Life in society is to be reinvented.
This is everything.
—slightly revised from an article from
“Adesso – Foglio di critica sociale", numero 14