Urban walls : political and cultural meanings of vertical structures and surfaces 9781138304338, 1138304336

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Contributors
Introduction The life of walls – in urban, spatial and political theory
Towards a territoriology of walls and wall-making
The contested urbanity of walls
The operations of walls
Structure of the book
Notes
References
1 On walls in the open city
Defending with walls
Defending the wall
Wayfaring in the city
Tilting the wall
Notes
References
2 Dismantling Belfast peace walls: New material arrangements for improving community relations
The walls as permanent structures dividing urban space
Normalising the barriers
Partial opening of security gates
Art as a catalyst
The Northern Ireland Housing transformative programme
A provisional meaning?
Notes
References
3 Walling through seas: The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present
Introducing the ocean in the political present: dependency and invisibility
An analytic blind spot in an urban theorist’s critical attention span: ‘the threshold of the ocean...
‘Stop the boats!’: the border, total deterrence, and the onshore construction of an offshore wall...
‘No Way’: Operation Sovereign Borders, boat people cannot fly, and the global class relations...
Conclusion: dependency and invisibility, total deterrence and social invisibility, the negation of...
Notes
References
4 Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative
Note
References
5 Screening Brazil
Footnotes on a wall
0.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Notes
References
6 Warsaw afterimages
: Of walls and memories
There were bullet holes in the courtyard
Following traces whenever they appear on the surface
He sees what I see even now
A peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical
His workshop has no ceiling
I forgot it was possible to hear no detonations
An act of thinking a ruined structure
In the presence of these things
With both sides of the same thought
The present as memory
Notes
References
7 Wall terrains
: Architecture, body culture and parkour
Body articulations
Terrain is a kind of familiarity
Tracing a terrain biography
Terrain formation and imagery
Terrain topologies and walls
Exploring the topologies of parkour
Walls and body cultures
Notes
References
8 Gating housing in Sweden: Walling in the privileged, walling out the public from public places
Introduction
Practices of gating housing
From gated community to urban gating
Walling out the public: gating as restriction of mobility
Urban gating
From gated community to residential hotel
Walling in the privileged: gating in support of mobility
Dwelling-on-the-move behind walls
Gating housing in Sweden: walling in the privileged, walling out the public from public places
References
9 The right to the city is the right to the surface: A case for a surface commons (in 8 arguments, 34 images...
1. Surfaces are intensive, expressive and deep
2. Neutral surface mode does not exist
3. Surfaces visibilise law, specifically private property and public order
4. Communal surface production outwrites exclusive ownership
5. Inscriptions turn private property into a precarious commons (precariousness is accessibility)
6. Surface conflict is spatial justice
7. Artification and criminalisation are attempts to stabilise surfaces
8. The right to the city is the right to the surface
References
10 The multiple walls of graffiti removal: Maintenance and urban assemblage in Paris
Urban assemblages, maintenance and multiplicity
Removing graffiti in Paris
An object of maintenance
A surface
A space for public expression
An official decorum
A material composite
Conclusion
Notes
References
11 Walls as fleeting surfaces: From bricks to pixels, trains to Instagram
Introduction – “We just form a fucking wall …”
Part 1: from bricks to pixels, walls to screens
Part 2: trains-as-walls
Bombing Melbourne’s trains
Conclusion: walls as data machines
References
Index

Citation preview

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Walls and cities have long been partners, but their relationship has been under-​ studied. This creative and important collection takes the social and political work of the urban wall seriously. Rather than a self-​evident object, the wall becomes lively, talkative, mobile and ambivalent, dividing yet also connecting. A valuable and original contribution. Nicholas Blomley, Professor, Geography, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. It is a remarkable feat for an edited volume to read as cohesively and with such strong focus as Urban Walls. The walls included here (violent walls, but also vulnerable ones; aquatic, immunising, yet totally exposed and medialised walls; affective and playful, immaterial and palimpsestic walls) are marked by the wounds of history, geography and politics that surround them but also that are generated by them. These walls feel as material and fleshy as if we were placing our hand on their surface. Andreas Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulos, Professor, Law & Theory, University of Westminster, London. An instructive and compelling examination of walls in their multiple present forms. The emphasis on the material and vertical puts this at the heart of contemporary debates. Historically situated, richly illustrated, and with a view to wider themes as much as empirical detail, this is an important contribution to politics, geography and urban studies. Stuart Elden, Professor, Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick.

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Urban Walls

In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls have been built around the world. Walls built in urban areas are particularly striking in that they have exacted a heavy toll in terms of human suffering. As territorialising devices, walls can be protective, but the protection they grant is never straightforward. This collection invites inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls, observing urban spaces as veritable laboratories of wall-​making –​ places where their consequences become most visible. A  study of the relationship between walls and politics, the cultural meaning of walls and their visibility, whether as barriers or as legible –​sometimes spectacular –​surfaces, and their importance for social processes, Urban Walls shows how walls extend into media spaces, thus drawing a multidimensional geography of separation, connection, control and resistance. As such, the collection will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture and politics with interests in urban studies and social theory. Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy. Mattias Kärrholm is Professor of Architectural Theory in the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment at Lund University, Sweden.

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Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that rediscovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Titles in this series Critical Theory and the Classical World Martyn Hudson Emotions, Everyday Life and Sociology Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen Urban Walls Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​sociology/​series/​ASHSER1383

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Urban Walls Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm

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First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​30433-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​203-​73022-​5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Out of House Publishing

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Contents

List of contributors Introduction: the life of walls –​in urban, spatial and political theory

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1

AN D RE A MU BI BR I G H EN TI A N D MATTI A S K ÄRRHOL M

1 On walls in the open city

17

AL I S ON YOU NG

2 Dismantling Belfast peace walls: new material arrangements for improving community relations

35

F LORI N E BALLI F

3 Walling through seas: the Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present

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P E T E R C H AMBER S

4 Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative

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C L AU D I O MI NC A A N D A LEX A N D R A R I JK E

5 Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall

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P E D RO V I C T OR BR A N DÃO A N D A N D R EA PAVONI

6 Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories

119

E L L A C H MI E L EWSK A

7 Wall terrains: architecture, body culture and parkour E MMA N I L S SO N

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8 Gating housing in Sweden: walling in the privileged, walling out the public from public places

169

K ARI N G RU N D STRÖ M

9 The right to the city is the right to the surface: a case for a surface commons (in 8 arguments, 34 images and some legal provisions)

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SAB I NA AND RO N

10 The multiple walls of graffiti removal: maintenance and urban assemblage in Paris

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J É RÔME D EN I S A N D DAV I D PO N TI LLE

11 Walls as fleeting surfaces: from bricks to pixels, trains to Instagram

236

L AC H L AN MAC D OWA LL

Index

255

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Contributors

Sabina Andron runs an arts organisation, curates up-​and-​coming art, and is about to obtain a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She teaches architectural history across London and is co-​founder of creative events space Studio189. Florine Ballif has been Assistant Professor at the Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris (Urban Planning Institute of Paris), University Paris Est, since 2009. She teaches urban policies, urban and regional planning in Europe, planning and security issues. She holds a bachelor in Politics and a Master and PhD in Urban Planning (2006). After her doctoral research focused on the Belfast peace lines, she investigated further the link between security issues and planning. Her research interests focus also on local planning decision-​ making. She has been a member of the editorial board of Métropolitiques/​ Metropolitics since 2010. Pedro Victor Brandão is a visual artist. He has a degree in Photography at UNESA (Rio de Janeiro, 2009) and has attended liberal study courses at EAV Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro, 2010 and 2015), and also at Universidade de Verão at Capacete (Rio de Janeiro, 2012). He has developed a series of works considering different political landscapes in research about the economy, the right to the city, social cybernetics and the current manipulable nature of technical images. He has presented the solo shows Pintura Anfituro (Casa França-​Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), Desvios na Paisagem (Portas Vilaseca Galeria, Rio de Janeiro, 2012)  and Tela Preparada (Sé, São Paulo, 2016). He has participated in many group shows and residencies. His work is represented by Portas Vilaseca Galeria (Rio de Janeiro) and Sé (São Paulo). He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Peter Chambers is Lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He has just completed a book addressing the emergence of border security, with a particular focus on sovereignty, communication, offshore, logistics and justice. The additional normative focus of this work develops the dystopian implications of border security as a way of thinking about utopian possibilities for global political justice. He also has a secondary focus on

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x Contributors power in space, and at the moment he is examining the micropolitics of urban conflict playing out between motorists and cyclists in Melbourne. Ella Chmielewska is Programme Director of Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). Her work focuses on the intersection of city, visuality and communication: relationships between image and text in public space; urban writing and place-​ marking (graffiti, inscriptions, and signage); place, memory and semiotic landscapes (practices of commemoration, representation and erasure); objects, materiality and place in visual culture. Jérôme Denis is Senior Researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovations, ParisTech-​Mines. His work takes place at the articulation of Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology of Writing and Working Place Studies. His research foregrounds the practical and political dimensions of information infrastructures, which take a crucial part, even though mostly invisible, in contemporary societies. He studies “data work”, investigating how information is concretely produced and maintained behind the scenes of the so-​called “digital” technologies and services. He notably explores the conditions of such work, its organisation, and its invisibilisation, in the case of urban management, urban innovation, administration and politics (smart cities, autonomous vehicles, open data, participation). Karin Grundström is Associate Professor at the Department of Urban studies, Malmö University, Sweden. Grundström holds a PhD in architecture from Lund University and is a chartered architect. Her research comprises both the dominant organisation of space and place, as well as people’s everyday resistance and experience of the city. She has published in areas of urban design and planning, housing and segregation and has curated and participated in exhibitions on urban research. Lachlan MacDowall (PhD) is a researcher in the Faculty of VCA and MCM, University of Melbourne. He has published and presented widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti and street art, mostly recently at New York University. His current project examines the effects on graffiti and street art of the digital platform Instagram and his book Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era is forthcoming from Intellect Press. Claudio Minca is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University in Sydney. His research centres on three major themes: tourism and travel theories of modernity; the spatialisation of (bio)politics; and the relationship between modern knowledge, space and landscape in postcolonial geography. His most recent books are On Schmitt and Space (with R. Rowan, Routledge, 2015), Hitler’s Geographies (with P. Giaccaria, Chicago Univ. Press, 2016) and Moroccan Dreams (with L. Wagner, I.B. Tauris, 2016).

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Contributors xi Emma Nilsson is an architect and associate senior lecturer working at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, LTH, Lund University. Her research interest focuses on the relations between architecture and everyday life with a special interest in how architecture makes and shapes different bodies and body cultures. Currently leading an artistic research project on architecture and photography. Andrea Pavoni holds a PhD in Law (University of Westminster, London) and is currently a post-​doctoral fellow at DINÂMIA’CET –​IUL, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, part of ISCTE  –​University Institute of Lisbon. He is assistant professor at the International Summer School on Urban Ethnography at the University of Trento, and co-​editor at Non Liquet (The Westminster Online Working Papers). Andrea is mostly interested in researching the way urban space is controlled, how order emerges, how disorder is kept at bay. His research draws from various areas such as critical geography, urban studies, legal theory, sociology and philosophy. David Pontille is a CNRS researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovations, ParisTech-​Mines. His works are at the crossroad of science and technology studies, workplace studies and anthropology of writing. His first research about scientific authorship aimed at a twofold objective: to specify the formal and informal criteria for name ordering of scientific articles, and to identify conceptions of the author that are different both from the literature definition and from the “counting” description promoted by scientometric analysis. Afterwards the enquiry was enlarged to other writing devices in several professional settings: the manufacture of deeds in the work of bailiffs, the production of large databases in biomedical sciences, the conception and maintenance of a brand new wayfinding system in the Paris subway. By addressing the performativity of writing devices, the aim was to bring to the forefront practices that are largely overlooked by approaches focused on textuality and interpretation only. Alexandra Rijke is a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Geography Department, Wageningen University. She obtained an MSc in International Development Studies at Wageningen University and an MA in Gender and Ethnicity at Utrecht University. In her PhD research, she analyses the daily geographies of the barriers in Israel/​Palestine. Alison Young is the Francine V.  McNiff Professor of Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has researched graffiti and street art for many years, and her ongoing research engages with the ways in which we live in and govern city spaces. She is currently developing a study of crime and neighbourhood change in Australia and Japan. At the University of Melbourne, she is a member of the executive of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, policymakers and urban designers interested in

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xii Contributors communicative cities, mobility, networked cultures and public space. She is an Honorary Professor in the Law School at City University, London, and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, Griffith University. She has been a visiting professor at Westminster University, Birkbeck College, State University of New York at Buffalo, Hong Kong University and New York University and has been a visiting research fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and was the Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College.

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Introduction The life of walls –​in urban, spatial and political theory Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm

Towards a territoriology of walls and wall-​making In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls have been built around the world. It is estimated that in the last decade almost 40,000 kilometres of walls and fences have been built in 65 major projects.1 Observers regularly voice worries about the current worldwide proliferation of walls. By and large, it is assumed that their presence fosters divisions and inequality. In particular, walls built in urban areas, where human density is higher and social diversity more accentuated, have exacted a heavy toll in terms of political divisions, ecological deterioration and human suffering. At the same time, however, homeless and displaced people, unprotected by any wall, are often terrorised by irregular militias, trafficked by criminal networks, captured or evicted by state police, and have likewise endured terrible ordeals.2 In war zones, war is increasingly using techniques of wall piercing.3 From time to time, walls are invoked, promised, contested, challenged and struggled over. They can be protective, but the protection they grant is always selective to a significant degree. In short, a fundamental ambivalence seems intrinsic to walls: perhaps paradoxically, walls are always a matter of perspectives. For these reasons, we would like to suggest that the whole spatial functioning of walls can hardly be reduced to a black-​and-​white picture –​walls as either simply “good” or “bad”. Moving beyond simplistic interpretations, walls may provide an important case for the advancement of a general science of territories, or territoriology. Observing walls as basic territorialising devices has wide-​ranging consequences. The ambivalence of walls –​and, more generally, of all wall-​like devices –​rhymes with the territorial duality of protection and segregation, which has also been defined as teichopolitics (Ballif and Rosière 2009). Walls impact upon bodies and constrain circulations. But territoriology suggests that there is more to walls than a two-​dimensional effect. In fact, walls are always part of several overlapping processes of territorialisations, setting parameters of co-​existence, both constraining and enabling meetings and flows. In a previous work (Brighenti 2009), one of the editors has drawn attention to three key dimensions which can be found articulated and mirrored in the

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2  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm social and territorial life of walls, namely, materiality (vertical separation), rhythmicality (sequences of openings and closures) and usability (scope for appropriation and resistance). Yet these are just some broad coordinates which invite us to develop a richer and more satisfying territoriology of walls. On the one hand, walls form material curtains that define an invisible, unquestioned horizon of events, on the other, they can be turned into surfaces of projection for visible traces and assertions –​they can become media (screens of affichage). Separation walls and screen walls are not two types of walls, rather, two different registers of use that act on potentially the same artefact. In this sense, visibility is the fourth dimension that defines the functioning of walls, linking the domain of phenomenology (lived events) to the domain of ecology (trans-​local relations). The significance of making the meeting of populations and groups alternatively possible or impossible must be understood as inherently related to the visible dimension of social co-​presence. In other words, the puzzle of walls resides in their complex and unsettled relation to social visibility. If walls have to do with a politics of visibility, it is because and insofar as they are, in the first place, material and semiotic technologies of inter-​visibility management. A territoriological approach invites one to explore the sites where walling is carried out at both material and ideational levels. In common parlance, building a wall means denying interaction, as well as usually expressing anxiety, fear and hate towards those who will find themselves on the other side of the wall. We should remember, however, that walling is integrally, and has always been, a technology of social interaction. In this sense, walls are not dumb or unilateral; they always entail across-​the-​wall interactions. They might be part of different intermingling or counteracting territorial associations, strategies and appropriations. Walls of different forms and sizes, such as, for example, shop fronts, garden fences, prison walls, neighbourhood hedges, planking, bar disks, etc., are all well-​known mediators of social exchanges, enabling and inviting for certain interactions and territorialisations, while disabling others. Furthermore, if the wall is an instantiation of an “us versus them” dichotomy, wherever the other group or subject is not immediately perceptible or cannot be physically met, it is ipso facto imagined, represented, evoked, ceaselessly talked about. Even when there is an attempt to forget the other side of the wall, to systematically erase it, the absent other is  –​as psychoanalysis has discovered long ago –​an indelible presence, a returning ghost. From this perspective, the three-​dimensional mediality of walls refers not simply to situations when the wall is somehow written over: for even white walls may be written over in a large number of ways. Thus, a characteriology of walls must be supplemented with an analysis of territories. So, for instance, the evilness of walls (they are ignorant, arrogant, unjust) and the vanity of walls (they are never as effective as dreamt by their builders) should be reconstructed on the basis of the multiple territorialisations of the actors that come to be associated with each single wall, as well as affected by it (on its two or more sides).

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Introduction 3 Impactful as they are, however, walls are not simply objects for empirical sociology. In the collection Urban Walls, we are interested in ascertaining their significance for social and political theory as well. The essays, especially written for Urban Walls, inquire into the complexities of the social life of walls at large. In particular, contributors are interested in the specific intersection of walls and the city. Urban and urbanised spaces can be observed as veritable laboratories of wall-​making, places where the consequences of walls become most visible and most palpable. The meanings of strategies aimed at walling-​in and walling-​out various populations, activities and social processes are all crucial for the fate of the city, just as they are for the future of the nation-​state and the new spaces of governance (including the internet etc.). The constitution of new forms of institutionalised spatial power at various scales transits through the shaping of new territorial guises. Far from a mere topography of social-​spatial relations, a science of social territories calls for a topological study taking into account the points of intensification of social and political existence. Studying walls, we believe, may thus help us advance towards a renewal of social and political theory for the 21st century.

The contested urbanity of walls Walls and the city have a long, coessentially intertwined history. The urban wall is probably as ancient as the pastoral wall, and cities had walls even before they had streets.4 The Italian words rocca, castro, fortezza, and the corresponding words stronghold, fortress, bastion, bailey and fort, all speak of the coessential relation of the dwelling settlement and the wall. In the course of Western history, at least since the late Middle Ages and in Early Modern Europe, the urban wall has constituted perhaps the most representative artefact to define city space –​at least, no less representative than the urban gate (itself a “rhythmical wall”). The city could then be squarely localised thanks to the wall that protected it. Sennett (1996) has described the urban walls as a technology of immunity, highlighting how institutions such as the lazarettos were located outside the urban walls in order to manage the presence of urban outcasts. Similarly, analysing the 1563 treaty titled On the Fortress City by Bernard Palissy, Klauser (2010) has suggested that in European history walls have functioned as an integral part of a psycho-​immunology of the urban: “The wall, for Palissy, figures as the territorial engagement and mediator of the residents’ jointly inhabited life-​world” (Klauser 2010: 327). Getting inside the city walls could be hard and next to impossible, but it could also be as mundane and peaceful, as described by the traveller William Penn during a visit to Duisburg in 1677: Betwixt nine and ten, we reached the walls of Duysburg; but the gates were shut, and there being no houses without the walls, we laid us down together in a field, receiving both natural and spiritual refreshment: blessed be the Lord. About three in the morning we rose, sanctifying God in our

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4  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm hearts that he had kept us that night; and walked till five, often speaking one to another of the great and notable day of the Lord dawning on upon Germany, and of several places of that land that were almost ripe unto harvest. Soon after the clock had struck five, they opened the gates of the city, and we had not long got to our inn. (Penn 1835 [1714]: 70 f.) Not only were walls ingrained in urban rhythms, but to a significant extent they were constitutive of them. The urban wall was an instrument of control where guards at the city gates might take note of the reason for travelling, the place of origin and the staying address of every traveller entering inside the walls (Maczak 1995: 119). In this sense, they were one of the first tools of policing in the modern sense (Foucault 2004). From the 18th through the 20th century, the walls of many early-​modern walled cities were repeatedly torn down and reconstructed in various rounds to be adjusted to the growing urban size. The most famous example here is perhaps Vienna:  during the late 18th century, the Emperor Joseph II had already opened the walls to the public, and they had quickly become an important destination for recreations, outings, social meetings and public life among the inhabitants of the city. The administrative and fiscal changes in the wake of the revolution of 1848 made the walls less important. The lack of housing combined with nationalist aspirations of building public institutions and monuments, inspired by previous projects in London and Paris, led Franz Joseph I to tear down the city walls in 1857 (Wulz 1979: 17–​42). The Ringstrasse project of Vienna with its monumental public buildings and large green spaces exerted a great influence on many European de-​walling projects. If Vienna is the most paradigmatic European case of de-​walling as an urban development project, the death of the traditional defensive use of urban walls could perhaps be set to 1870. This was arguably when the last European city wall served an important purpose in battle, i.e. when the Aurelian wall of Rome was breached at Porta Pia, just before the Italian unification. Prolonging the trend of loosening the walled urban perimeter, contemporary urban processes appear to be even more dislocated and scattered on larger suburban territories:  in increasingly sprawling urban landscapes, old city gates have been supplanted by shopping malls as new, uncanny city entrances (Kärrholm 2012:  117). As the city started sprawling into urban regions, and found itself no longer surrounded by a single wall capable of demarcating its proper location, an important shift occurred: instead of being embraced by one wall, the city was increasingly fractioned by a number of internal walls. The rationale of these internal walls was, as we know, varied. Among the first walls for inner urban partition were for instance those of the Middle-​Age Jewish ghetto (Sennett 1996). This partition seems to have worked not just like an urban enclave, but more like an urbanised camp, and a place of exception (Diken and Laustsen 2006). The English traveller Moryson described the ghetto in Venice after a visit in 1594:

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Introduction 5 The Jews have a place to dwell severally, called Il Ghetto, where each family hath a little house, and all have one court-​yard common, so they live as it were in Colledge, or Almes-​house; and may not come forth after the gates are locked at night, and in the day they are bound to weare a yellow cap. (Moryson 1908: 192) Later, during the course of the 19th century, the prototypical internal urban wall came to be identified with the wall of the disciplinary institution –​the prison, the hospital, the school (Foucault 1975). The portioning wall was now not just about shelter or visibility but also about information and knowledge –​ better, visibility itself turned into and was increasingly accounted as information. Robin Evans documented the 1836 wall experiments at Millbank prison in London, where the object was to find the wall that reduced the transmission of information through speaking and shouting, rather than noise (Evans 1982: 335 ff.; cf. also Harou-​Romain’s experiments in the 1840s, reported by Vanderburgh 1994: 327). During the same period, the city also appeared as a major political battlefield, with the barricade featuring as iconic “exceptional wall” materialised in the urban landscape, the most famous example being the Paris Commune in 1871, when about six hundred barricades were built on the streets of Paris (Vidler 2011: 109–​116). Opening gates, tearing down walls or putting them up has always been part of political struggles, and this has in no way ended with the modern or contemporary city. Napoleon, who made several of the conquered European cities tear down their outer defences (Kostof 1992: 26), went a step further during the invasion of Cairo in 1798, as he tore down a number of interior walls and gates of the city as well. Cairo had a hierarchical system of several territorial levels with local streets and neighbour streets that were locked at night. Napoleon and his army tore down the gates in order to create a continuous public space of flow similar to Paris, from the most public spaces all the way to the front doors of the private houses (Habraken 1998: 219; Akbar 1988:  171 f.). In the more recent examples of urban warfare in Israel and Palestine, the issue of tearing down walls was not so much about producing urban spaces of flow and circulation, but about breaking the walls between private homes, leading the battle inside the walls of private houses rather than through the streets (Weizman 2007: 185–​218; Bleibleh 2015). In the measure to which the modern city is essentially defined by flows,5 the interruption of such flows becomes meaningful, in that it appears as disruption. In general, an accident works as a test for ascertaining (visibilising) the degree of tightness, or conversely looseness, of an assemblage. Yet, if walls may be urban devices par excellence, their urbanity always remains contested. On one side, urban walls have been seen as the very essence of the urban: the outer urban walls define the traditional city, the inner urban walls produce the spatial configuration and organisation of the city. Directly or indirectly, walls are what define the city as a “movement economy” of people and goods

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6  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm (Simmel 1997 [1903]; Hillier 1996). Here the role of walls is to form a backdrop to a continuous and connected net of streets, as well as to allow for an interface between public and private spaces. On the other hand  –​and maybe even more routinely  –​urban walls have been accused of not being “urban” enough:  so, the function of protection granted by walls has been associated with domestic spaces, segregation and withdrawal from the public sphere of the city. In fact, urban walls increasingly seem to be stuck with a bad reputation, one associated with the failure of urban coexistence with diversity: maybe urban artefacts, but not urbane ones. Even nowadays, the search for immunity regards walls as elective tools, as the case of the recent multiplication of movable walls and barriers in response to terrorist car attacks in Europe and elsewhere confirms.6 How to explain then that the “failure” of walls has proceeded hand in hand with their proliferation? The first factor to consider is that such a proliferation of walls has not only been quantitative but also and especially qualitative. In the context of the contemporary extensive urbanisation of territories, traditional walls have been flanked by a variety of additional walling systems and devices, ranging from the more simple and immediate (fences, gates, etc.) to the more complex and subtle (smart location technologies that allow for the enactment of thresholds etc.). In many cases, for instance, walls do not look at all like walls but rather like, for example, pickets and hedges (Blomley 2007). Such is the case, for instance, of gated communities, were external walls look purposely “beautified”, sometimes even presented as fake ancient walls, etc. Another case where the walling function is performed by artefacts other than walls is where urban infrastructures such as large motorways and bypasses become active separators. Although strictly speaking not un-​traversable, these infrastructures define veritable urban boundaries, hampering the connection of peripheral areas and suburban towns to the city centre. Other less perceptible thresholds scattered across the urban landscape function as selective walls, in the sense that they sort people and grant admission in a selective way. Because these thresholds may be increasingly less visible, although no less operative, as we shall see in this book the proliferation of walls also means the proliferation of different kinds of wall cultures. As new types of walls, wall engineering and wall politics emerge, the wall increasingly becomes a multifaceted and enigmatic phenomenon. In short, urban walls and their effects seem to have become something that we need to investigate and analyse in a much more comprehensive and focused way than hitherto.

The operations of walls The collection of essays Urban Walls seeks to conceptualise and analyse in-​ depth the range of “operations” performed by walls as well as with and upon walls. Once we attribute to walls a power to set people apart, we concurrently attribute to people the condition of being “operated” by walls. Indeed, the urban built environment is to be conceptualised as an active environment.

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Introduction 7 Above, we have recalled the ambivalence between separation and protection that contradistinguishes walls. Separation and protection, however, are two sides of the same coin, if we just clarify the spatial premise entailed by walls. Such a premise is simply that people who are put on the one side of the wall also find themselves belonging to a social category that is distinct and in many cases opposed to that of the people who are put on the other side. For instance, these people are members of a family (walled in a house), or colleagues (walled in an office), or fellow coreligionists (walled in a church). But, what does it mean to be members of a family, colleagues, coreligionists, if not being on the same side of the wall? Walls do not simply mirror belongings, but are constitutive of them. In other words, walls operate purposeful sorting of social relations. By doing so, they provide an emotional way of articulating diversity: as the ethno-​psychiatrist Tobie Nathan (2017) observed, “the other is traumatic and in order to manage it we erect a wall [l’autre est un traumatisme, et pour le gérer on crée un mur]”. Walls operate as devices for stabilising relations, as illustrated in the famous 1914 poem by Robert Frost, Mending Wall (see Madsen and Ruderman 2016) –​where the “good fences make good neighbours” maxim is reiterated yet also subtly interrogated. As people who find themselves on the two sides of the wall learn that they are not similar and train themselves in “taking the measure” of the other, people who get sorted and put on the same side of the wall increase their degree of similarity.7 It is in this sense that we can define walls as basic territorialising devices. Walls separate roofs from grounds (set heights), they bear loads, protect from fires, set light conditions, effect atmospheres, insulate from cold and from noise. They might come in stone, brick, earth, mud, wood, paper and woven; as green walls, gallery walls, wet walls, moveable walls; as Indian jali, Chinese partitions, spirit walls, Japanese screens, and so forth (Koolhaas et al. 2014). It is a long history that stretches from the ancient Greek nomos, the law of pasture, to the early capitalist accumulation strategy of fencing the common lands in Britain –​to, ultimately, the walls of goods exhibited in superstores. From rocks to hedges, from bricks to concrete, a wide range of materials has been used to build walls. Even “finer” materials have been envisaged: so, communication technologies have brought into existence walls of a more volatile nature than rock and concrete. While at first sight walls tend to appear as forceful –​ often arrogant and ignorant –​artefacts, in fact they are also fragile creatures in need of maintenance, repair and support. Also, the more walls become high-​tech, the more maintenance they call for. So for instance, whenever walls are created through sensors that capture movement, connected to algorithms to assign bodies to this or that conceptual space (e.g., automatically warning of “illegal” trespassing), maintenance becomes a quite sophisticated activity, involving advanced engineering and informatics. Walling-​out and walling-​in have consequences in terms of appropriation and expropriation in economic as well as political terms. Different materials and different designs modulate such effects of separation and protection

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8  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm in different ways, impacting on different senses and conjuring up peculiar atmospheres that surround walls, and surround people surrounded by walls. In practice, each technological material could be described in terms of its specific walling potential, its pliability for the enactment of selective and sorted territorialisations. In this sense, it is easy to see that the mass media and the new media have not abolished walls, rather, they have made them more dynamic, movable and transposable. Despite being heralded by a discourse of openness and connectivity, the new media have their own walling techniques, which include  –​yet are not limited to  –​the famous “server firewalls”. Marketing techniques practised by large corporations include for instance the creation of “walled gardens”, whereby the potential or actual client is kept on the same website as long as possible and lured into a series of subsequent clicks. To take another example, academics may just think of the practice of “cracking the wall of copyright” with semi-​legal services such as sci-​hub and unpaywall, which explicitly feature the image and lexicon of “opening a breach in the wall” for the benefit of shared knowledge as opposed to the rigidity and selectivity of the copyright system. But, the mobility of walls does not concern media spaces only. Phenomena of “delocalisation of walls” are extremely widespread nowadays. Consider for example the movable border of the UK with Europe, which has been externalised to Calais by the British, but would be better seen by the French as located in Kent: in 2016, the then-​French Prime Minister Alain Juppé explicitly called for France-​UK border to be moved into Britain (Chrisafis 2016). This fact also alerts us to the multi-​scalarity or trans-​scalarity of walls, which is essential to comprehend the topology of contemporary politics: for instance, a fence in a certain neighbourhood in the city Belfast can set apart two local communities as well as two national communities, and even –​when the UK leaves the EU –​two supranational entities. A crucial set of operations enabled by walls takes place through the visible surface that these artefacts create. From this perspective, walls offer affordances for imagination, representation and communication. We have already highlighted that the relationship between walls and visibility is extremely deep and powerful. So, for example, the military walls of ancient castles were conceived of as not simply protective devices against external enemies, but also notably as a display of power addressed by governors to the local inhabitants. By contrast, the desideratum of all camouflage, of all concealment and avoidance strategies  –​the “weapons of the weak” evoked by James C. Scott (1985) –​can be best formulated as the attempt at “merging with walls” –​which is also, in a different context, the refined skill of spies and undercover agents. The perception of walls, however, in most cases turns into the perception of what is deliberately painted or represented on walls. Not only are walls physically connected to the street (as its boundaries), but lato sensu street cultures are intimate with the type of expression that one can read on walls. From this perspective, graffiti and street art represent an important way in which walls are mobilised and turned into operative devices. It is an

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Introduction 9 intensely expressive practice that produces as much communication as irritation in public space. Graffiti and street art highlight the coessential relation between urban walls and public space or, as we have also called it, the “public domain” (Brighenti 2016). Walls as carriers of messages of various sorts are crucial to enable public space, to make it possible at all. Communication is not only a semiotic process of meaning transmission, but also an affection of the viewer or the reader. For the good or for the bad, people are touched by painted or scribbled walls. The urban domain is thus a space where visual stimuli become instantly either obnoxious or thrilling, seductive or repellent. For graffiti writers, in particular, walls are always-​already written over (to them, there is no white wall). While clearly this view offers a rationalisation for the writers’ claim to use walls without official permission, and a justification for what is otherwise to be seen as “defacement”, it is nonetheless true that the relation between wall and writing is primary. In fact, public space can only exist through public address, that is, through a deliberate attempt to communicate. Communication is what graffiti and wall writing perform to the highest degree –​even, or perhaps especially, vis-​à-​vis those who hate graffiti. In this sense, graffiti and street art form a key component in the larger visual ecology of the city, an ecology which is largely supported by and inscribed into walls and wall-​like artefacts.

Structure of the book The collection Urban Walls is articulated in two parts. The first part pivots around the politics of walls and walling, whereas the second tackles the cultural import of walls and the consequences that various wall cultures generate. Of course, the distinction is to some extent fictional, given that the two aspects are intimately intertwined. The aim of this collection is indeed to indicate that the political, material, cultural and affective dimensions of walls must be tackled simultaneously. Thus, the chosen order of presentation should not obfuscate that, as the reader will notice, a number of crucial themes are echoed across the various contributions. We provide here a handy guide to the chapters, trying to highlight the fils rouges that run through the various topics and approaches. In the first chapter, “On walls in the open city”, Alison Young draws a large map for understanding the intertwinement of legal relationships and physical architecture that is put into effect by urban walls. Young argues that, while we tend to see how walls defend us, we often fail to acknowledge how walls themselves somehow call for being “defended”. In the city, complex and rich interactions between what is official and what is unofficial, what is legal and what is illegal, what appears legitimate and what illegitimate, concern the life of walls. Young highlights in particular how what is practically entailed by the call to “defend the walls” remains open to different and diverging interpretations. To instantiate this, she guides us to the spatial adventures of the illegal graffiti writer. The writer is a peculiar type of urban wayfarer who

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10  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm virtually –​and graphically –​connects the multiple walls of a neighbourhood or a city into a single navigation. “The resulting assemblage of movement-​ through the city”, Young suggests, “engenders an image of the city.” Graffitied walls are thus the tableaux of a particular urban spatial knowledge where a discourse on the visuality of the law comes to be articulated: “The wayfaring graffiti writer who writes and paints on walls that do not belong to her both challenges the legal status of a wall as under the sole control of its legal owner and also visually reconfigures the city’s very surfaces”. In the second chapter, Florine Ballif analyses one of the most iconic urban walls world-​wide, the so-​called Belfast peace lines. She notices how, since the 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland (also known as Good Friday Agreement), not only have many old walls and fences been maintained, but new ones have been created (from 18 barriers in at the beginning of the 1990s, to 99 in 2011). This fact highlights how walls as separators create a memory of their own that tends to reproduce divisions, by inertia and path dependence. While, of course, the causes that led to the separation are far-​reaching, the very presence of walls becomes a factor that reproduces distrust between groups who are already in uneasy relations. This way, the temporal horizon of walls also turns into a key factor, whereby more or less patched temporary solutions end up forming a “permanent structural landscape”. This is also why the process of removal of the barriers has been slow, controversial and painful. Drawing attention to the fact that separation walls are located in socially marginalised areas, Ballif shows how, over the course of time, the “interface zones” in Belfast have become precarious places where unpredictability and violence impinge on the residents’ possibility of living a normal life. The following chapter by Peter Chambers, titled “Walling through seas”, moves towards to a larger, oceanic view, and analyses how, since the early 2000s, the Securing Australia defence programme has been premised on the perhaps paradoxical imagination of the ocean as a wall. Paradoxical, but no less full of ominous effects. Between 2001 and 2013, Chambers argues, the Indian Ocean has been transformed into an “Australian wall” for the management of immigration. What is interesting here is that the very political-​ geographical notion of border has been increasingly imagined through the artefact of the wall –​an operation which is far from innocent. The strategy of “total deterrence” turned the oceanic space into a “threatened space”: just one arrival, comments Chambers, just one passage through the wall was deemed as a “total breach of national sovereignty”. Such a totalising view has ultimately made the border necessarily very weak, subject as it is to even the slightest non-​compliant action. Chambers’s chapter is an apt reminder that walling techniques nowadays encompass an array of devices and formats, including much high-​tech, but that they are also writ large in the social imaginary. From this perspective, Chambers’s analysis is nicely complemented by Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke in the fourth chapter, who focus on the case of Europe and the influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

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Introduction 11 In “Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative”, Minca and Rijke reconstruct the logic of the contemporary spatial political technology of walls in terms of an immunity-​seeking machine, that may not be directly related to its actual “effectiveness” and may, instead, be connected to a social imaginary where “the wall will be there, visible, touchable, real, impenetrable, monumental”: the spectacle of the wall and the practices of illegal trespassing go hand in hand. In the analysis of this dispositif, the authors refer to the theory of immunity and immunitarian processes developed by the Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito. In particular, they look at how this machine is embodied in a variety of border zones located along the territorial margins of Europe, in places such as for instance the Greek–​Macedonian border town Idomeni or the periphery of the Serbian capital, Belgrade. These are the places where refugees’ camps have multiplied as uncanny enclaves of populations inside, yet separated from, Europe. The authors’ overall argument that “walls should be analysed as spatial biopolitical technologies aimed at controlling, protecting and taking life” resonates with Chambers’s ascertainment that, over the last two decades, the immunitarian machine has grown “huge in size, scope and cost”. Whether this situation derives from a more or less deliberate plan or from the utter absence of political vision remains a question worth pursuing. In the fifth chapter, titled “Screening Brazil”, Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni propose an essay that is organised as a series of loosely connected footnotes aimed at exploring a wall that is both localised in the city of Rio de Janeiro and travels all over the national territory through the Brazilian media, in an “all-​ingesting sphere of information and communication”. Following the path of a wall erected in the neighbourhood of Cosme Velho in the city of Carioca, the authors intersect street corners where multiple layers of native vestiges, colonialism, modernity and capitalism overlap and interfere. The wall in question separates  –​as well as joins  –​the properties of the petrol giant company Petrobras and the world’s second-​largest commercial TV network, Globo TV. It is not by chance, the authors suggest, that the recent history of Brazil can be appraised as a complex process of un-​walling and re-​walling that involves these two powerful actors and their emissaries. Eschewing conspiracy theorising, Brandão and Pavoni suggest instead that what matters “is not knowing what is beyond this wall, but rather letting the contradiction it materialises emerge. Letting the wall speak”. This is an important move in the general economy of the Urban Walls collection, insofar as we aim to precisely show how walls, rather than just being mute (as first hypothesised by Simmel), can in fact tell stories of past, present and future. This is also the deeper meaning, highlighted by the authors, of the wall (private property) as a screen surface (TV set). The second part of the collection focuses on the analysis of the “cultures of walls” that counterpoint actual walls and act as essential operators in their social functioning. The sixth chapter, by Ella Chmielewska, titled “Warsaw afterimages”, is an intellectual, historical as well as personal exploration

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12  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm that begins with the bullet holes left in Warsaw’s walls since World War II. Following the works of the filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, the Nobel-​laureate poet Czesław Miłosz and the art critic and psychotherapist Mariusz Tchorek, as well as drawing from her own remembrances and sensitivity, Chmielewska leads us through the memories of Warsaw as “a city littered with ghosts”, a city of departures and disappearances, but also of persistence. Urban memories compound a region where the personal and the collective meet most directly and, sometimes, abruptly. Childhood, the author suggests, and the “witnessing” of it that the artist attempts, may indicate the capability of disclosing many unknown operations of walls. In Warsaw, Chmielewska highlights, “the city’s surfaces with their materials and textures, urban topography, typography and toponymy were revised and re-​visioned” several times in order “to incorporate post-​war soviet-​style interventions into a unified image of the national capital”. The tormented identity of the city, its history and above all the memories that wander along its streets, seems to be powerfully written, or carved, in the walls of its buildings. In chapter seven, “Wall terrains”, Emma Nilsson reports from her ethnography of parkour practitioners in Lund, Sweden, as well as from a field trip to the cradle of parkour, Lisses, a suburb just outside Paris. Nilsson develops the concept of terrain to account for the different ways in which parkour practitioners (also known as traceurs) produce a peculiar body and body culture in relation to specific material configurations (such as different kinds of walls). A terrain is produced as a result of a bodily activity in the milieu where this activity takes place. Hence, a terrain entails the production of a milieu and a familiarity with how this milieu responds to the body. To traceurs, walls offer a specific and new kind of terrain for movement. Influenced by, for example, military training techniques developed on obstacle courses, and by figures of popular culture such as ninjas and superheroes, the practice of parkour developed through bodily interactions and experiments in a suburban environment and spread through films and digital media. Nilsson goes on to show how parkour as a body culture (and indeed a wall culture) relied on a specific kind of suburban modernistic architecture that is quite widespread in many European suburbs. The author also suggests that the duality of walls  –​walls as specific material figures and walls as a specific sorts of materiality –​plays differently in the development and spreading of parkour as a body culture that is nowadays internationally recognised. “Gating housing in Sweden” is a chapter that presents Karin Grundström’s analysis of the spread of gating strategies in Sweden. Focusing on the questions of who is walled in, and who is walled out, Grundström distinguishes gated communities (which still are quite uncommon in Sweden) from a variety of more diffused gating practices. The author discusses a series of examples from the city of Malmö, such as for instance residential hotels and the locking of courtyards and shortcuts through alleys. Urban mobility, the chapter shows, has become increasingly polarised, and urban walling and gating can be seen as a part of this development where mobility becomes a privileged resource

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Introduction 13 for some, at the cost of others. Urban walls and gating actually also play a certain role in visualising the ongoing residential segregation in the public realm. As part of describing the historical development and spatial principles of Swedish urban gating, Grundström’s chapter is accompanied by a series of more conceptual diagrams that capture the overall morphological effects of gating at the micro as well as macro urban scale. The following “The right to the city is the right to the surface” is a visual essay by Sabina Andron that advances the programme of an “affective semiotics” of London walls. In the ninth chapter of the collection, Andron presents eight arguments  –​made through text, images, as well as the combination of texts and images –​to recognise surfaces as part of the lawscape, a precarious common and an important place of contestation. Through her essay, Andron illustrates the depth and the richness of surfaces as a material expression activated through different kinds of inscriptions and interactions, all the time pointing to the plurality and complexity of surface affects. Here, vertical surfaces represent not simply an urban and political medium, but also the place of actual physical conflicts through the lens of their multiple territorialisations. The reason, the author suggests, must be retrieved in the fact that surfaces are like dispositifs that make visible to the public gaze the legal arrangement of private property and public order as they unfold in their dynamic and fragile balance. For Andron, however, such chaotic becoming is itself an expression of “spatial justice”, a situation of “spatial tension that keeps bodies moving, negotiating, deceiving or dominating the situation”. From this perspective, the attempts to either criminalise the multiple uses of walls or “artify” them (i.e., transform them into recognised pieces of art) are ways to stabilise a situation that is de facto out of the control of any single agency. Andron’s conclusion, that the wall’s lack of stability also contains the promise of an actual public domain, also rhymes with Alison Young’s chapter. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille author the tenth chapter of the collection, titled “The multiple walls of graffiti removal”. The chapter draws from an extensive ethnography of graffiti cleansing in Paris (Denis and Pontille 2011), and takes the discussion on the enactments of walls one step further. At first sight, maintenance appears as just one of the many possible uses of walls. Through their study of graffiti-​removal strategies, however, Denis and Pontille point out that the enactment of walls is always multiple, even for a single practice. Walls are in no way given once and for all, but produced and enacted in different ways by the practices of maintenance and repair. Not even an organised and strategic practice such as graffiti removal can be seen as a univocal, rather it constantly enacts different versions of what an urban wall can and should be: a wall is thus always an object of many, sometimes contested, boundaries, strategies and expressions. The final chapter, “Walls as fleeting surfaces. From bricks to pixels, trains to Instagram” by Lachlan MacDowall, investigates how contemporary digital cultures have affected the work of walls. The author points to the relationship between walls, screens and trains, deepening the argument about how walls

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14  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm have taken on new roles and how their meaning is becoming ever more fluid and articulated. As also highlighted by Brandão and Pavoni, new “immaterial” walls should be regarded as a prolongation of traditional walls, especially because the former engage continuous dialogue with the latter. MacDowall advances an original parallel between bricks and pixels, and explores the possibility of identifying the elements that in new digital spaces correspond to the bricks of the wall. As walls have become screens for digital content as well as backdrops for Instagram shootings, the pace of change and production has increased to the point that walls themselves can be turned into fleeting surfaces –​just like trains, or conversely walls as seen from a train in motion. As a consequence, walls can no longer be seen as static objects, but play an increasingly active part in the vast amounts of data generated in the digital world. Taken together, the chapters of this collection draw a rich picture of how walls can take on different forms, meanings and aspects in different situations and for a variety of purposes, uses and cultures. Walls play a sometimes silent and sometimes more salient part in politics and political metaphors, in the production of new urban cultures and expressions, in urban governance as well as urban development. If walls were first created in cities as tools to enhance physical safety, the search for immunity also meant stern segregation, and population control. However, walls have also proved, and still prove, central in the production of a public domain of communication and discussion, both for their capacity of being used as visual surfaces, and for their becoming intense objects of conflicting discourses and visions for the city to come.

Notes 1 See Vallet (2014). In the year 2015 alone, countries including Estonia, Hungary, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia undertook the construction of walled barriers along their frontiers (Jones 2015). 2 For a vivid and painful illustration, see for instance the first-​person narratives collected in Godin et al. (2017). 3 See Weizmann (2007), Bleibleh (2015) as well as stunning reportages in newspapers such as The Guardian. See for instance www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/10/ raqqa-a-journey-into-the-destroyed-heart-of-the-islamic-state-capital (accessed 10 October 2017). 4 See Kostof (1992: 26 ff.), who also claims that the first known urban street was in Khirokitia on Cyprus, about 6000 bc (ibid.: 191). 5 Sennett (1996) first pointed out the parallel between the medical discovery of the circulation of blood and urban traffic. The modernist movement in architecture can be said to embody the endpoint of such a trajectory: for instance, Lucio Costa’s project for Brasilia was for a city built on pilotis where level ground would have been completely wall-​less. 6 From this perspective, bollards and other types of “protective” street furniture can all be appraised as wall-​like devices. See for instance www.theguardian.com/world/ 2017/aug/18/how-cities-protect-citizens-vehicle-attacks (accessed 10 September 2017). As the article reminds one, “The most obvious defences are barriers that

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Introduction 15 prevent vehicles either gathering speed or continuing for long distances. These can be highly visible –​such as the deliberately obvious metal-​cased concrete blocks outside the Houses of Parliament in London –​or disguised, as with heavy flower pots and sculptures that are appearing on our streets”. 7 Among the classics in sociology, Simmel took space, materials and the senses most seriously. While, as we have remarked elsewhere, in his essay “Bridge and Door” from 1909, he did not seem to attribute great sociological importance to walls (which he characterised as “mute”), in his previous chapter on the spatial orders of social life (from 1903, then collected in the 1908 major Sociology) he offers precious insights. For instance, in the context of discussing the space occupied by mass gatherings, he notices how night-​time gatherings unite participants most closely thanks to the shared perception of a “black wall” surrounding them.

References Akbar, J. (1988), Crisis in the Built Environment:  the Case of the Muslim City. Singapore: Concept Media. Ballif, F., and Rosière, S. (2009), ‘Le défi des « teichopolitiques ». Analyser la fermeture contemporaine des territoires’, L’Espace géographique, 38(3), 193–​206. Bleibleh, S. (2015), ‘Walking through walls:  the invisible war’, Space and Culture, 18(2), 156–​170. Blomley, N. (2007), ‘Making private property: enclosure, common right and the work of hedges’, Rural History, 18(1), 1–​21. Brighenti, A.M. (ed.) (2009), The Wall and The City. Trento: professionaldreamers. Brighenti, A.M. (2016), ‘The public and the common: Some approximations of their contemporary articulation’, Critical Inquiry, 42(2), 306–​328. Chrisafis, A. (2016), ‘Alain Juppé calls for UK border to move from Calais to Kent’, The Guardian, 20 October. Denis, J., and Pontille, D. (2011), Nel mondo della segnaletica. L’ecologia grafica degli spazi del metro. Trento: professionaldreamers. Diken, B., and Laustsen, C.B. (2006), ‘The camp’, Geografiska Annaler:  Series B, Human Geography, 88(4), 443–​452. Evans, R. (1982), The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–​1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2004), Sécurité, territoire et population. Cours au Collège de France 1977–​1978. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, Seuil. Godin, M., Møller Hansen, K., Lounasmaa, A., Squire, C., and Zaman, T. (2017), Voices from the ‘Jungle’. Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp. London: Pluto Press. Habraken, N.J. (1998), The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hillier, B. (1996), Space is the Machine. A  Configurational Theory of Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, R. (2015), ‘Border walls just don’t work’, The Straits Times, 23 September. www. straitstimes.com/opinion/border-walls-just-dont-work (accessed 1 October 2017). Kärrholm, M. (2012), Retailising Space, Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space. Farnham: Ashgate. Klauser, F.R. (2010), ‘Splintering spheres of security: Peter Sloterdijk and the contemporary fortress city’, Environment & Planning D 28(2), 326–​340.

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16  Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm Koolhaas, R., AMO and Harvard Graduate School of Design (2014), Wall. Venice: Marsilio. Kostof, S. (1992), The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form through History. London: Thames & Hudson. Maczak, A. (1995), Travel in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Polity Press. Madsen, K.D., and Ruderman, D.B. (2016), ‘Robert Frost’s ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and political discourse’, Political Geography, 55, 82–​91. Moryson, F. (1908 [1617]), An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell: Through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland (Vol I). Glasgow:  J. MacLehose and sons. Nathan, T. (2017), ‘Pour une petite histoire des murs’ (interview). www.franceculture. fr/emissions/la-grande-table-2eme-partie/pour-une-petite-histoire-des-mursgrand-entretien-avec-michael (accessed 1 October 2017). Penn, W. (1835 [1714]), William Penn’s Journal of his Travels in Holland and Germany in 1677. London: Darton and Harvey. Scott, J.C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (1996), Flesh and Stone:  The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton. Simmel, G. (1997 [1903]), ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture. London: SAGE. Vallet, E. (ed.) (2014), Borders, Fences and Walls. State of Insecurity? Farnham: Ashgate. Vanderburgh, D. (1994), ‘Typification and the building of society:  “The absent patron”’, in K.A. Franck and L.H. Schneekloth (eds.), Ordering Space, Types in Architecture and Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Vidler, A. (2011), The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays. New York: The Monacelli Press. Weizman, E. (2007), Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Wulz, F. (1979), Wien 1848–​1934. Stockholm: BFR.

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1  On walls in the open city Alison Young

What is a wall? There have been famous walls throughout history. A  wall was built as a defensive fortification, in what is nowadays called the north of England but what was in AD 122 the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire in the time of Hadrian, with the lands of the Ancient Britons lying beyond it. A wall slashed a brutal divide through Berlin for decades until it was smashed by bulldozers and taken apart by the hands of its citizens in 1989.1 Later the dismantled wall was ground into pieces that were concreted into pavements as a memorial to those who died trying to climb it, and sold to tourists in tiny pieces. Since 1969 there have been walls built in Belfast and elsewhere in Ireland, in response to violence between the Catholic and Protestant populations there.2 Many were intended to be temporary structures, but have been strengthened and extended over the years. Made of iron, brick or steel, they vary from several hundred metres to almost five kilometres in length (Boal 2002; Dawson 2015). They are often called ‘peace lines’ or ‘peace walls’. The Israeli West Bank barrier separates Palestine from Israel along the Green Line.3 Known as a ‘separation barrier’ in Israel and as a form of apartheid wall in Palestine, it runs for 708 kilometres (see Weizman 2012:  161–​184).4 And the contested claim that there might be a need for another wall, between the United States and Mexico, figured as a trope in the American election campaign of 2016 (Casey and Watkins 2016) and in American political discourse in 2017. These are walls that have sometimes acquired a capital letter, referred to as the such-​and-​such Wall, or a euphemism (a ‘line’ or a ‘barrier’), and which symbolise something more than the functions normally performed by walls without euphemism or capitalisation –​the ordinary walls of everyday life (Brighenti 2009a). What functions are served by these ordinary walls? Walls are essential components in the units of architecture that comprise most human habitations and development:  it is hard to conceive of a house, office building, parliament or courtroom without walls. Walls provide support for a building’s roof as well as operating as partitions between one room and another, generating spaces of privacy, insulating inhabitants from heat, cold and wind. From these immensely practical functions, others have also evolved. The privacy offered by a wall can be conceptualised as a legal relationship as well

18

18  Alison Young as one of physical architecture: the outer wall of a building has become synonymous with the legal limits of an owner’s proprietary interest in a space. Proprietary rights confer power upon their holder; with power comes the fear of it being challenged or lost, such that the outer wall, in addition to delimiting a boundary between ‘I own this’ and ‘you own that’, is required to act as a barrier to those who might transgress the line demarcating one owned space from another. Cities, being composed of streets whose vertical structures comprise almost exclusively walls (Brighenti 2009a: 64), are a tapestry in which the walls of each individual property function as stitches. Each stitch represents a legal boundary; each boundary generates a desire to defend what lies within it.

Defending with walls It is not only the properties found within a city that are perceived to require defence with walls. The city itself is conceptualised as a place with boundaries requiring defence –​a way of thinking with such a lengthy history there is no doubt it is still hard-​wired into contemporary urban architecture. Invasion represents the greatest single threat to any settlement, and protection of a city during wartime poses the most significant test of the capacity of a wall as a mode of defence. Resistance to occupation was assumed to be the necessary approach when invasion was threatened, and for centuries settlements were built in sites that not only were defensible but which offered advantages in repelling attacks by potential invaders: thus, settlements were often built high on hillsides that could offer clear sight lines, or with steep hills at the rear, reducing the number of sides from which an attack could come. The Second World War’s colonisation of the air as a terrain from which to do battle meant that old strategies of defence were easily overcome. A potential invader could drop bombs on a city from above, wreaking destruction on its residents, food stores, buildings and infrastructure. To avert extensive destruction, city authorities sometimes resorted to declaring a city to be ‘open’: in 1940, during the Second World War, for example, Brussels was declared by the Belgian government to be an open city, and it was later occupied by the Germans. Naming a city as ‘open’ to its attackers indicated that it was undefended, and was open to occupation. Opposing forces were thus expected to simply march into the city, and no resistance would be offered to them. Krakow was declared an open city, as was Paris, Manila, Belgrade, Batavia, Rome, Trieste, Athens, Hamburg and Brussels.5 An open city, then, is one that is open to invasion and occupation. Once a city has been invaded, whether by its walls being breached or its gates being opened, the members of the opposing forces enter the city and become part of its everyday activities. During wartime, such occupation might have obvious characteristics: the presence of individuals who dress, act and speak differently, for example, and the citizens of an occupied city often developed subtle techniques of everyday resistance or rebellion. While wartime occupation had obvious characteristics –​a declaration that the city was

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On walls in the open city 19 open, or a bombing campaign leading to destruction of a city’s defences –​in more recent times, it can be argued that a city’s citizens still fear that occupation by others might have taken place. Able to control entry into the spaces they consider private, such as the home, individuals experience greater uncertainty about the encounters they face within the common spaces of the city. On the streets, on public transport, in shops: encounters in these notionally ‘public’ places are contingent upon the activities and attitudes of the others using and travelling through them. As Iris Marion Young notes, Because by definition a public space is a place accessible to anyone, … in entering the public one always risks encounter with those who are different, those who identify with different groups and have different forms of life. (Young 1990: 240) For Young, the ‘risk’ of that encounter is a social good to be promoted and protected, and I would propose that such an encounter has the capacity to ‘enchant’ by arresting the subject in a moment that can offer outrage, distaste, pleasure, or indifference (see further Young 2014; also Bennett 2001; Watson 2006); however, as if the city is continually in a state of post-​invasion, the encounter with the other has become a problem demanding management and control, through urban planning, law and criminal justice. As Brighenti writes Compared to the medieval walled city, the modern city transforms walls into elements of a spatial political economy of government. The outer boundary and its capacity to protect the city from external invasion is no longer what really matters …. [I]‌nstead it is the capacity to manage enclaves within the city. (2009a: 67) The city exists as much in a network of defensive and protective laws and policies as it does in the mesh of its material architecture. What Philippopoulos-​ Mihalopoulous has called the ‘lawscape’ (2013, 2015) and I have called the ‘legislated city’ (Young 2014) is a place in which a particular kind of experience is encapsulated and produced through the regulation of space, temporality and behaviour. The legislated city has mappability; it has aspirational qualities expressed through social policies, statutes, local laws and strategic plans. It is characterised by regularity and order (or at least the attempt or desire to create regularity and order). The efforts of the law to control the city are anchored in time and space. Permitted noise levels vary according to the hours of the day and the location of the sound. Encounters with others might follow a rhythm, which can prompt a concomitant regulatory temporality in the effort to manage the frequency and timing of such encounters, as well as their location.6 Roquet

20

20  Alison Young describes the sonic ambience, such as mechanized birdsong, deployed as a calming technology for commuters in the crowded train stations of Tokyo: Whatever daily and yearly rhythms these birds may have had  –​dawn choruses and rainy-​day retreats  –​have been eliminated in favour of ensuring the calming affordances of their perpetual chirping presence. (2013: 78) According to s 4A(1) of the Summary Offences Act in New South Wales in Australia, ‘a person must not use offensive language in or near, or within hearing from, a public place or a school’, thus criminalising a mode of speech when it occurs in certain designated locations. We might call the result an ‘atmosphere’ (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015; Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulous 2015: 122; Hillary and Sumartojo 2014), where the city becomes a sensorium whose smells, sounds, sights and surfaces are both produced by and productive of juridical regimes. Such strategies create legal territories in time and space: ‘just like any other form of notation and writing, law, too, deals with lines, barring some and allowing others’ (Brighenti 2010a: 225). Such a regulatory apparatus acts as a kind of wall against invasion by others; however, walls themselves need defending.

Defending the wall Each day when I walk between home and my workplace, I pass by a gallery, located on a street corner formed by one quiet residential street off a larger, busy road. Art is displayed within its interior rooms, as is conventional for such a space, but the building’s exterior walls also feature images referencing artworks that may, the spectator is invited to deduce, have been exhibited within the building or that may be characteristic of the type of image that can be found inside. Several paper posters, showing examples of work by artists who have had exhibitions at the gallery, are pasted to its west-​and south-​ facing walls, with a version of Sidney Nolan’s iconic figure of the bushranger Ned Kelly directly painted on one wall as a black silhouette. Pasting paper onto walls and applying paint to them are two of the techniques utilised by street artists and graffiti writers when they add their uncommissioned images to the surfaces found in the urban environment. But it would be difficult to interpret the posters and paint on the gallery’s exterior as the result of the activities of graffiti writers or street artists:  the gallery’s name features on one of the posters and the association of the Ned Kelly figure with Nolan, one of Australia’s best-​known fine artists, align the images with authorised art rather than with the unauthorised activities of the street artist. Every so often, graffiti writers do add their own work to the gallery’s wall, tagging the posters or the Kelly silhouette. These unlegislated additions are removed or painted over by the gallery owner, who is acting both as curator of the images on this exterior wall and as police officer or cleaning crew

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On walls in the open city 21

Figure 1.1 

in differentiating between the permitted images of self-​advertising and the unauthorised images of graffiti, even though they have in common both a range of artistic techniques and an interest in the street as a location for images. In pasting paper and painting figures directly on to this exterior, street-​ facing wall, the gallery is taking from the cultures of graffiti, conventionally practised as wall writing, and of street art, whose very name locates its practitioner in public space and its artworks on the surfaces associated with the exteriors of buildings rather than their private interiors.7 On the gallery wall, then, is displayed both a contest over its spaces (between taggers and gallery owner) and a process of judgement that deems some images on the wall to have legitimacy while others do not.

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22  Alison Young

Figure 1.2 

Only one street away from the gallery wall can be found an unoccupied building whose exterior displays a different version of this contest. The building is of the type known in Australia as a ‘milk bar’. Many years ago, it functioned as a small shop selling milk and other household goods; later it would have become a more generic convenience store of the type found on street corners in countless cities. It has been vacant for several years, occupying a corner position, with streets on two of the three sides of its lot, adjoining the intersection of five small streets in a residential area. During its long vacancy, additions to the three exterior walls have included artworks (by artists such as Shida and Be Free), political slogans (including comments about homelessness and vacant properties), posters (sometimes made by artists and sometimes advertising products) and a multitude of examples of graffiti tags and ‘throw-​ups’. In the midst of the rapidly changing swirl of words and images can be seen a small sign, affixed to the small middle wall that directly faces on to the roundabout at the intersection of the five streets. White lettering on a deep blue background reads CRAIG PATTERSON CARLTON FETE Cnr Lygon & Elgin St Saturday 19 November 9am-2pm

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Figure 1.3 

Figure 1.4 

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24  Alison Young The top line states the name of a local real estate agent; the remainder of the sign announces a local event. In Melbourne, it is common for estate agents to sponsor school fetes by providing signs that the schools can used to advertise their annual fundraising events. Someone has attached this sign to the wall of the derelict milk bar. While tags, paste-​ups and pieces come and go around it, each one more or less quickly removed by the council with new ones swiftly added, this sign has remained untouched for months. Something in the sign bespeaks official authorisation or social utility, or both, in a way that the tags, paste-​ups and pieces do not, just as the gallery’s painted Ned Kelly and pasted-​on posters emitted an air of authorisation.8 On the gallery wall, inclusion of the name of the gallery on one of the posters and the recognisably ‘fine’ aesthetics of the images’ content distinguish the authorised images from the other additions to the wall’s surface. In this instance, the sign’s content, announcing a school fete, and aesthetics, with its restricted colour palette and easily legible font, accord it an aura of legitimacy and social value, even though the unoccupied state of the milk bar will have meant that permission to place the sign on the wall is unlikely to have been given, and its aura of legitimacy and utility has persisted even after the event was long past. Despite lacking any utility or legitimacy as a sign, the notice has been allowed to remain, while all others on the walls have been regularly and repeatedly removed. On the walls at both locations, although varying styles are used to apply to both the authorised and unauthorised images found on each, the process of removal has not been haphazard. Removal of the unauthorised additions on the gallery wall has probably been carried out by the gallery proprietor, and has been targeted and selective. New tags are painted over; any additions to the posters are removed or repaired. The works which remain are the gallery’s own images which perform what is really an advertising function in creating awareness as to what might be seen within the building’s wall. Authorisation of these images and ownership, of both the conserved images and the walls upon which they have been placed, are the governing motivation for the gallery’s engagement with the wall as a surface. On the walls of the unoccupied milk bar, removal seems aesthetically motivated. Only the imagery that can be attributed to the cultures of graffiti and street art is being removed; the unauthorised sign left on behalf of the school or estate agent is separated from the other illicit works and allowed to stay in place. Whether performed by a proprietor seeking to protect their sense of control over and ownership of the aesthetic choices they have made for their property’s exterior walls (such as painting the wall blue, sanding its stone surface, commissioning a mural, or adding advertisements for their business) or by municipal authorities seeking to achieve a visual hygiene that conforms to their aesthetics, the painting over or removal of illicit graffiti and street art (known to practitioners of graffiti and street art as the ‘buff’) performs a kind of defence of the wall as structure, object and surface. Such a defence responds to two perceived threats: first, an aesthetics counter to that of the

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On walls in the open city 25

Figure 1.5 

locale’s conventions, and, second, activities that fail to recognise the legal owner of the wall as the sole controlling agent of its appearance.9 Defence of the wall is authorised by both law and social policy when undertaken either by the wall’s proprietor or by an agent deemed to be acting on behalf of the owner’s interests, such as a concerned neighbour, a landlord or staff member, or an employee of a local council. In my research on social and legal responses to graffiti and street art (Young 2014), graffiti writers and street artists related instances where such individuals forcefully defended a wall against them.10 Sparcs described an individual who lived in a neighbouring building grabbing him as he sprayed a stencil on a wall, and repeatedly ‘shouting “you’re fucked” ’ (Young 2014: 46), while Civil was ‘punched full in the head’ by a passer-​by, and, on a different occasion his brother was ‘dragged … by the hair’ when being seen painting in the street (2014: 47). While conducting research for this essay, the author saw two boys tagging their names on the display case housing a

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26  Alison Young nearby restaurant’s; a staff member ran outside to stop them and threatened to call the police if they did not depart.11 In each of these instances, the intervening individual positions themselves as acting within the authority of the law. What artists and writers experience as a physical assault is interpreted as justifiable retribution against someone whose acts of writing or painting have damaged or otherwise altered a wall without permission. Removal of images and words is legitimated by municipal regulations as well as by statute. In the state of Victoria in Australia, for example, although the City of Melbourne’s Local Laws acknowledge that the council must contact a property owner to get permission to remove graffiti on a wall, the council is authorised to remove the graffiti without permission if no response is obtained from the owner after ten days.12 Powers are given to councils by s 18 of the Graffiti Prevention Act 2007 (Victoria), authorising agents of the local council to enter premises without permission and to remove graffiti without the property owner’s permission.13 Defence of the wall, through its cleaning or through physically repelling someone writing on it, responds to a perceived physical or aesthetic challenge to ownership and bases itself both in the authorisation of ownership in law and as a means of shoring up a defence against the possible version of ownership that unauthorised words or images might create. However, once a wall has been identified and utilised by graffiti writers and street artists as a ‘spot’ (Ferrell and Weide 2010) suitable for adding their words and images, the wall’s ownership is considered by them to have been expanded to include writers and artists. Adding their images stakes a claim within the territory of the available surfaces in the city’s environments and enables a writer to return to the wall on future occasions (Brighenti 2010b). (This is particularly so within tagging culture and practice.) Beyond this, many whose art or writing practice includes placement in public places have argued a sense of self-​authorisation based on proximity to the wall’s ‘public’ side. It is not that the wall is regarded as publicly owned but that in presenting a side that adjoins the thoroughfare used by writers and artists along with all citizens, it is available to be adapted, enhanced or altered by them (see further Young 2014: 29). Passing by a wall is considered by many to confer a right –​not of ownership, but of possible interaction with it by adding words or images.

Wayfaring in the city Passing by a wall is never simply a matter of transit. To slightly paraphrase a comment by Blomley, ‘to [move] through the city, and to encounter other people and things, is a complicated matter’ (2011:  107). Thinking about movement through the city requires us to think about its surfaces, including both the thoroughfare or the pavement (the surface on which one passes by) and also the wall (the surface that one passes). Movement through a city is facilitated through planning and design:  streets reach between places and provide arterial or capillary lines of connection in and through urban space.

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On walls in the open city 27 Thoroughfares, in cities, are often lined with the myriad forms of walls identified by Brighenti (2009a), functioning both as barricades against possible routes through the city and conduits that facilitate motion in authorised directions. Thus, such conduits exist both as the means to achieve through passage, and also as constructions shaping (and limiting) an experience of the city as we pass through it. If we can consider urban mobility in this multiply layered manner, then it is possible to consider how the resulting assemblage of movement-​through the city engenders an image of the city, fosters an experience of it and allows us to inhabit different subject-​positions as citizens. To move through the city in this way is an experience that is shared by most of us. Our travels are held in common among us all; the experience of movement through the city is so familiar across a city’s inhabitants that it might scarcely seem worthy of second thought, but Blomley (2011) argues that ‘pedestrianism’ should be regarded as a concept deserving careful study, both of the figure who walks in the city and of the ways in which urban walking is often (dis)regarded as mundane and unworthy of sustained consideration. Instead, Blomley argues, banal spaces of urban movement such as sidewalks (see also Lorimer 2011; Middleton 2011) are in fact ‘manifestations of power and regulation’ in which we can find ‘a regulatory logic, hidden in plain view’ (Blomley 2011: 107; see also Loukaitou-​Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009). With that in mind it is worth thinking deeply about the ways in which we travel through the ordinary and everyday spaces of the city, and the ways in which movement-​through, although ostensibly an effect that is facilitated by urban design, is also regulated and subject to constraint. Whether driving through the city’s streets or walking along its pavements, walls bar the citizen’s passage at the same time as they productively shape and permit it. The mundane places of the city, these walled roads and streets, are the sites of struggles for the regulation of public life; they also create, as Blomley puts it, ‘zones for the production of citizenship’ (2011: 107). To the observations already made of the ways in which walls display the contestations over aesthetics and ownership prompted by the presence of graffiti or street art upon a wall can be added the possibilities for thinking about movement through the city –​moving past walls, along streets, and into the air. The possibilities offered by such movement can be seen in a short film made in 2016. It is called Sofles /​Wayfarer, and in its 11-​minute duration shows the graffiti writer Sofles, alone and in the company of other writers and artists, travelling through the streets of Melbourne, writing and painting as he goes.14 The film begins by showing the skyline of Melbourne, with the camera positioned both at a distance from it and high above the city streets below. The opening shot displays the skyscrapers of the city’s central business district and then turns away from them to look downwards towards street level, descending slowly although not quite reaching ground level, pausing to allow the spectator’s gaze to settle upon a single moving figure within the cityscape. The figure is spray-​painting a tag upon the side panel of a graffiti-​covered van, parked on the top, open-​air, level of a car park. The camera pauses to

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28  Alison Young watch the figure complete the writing of ‘Sofles’, and then climb on to a bike leaning against the van. As Sofles cycles slowly down the car park’s exit ramp towards the street, the camera follows behind him, still high above, giving the spectator the sensation of moving through the city in mid-​air rather than on the street. After leaving the car park, Sofles turns his bike to the left and into an alleyway; as he does so the camera descends to shoulder height and trails behind as he walks his bike through the alley, whose walls are being painted by several graffiti writers, some of whom greet Sofles and hand him spray cans as he goes. At the end of the alleyway, Sofles writes his tag upon the side of a dumpster, mounts his bike and cycles off through the streets, now accompanied by fellow writers on their own bicycles. The camera follows, watching Sofles pause to add embellishments to a large and elaborate graffiti ‘piece’, but, as the group speeds off through the mesh of surrounding streets the camera ascends again to give a moving bird’s-​eye view from high above. For several minutes the camera, using the fluid and continuous shots afforded by drone technology, travels behind the writers, swooping over power cables or dipping below them.15 The spectator sees the city’s buildings once again but now from above. Rooftops are rendered more visually prominent than the vertical walls that would normally dominate the streetscape. The drone’s overhead perspective flattens and diminishes the walls, which seem incidental to the patchwork of the rooftops, with the neighbourhood’s roads and alleyways visible as a chequerboard of lines between buildings. This effect is enhanced when the spectator catches sight of words sprayed on the road itself: tags stretch across the bitumen at several points along the writers’ journey through the streets, tilting the roadway into the position usually allotted by graffiti writers to walls, that of a surface that might be written on. After cycling through several streets, Sofles separates from the others and dismounts, jumping over a wire fence and into a small vacant lot, where he attends to one of his pieces, methodically adding colour and line to its letters. When satisfied with the piece, he jogs to the rear of the vacant lot where a makeshift corrugated-​iron gate swings open to admit him into a space where several laneways converge. In this interim place, existing unmarked on any map of the area, several writers are present, painting works on the roller doors of fences at the rear of the properties whose frontage would face onto the neighbouring streets. Sofles retrieves his bike and, followed by several writers, cycles on, pausing to tag various walls as he goes, and passing by still more artists and writers, positioned on the street or high on ladders as they work on their pieces. The group’s journey continues until they reach a building known as the End to End Building in Easey Street in Collingwood, whose design by the architect Zvi Belling features three decommissioned train carriages positioned on top of the building (Young 2016: 13). That trains could be situated on top of a building tilts the viewer’s projections of the cityscape in the same way as the camera’s overhead shots of tags written on the surface of the roadway. Then,

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On walls in the open city 29 writing that is associated with a vertical structure –​the wall –​appeared along the horizontal surface of the street; here, that which should be on the ground is raised up and individuals who should be in or near the train carriages are on top of them. The film concludes by showing the writers and artists emerging from the top floor of the building to climb onto one of the train carriages, as the camera pulls backwards and upwards so that the group, the train carriages and the building itself shrink and recede into the streetscape, which in turn merges into the cityscape itself, thus reversing the film’s opening shot, which began with the city skyline and then moved downwards into the street to find the ways in which illicit writing moves through the spaces and along the surfaces of the city. Directed by the videographer Selina Miles, and featuring music by Erin McKimm and spoken-​word narration by the Australian poet Omar Musa, the film was conceived by Miles as an homage to Fitzroy and Collingwood, two neighbourhoods long associated with the histories and cultures of graffiti and street art in Melbourne.16 The car park where Sofles begins his itinerary of writing in the film is located in Fitzroy, and his journey takes him along the laneways and streets of Fitzroy and the adjacent suburb of Collingwood. That journeying is key to the film is indicated by its title: Sofles /​Wayfarer. The title names the film simultaneously as a portrait of an artist, and as an account of a mode of existence in movement. What does it mean to be a ‘wayfarer’? Associated with restless journeying, often on foot or by any means available, the wayfarer is not a commuter, tourist, or casual pedestrian.17 For the wayfarer, itinerancy has a purpose beyond the instrumental requirements of arriving at a destination; as an urban wayfarer, the graffiti writer’s movement through the city is its own purpose as much as it is a means of travelling between locations for painting and writing. As a wayfarer, when the graffiti writer moves through the city, surfaces are viewed as opportunities for painting. She thus travels through the city’s spaces in a mode of being that refuses to recognise walls as barriers, boundaries or exclusions, but instead sees them as canvasses, backdrops, objects available to her, for her use. Her actions undo the stitches afforded by walls in the city’s embroidery of ownership, reconstituting them as stopping-​off points on an itinerary whose purpose is exactly that: the iteration and reiteration of the city. For a wayfarer such as the graffiti writer to inhabit the city means finding a life located in its myriad surfaces and thoroughfares. As the poet and writer Omar Musa says in the film: ‘The streets confused us … just when we thought we knew them they rolled themselves up again, unscrolled the next day in different arrangements of letters and light’. In the film, Musa asks, ‘You remember when we first came to the city, don’t you?’. The ‘we’ of Musa’s memory comprises an assortment of the marginal, the criminal and the overlooked, who, on having arrived in the city, form a community: ‘we all found ourselves here’. Inhabiting the streets, with these other wayfarers, creates a home, and a mode of belonging located within the city. It is a community but a precarious one with no fixed location, and it

30

30  Alison Young exists in the interstices (Brighenti 2009b), or, as Musa puts it, ‘in the spaces between things’. Such an interim existence in the non-​ spaces of the city (Augé 2009; Brighenti 2009a) marks the wayfarer as not-​quite a true resident of the city. In Simmel’s thinking about the city, the stranger is the individual who comes to the city as a temporary visitor and who stays (perhaps long outstaying their welcome, and perhaps after the city is opened to enemies) (Simmel 1972; see also Isin 2002: 30–​31). Such an individual is interior to a city, a wanderer who has arrived in the city and stayed on, but who remains separated from its true inhabitants. The wayfaring graffiti writers and their companions spoken of by Omar Musa and seen painting with Sofles in the streets of Fitzroy are shadows, or perhaps premonitions, of the invader from outside the city, who have breached the city’s defences unbeknownst to its residents, and who live within it, painting its walls, undoing the stitches of its laws. That they might claim attachment to the city is mistrusted as contingent by the authorities: the law does not permit a graffiti writer to claim any defence against a charge of property damage by saying that they believe their actions have made the city’s surfaces look better or more appealing (see Young 2014). The wayfaring graffiti writers are not seen as true citizens, their activities are policed through harsh legislation, and their cultures condemned as illegal or minor. Even the film Sofles /​Wayfarer, intended to celebrate these neighbourhoods, cannot be accepted as a sincere expression of affection. Instead it must be rendered strange. Representatives from the City of Yarra, the municipal city in which Fitzroy and Collingwood are located, criticise the writers for damaging property and riding bikes without helmets, and its director was criticised for operating a drone in a manner that is alleged to breach regulations for use within a populated area.18 It is a truism of the municipal sense of the city that it should be defended against those who would destroy it. Rome, archetypal city of civilisation, was sacked multiple times, famously by the Vandal horde who had travelled from Germania to lay siege to Rome. The story that the Vandals destroyed cultural artefacts and laid waste to buildings is one of the roots of the term ‘vandalism’, used as a label for those who do not respect the property of others, damaging or destroying it.19 The illicit images and words written and painted by writers such as Sofles is often called ‘graffiti vandalism’ (see Young 2005) in a move that concedes the occupation of a city by its enemies. Since the vandals have come into the city –​‘you remember when we first came to the city, don’t you?’ –​then the city is open, the strangers have come in, and they are, as Simmel (1972) warns us, both near and far at the same time.

Tilting the wall The fear and anxiety that dominate the regulatory apparatus enmeshing the city are always compelling us to close the city, and to keep it closed. Closing off a city is a process that enlists its internal material components as well as

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On walls in the open city 31 its exterior walls. Threat can come from so many directions; a city’s defences must therefore be woven into its fabric. The ‘open city’ of urban defence was a response to the city’s perceived vertical vulnerability and horizontal vulnerability inspired the building of walls and the closing of gates. But now the city is also seen as pervasively, permeably vulnerable, as if always already invaded from within, with enemies living within its spaces which they inhabit along with the city’s residents. Such a fear gives rise to ‘bubble zones’ of civic protection (Mitchell 2005) and defensive architecture (Bottomley and Moore 2007). Such hostile ordnances seek to minimise a citizen’s exposure to those who might be ‘other’ than citizens, other than ourselves. The wayfaring graffiti writer who writes and paints on walls that do not belong to her both challenges the legal status of a wall as under the sole control of its legal owner and also visually reconfigures the city’s very surfaces, adding tags next to advertisements and spraying aerosol paint onto sandstone. And as we see in Sofles /​Wayfarer, the graffiti writer reassembles the physical components of urban infrastructure, such that the road itself becomes isomorphic with the city’s walls, rendered a surface for tagging, and a train carriage, which should be found on the ground or on tracks, can exist above the tops of buildings. Along with others who do not blend, or fit, into the spaces of the closed city, the wayfarer evokes for us other ways of being an urban inhabitant, so that we might see new modes of connection, new forms of community, and thus tilt the walls of the city.

Notes 1 See Bromboszcz 2013 on Hadrian’s wall and a number of other famous European walls. 2 On the Belfast wall, see Florine Ballif’s essay in this collection. 3 Another ‘Green Line’ can be found in Nicosia, a ‘buffer zone’ bisecting the island of Cyprus; see Leventis 2017. 4 Weizman describes how the solidity of ordinary walls within buildings can be rendered permeable in occupied Palestine: Walls … have lost something of their traditional conceptual simplicity and material fixity, so as to be rendered … as flexible entities, responsive to changing political and security environments; as permeable elements, through which both resistance and security forces literally travel; and as transparent media, through which soldiers can now see and through which they can now shoot. (2006: 8)

5 For a literary account of Brussels as an open city, see Cole 2011. 6 On the rhythms of the city, and the demands of their analysis, see Lefebvre 2013, Thrift 2008. 7 See Young 2017 on ways in which the conventional art world has adopted aspects of graffiti and street art cultures. 8 On signage, logos and other forms of ‘corporate tagging’, see Halsey and Young 2002; Young 2014.

32

32  Alison Young 9 It is not just graffiti and street art that might prompt regulatory and restorative responses but also activities such as littering, public urination against the wall, fly-​ posting or bill-​posting, and loitering. 10 This is in line with findings by Brighenti (2010b) of a sense of physical revulsion experienced by its opponents upon sighting graffiti. 11 See further on the criminalisation of graffiti and street art: Young 2012. 12 This and other aspects of the City of Melbourne’s policy on graffiti can be found online at www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/residents/home-neighbourhood/graffiti/ Pages/graffiti.aspx. 13 Section 18 states: ‘A Council may, in accordance with this section, take any action necessary to remove or obliterate graffiti on private property if the graffiti is visible from a public place’. 14 The film can be viewed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXskp89Cm8w or on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/156828060. On Sofles, see further Young 2016: 182–​187. 15 For a consideration of the technologies of vision afforded by drones, see Bradley Garrett’s recent presentation at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne, available online at http://digital-ethnography. com/bradley-garrett-drone-methodologies/​. 16 Stated by Miles on her Facebook page www.facebook.com/selina.miles.9. 17 On commuting, see Bissell 2010. For a detailed consideration of wayfaring, and how it differs from wayfinding or from transport and transit, see Ingold 2007. 18 As reported on Channel Nine News, 27 March 2016, included in their Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/9NewsMelb/status/713989820926656512. Accessed on 29 March 2016. 19 It is worth noting that the eventual fall of Rome can be attributed as much to internal conflict between powerful families and factions, along with the disastrous consequences of the accumulation of resources and privatisation, as to the effects of any external aggressors.

References Augé, M. (2009), Non Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso. Austin, J. (2001), Taking the Train:  How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, J. (2001), The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bissell, D. (2010), ‘Passenger mobilities:  Affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(2), 270–​289. Blomley, N. (2011), Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Urban Flow. London: Routledge. Boal, (2002), ‘Belfast: Walls within’, Political Geography, 21, 687–​694. Bottomley, A., and Moore, N. (2007), ‘From walls to membranes: Fortress Polis and the governance of urban public space in 21st century Britain’, Law and Critique, 18, 171–​206. Brighenti, A. (2009a), ‘Walled urbs to urban walls –​and return? On the social life of walls’ in his (ed.), The Wall and the City. Trento: professionaldreamers. Brighenti, A. (ed.) (2009b), Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-​betweens. Farnham: Ashgate.

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On walls in the open city 33 Brighenti, A. (2010a), ‘Lines, barred lines. Movement, territory and the law’, International Journal of Law in Context, 6(3), 217–​227. Brighenti, A. (2010b), ‘At the wall: Graffiti writers, urban territoriality, and the public domain’, Space and Culture, 13(3), 315–​332. Bromboszcz, R. (2013), ‘The catalogue of walls: A collective memory of Europeans’, Art Inquiry, 15, 1319–​51. Casey, E.S., and Watkins, M. (2016), Up Against the Wall:  Re-​Imagining the U.S.-​ Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cole, T. (2011), Open City. New York: Random House. Dawson, G. (2015), ‘Memoryscapes, spatial legacies of conflict, and the culture of historical reconciliation in “post-​conflict” Belfast’, in P. Gobodo-​Madizikela (ed.), Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition:  A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory. Opladen and Toronto: Barbra Budrich Publishers. Edensor, T., and Sumartojo, S. (2015), ‘Designing atmospheres’, Visual Communication, 14(3), 251–​265. Ferrell, J., and Weide, R. (2010), ‘Spot theory’, City, 14(1–​2), 48–​62. Halsey, M., and Young, A. (2002), ‘The meanings of graffiti and municipal administration’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 35(2), 165–​186. Hillary, F., and Sumartojo, S. (2014), ‘Empty-​nursery blue: On atmosphere, meaning and methodology in Melbourne street art’, Public Art Dialogue, 4(2), 201–​220. Ingold, T. (2007), Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Isin, E. (2002), Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, H. (2013), Rhythmanalysis:  Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. Leventis, P. (2017), ‘Dead ends and urban insignias: Writing graffiti and street art (hi) stories along the UN buffer zone in Nicosia, 2010–​2014’ in K. Avramidis and M. Tsilimpounidi (eds.), Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. Farnham: Ashgate. Lorimer, H. (2011), ‘Walking: New forms and spaces for studies of pedestrianism’ in Cresswell, T. and Merriman, P. (eds.), Geographies of Mobilities. Burlington: Ashgate. Loukaitou-​Sideris, A., and Ehrenfeucht, R. (2009), Sidewalks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Middleton, J. (2011), ‘Walking in the city:  The geographies of everyday pedestrian practices’, Geography Compass, 5(2), 90–​105. Mitchell, D. (2005), ‘The S.U.V. model of citizenship: Floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the “purely atomic” individual’, Political Geography, 24, 77–​100. Philippopoulos-​ Mihalopoulos, A. (2013), ‘Spatial justice in the lawscape’, in A. Brighenti (ed.), Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-​betweens. Farnham: Ashgate. Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulos, A. (2015), Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. London: Routledge. Roquet, P. (2013), Ambient Media:  Japanese Atmospheres of Self. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simmel, G. (1972), ‘The stranger’, in his On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thrift, N. (2008), Non-​ Representational Theory:  Space, Time, Affect. London: Routledge. Watson, S. (2006), City Publics:  The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters. New York: Routledge.

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34  Alison Young Weizman, E. (2006), ‘Walking through walls’, Radical Philosophy, 136, 8–​22. Weizman, E. (2012), Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Young, A (2005), Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law. London: Routledge. Young, A. (2012), ‘Criminal images: The affective judgment of graffiti and street art’, Crime, Media, Culture, 8(3), 297–​314. Young, A. (2014), Street Art, Public City:  Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. London: Routledge. Young, A. (2016), Street Art World. London: Reaktion. Young, A. (2017), ‘Art or crime or both at the same time? On the ambiguity of images in public space’ in K. Avramidis and M. Tsilimpounidi (eds.), Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. Farnham: Ashgate. Young, I.M. (1990, 2011 ed.), Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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2  Dismantling Belfast peace walls New material arrangements for improving community relations Florine Ballif

In Northern Ireland, the conflict1 between Catholics and Protestants is rooted in the colonial history of the British Isles as the Irish natives were Catholic and the settlers from Britain (mainly Scottish) were affiliated to Protestant churches.2 The Irish independence war led to the partition of Ireland in the 1920s. Northern Ireland then remained within the UK. The new state discriminated against the Catholic minority regarding voting, public housing and employment (Tomlinson 1980). Massive demonstrations and repression led to civil strife in the late 1960s, ending with the peace agreement3 in the late 1990s. The conflict sustained structural spatial and social polarisation in rural (Murtagh 1998) and urban settlements (Anderson and Shuttleworth 1998). The ethno-​national identities are linked to a sense of ownership of territory. The level of residential segregation along community lines is high. In Belfast, more than half of the population lives in homogeneous areas (more than 70% of the same community background).4 The segregation pattern results not in separating Catholic and Protestant into strictly homogeneous clusters, but in drawing multiple boundaries between predominantly Catholic/​Protestant neighbourhoods. Strong heartlands structure the representations of the city. East Belfast is predominantly Protestant and West Belfast is divided into the republican Falls and the loyalist Shankill. The south of the city around the university tends to be mixed, whereas the north of the city is a mosaic of small enclaves. Regarding the class distribution pattern, working-​ class housing predominates in inner Belfast (near the old industrial port and mills) whereas the areas further out and the suburbs are higher in class status. Individuals tend to socialise in the same religious group. Workplaces and some leisure facilities tend to be less segregated, although more subtle differentiation and avoidance strategies may occur. The level of distrust between groups remains high. The class issue is entangled with religion: if the middle class tends to be more mixed in residence and activities, refined forms of segregation may also reduce inter-​group interaction. Travel to work and leisure and shopping patterns are still constrained by sectarian considerations or fear, although mobility is made easier (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). The conflict resulted in more than 3000 casualties in 30 years. The worst time was the 1970s, when bombings and sectarian murders raged. If the

36

36  Florine Ballif general level of violence dramatically declined, outbursts of violence, especially rioting, still occur at times of historical commemoration (the most important being the 12th of July parades commemorating the Battle of the Boyne), viewed as sectarian events by the Catholic population. Assaults and attacks on properties for sectarian motives still happen (Balcells et al. 2015). The constitutional issue had been in part solved by the peace agreement (the claims for Irish unity had been recognised and subordinated to Northern Ireland people’s consent) but rose again in the Brexit negotiations. The contention today tends to be framed by issues of equality in socio-​economic opportunities and cultural parity of esteem, translating into disputes about access to local services or displays of cultural identity symbols. The decision of Belfast City Council (BCC) not to fly the Union Jack any more (only a few days a year) led to peaceful and violent protests during the winter of 2012–​2013 (Hearty 2015). The recent language dispute still prevents the power-​sharing executive, vacant since January 2017, from resuming. Republicans advocate an Irish language act that would recognise Irish as an official language (and whose most visible effect would be bilingual street and road signs). Unionists refuse unless there is a Cultural act where the provisions for the Irish language are extended to the Ulster-​Scots, a dialect inherited from Scottish settlers.5 In the Twaddell Avenue dispute, which ended in 2016, a protest camp was set up following the restriction by the Parade commission on the Orange Order parading in Crumlin Road on the 12th of July. The Catholic residents opposed the parade as they view it as a provocation. The Orange Order was attached to its historical route. The loyalist stand-​off lasted 3 years before the Crumlin Ardoyne Resident Association and the Orange Order reached an agreement to allow the parade on the Twelfth every year, providing the bands remain silent when marching down Crumlin Road. The enduring conflict impacts the urban landscape as the claims for territory are embedded in the urban fabric. Sectarian artefacts (flags, murals and memorials) often mark the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant areas. And these areas are divided by security walls. The first one was erected by the army in September 1969 after very violent intercommunal riots in the summer. There had not been an extreme situation where security devices control and prevent population movement (Weizman 2007). The security forces and the residents asked for the building of barriers to protect the population from violence (Calame and Charlesworth 2009). Called peace lines or peace walls, these “conflict infrastructures” (Till et al. 2013: 56) have multiplied until now in Belfast residential areas. Each has been built after local escalating tensions or attacks. The walls are only the most visible part of a set of planning policies trapped in the sectarian representation of space. The sectarian geographies are constant over time, but also shifting in the inner-​city areas due to Catholic demographic growth and socio-​economic catch-​up. Moreover, since the 1970s, young and upwardly mobile Protestants from the working

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 37 class have been tending to move out further from the centre and into the suburbs. Then in the central areas, especially in West and North Belfast, Protestant working-​class areas tend to decline and Catholic areas to grow. The expanding Catholic community is compressed into a small space and the decreasing Protestant community has more land made available with a high rate of vacant properties. The demographic dynamic imbalance constrains planning decision-​ making in Belfast. The planning authorities and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE)6 developed differentiated strategies for these areas. In order to accommodate higher housing needs, Catholic neighbourhoods were redeveloped over time with high-​density social housing programmes. To cope with the decline of the Protestant areas, the authorities planned low-​density housing programmes and industrial parks (Northgate, Hillview, Springvale) in the 1990s or commercial developments more recently. The idea was to reduce the blight and to benefit from the economic development subsidies available in implementing planning policies. The perspective of job creation and new-​built housing programmes was a token to convince the local Protestant population and interest groups to accept the lower housing densities. If it physically reduced the blight and the potential for violence, economic success was lacking, as business and office units often lay empty. The industrial estates and commercial or leisure facilities are meant to be neutral spaces. But they freeze territorial claims. A lot of space is also left over without any development. Oversized roads and left-​over spaces have been criticised by Alternative Forum Belfast, a local NGO raising awareness of planning issues. They coined the abandoned space as “the missing city”, showing that the vacant space on the fringes of the city centre represents a surface equivalent to the city core. The issue of maintaining security walls is trapped in this enduring polarisation and long-​lasting conflict, fuelled by the demographic shifts in inner Belfast. Catholics can’t be allocated housing in Protestant territory behind the walls. Demolishing these walls would indeed be likely to increase the spread of Catholic residency across the former boundaries. Nevertheless, for the last 10  years the Northern Ireland authorities have been pressing for their dismantling.

The walls as permanent structures dividing urban space Building separation walls had been one of the policing instruments aimed at containing the conflict in the last decades in Northern Ireland. Amid the civil strife at the end of the sixties, the army hastily laid barbed wire in West Belfast. It was meant to temporarily protect areas from rioting and looting. General Freeland, GOC for Northern Ireland, declared on the 9th of September 1969: “The peace line will be a very, very temporary affair. We will not have a Berlin Wall or anything like that in this city”.7 At the beginning of the 1970s, army intervention had been used as a tool to negotiate with the residents to dismantle the barricades erected to protect themselves

38

38  Florine Ballif and replace them with military barriers. At first, the army used barbed wire, but soon they put up corrugated iron fences. From the middle of the seventies, the police were responsible for erecting peace lines. As it was in the 1970s and 1980s a discretionary power of the police and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO),8 the Secretary of State became accountable for it in the late 1990s.9 And if in the 1970s and 1980s barriers were erected after violent riots or murders, in the 1990s and 2000s it became a political issue: as the decision was still a standardised response from the police to protracted violence (recreational rioting,10 attacks on properties, petrol bombs, intimidation) it often led to residents’ opposition and debate by local politicians, reported in the press (Ballif 2009). These barriers differ in shape and form. Mapping and numbering interfaces are subject to dispute between government bodies and NGOs. Indeed, approaches differ in considering physical continuity or the diversity of materials used and the successive interventions. Barriers multiplied even after the 1998 peace agreement. Belfast Interface Project, a local NGO, identified 18 barriers in Belfast at the beginning of the 1990s, 99 in 2011 and 97 in 2017 (BIP 2011, 2017).11 The largest number of barriers (70) are owned by the Department of Justice (which inherited them from the Northern Ireland Office following devolution of policing and justice powers in 2007), 25 are owned by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, five appear to be in private ownership (among which a school and churches), three belong to the Department for Regional Development and two to Belfast City Council. To date it has not been possible to confirm the identity of the owners of eight of the barriers (BIP 2017: 9). Most of the walls are located in deprived areas which underwent the most violent conflict, distributed into 12 clusters (BIP 2017: 8). Forty barriers are located in North Belfast, 30 barriers are in West Belfast and 11 barriers are in East Belfast. There are 15 barriers in the central area just outside the city core and only one barrier in South Belfast (BIP 2017: 7). Almost all of those (17/​ 21) built after the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires are in North Belfast (BIP 2011). Spaces between predominantly Catholic areas and predominantly Protestant areas are called interface areas. The walls are located in these socially and spatially marginalised spaces. They encapsulate the national conflict (Boal and Murray 1977). They mark territorial divisions and fix boundaries. The CRC deplores that “the physical barriers which were once seen as short-​term protection for embattled communities have now become part of the permanent structural landscape” (CRC 2008:  3). These barriers replace cognitive barriers with physical ones. However, not every social boundary has a wall. The walls operate a process of territorialising space and violence (Feldman 1991). Violence doesn’t disappear but takes other forms or relocates. Walls define the interface as a place for violence and insecurity, while securing a safe space within homogeneous confessional areas. The barrier reinforces the othering process, the malevolent other behind the wall being (un)represented as a faceless evil.

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 39

Normalising the barriers Since the 1990s, the political situation had been slowly normalising. The local and central authorities had made efforts to normalise the urban landscape too. The first walls had been made with corrugated iron and barbed wire; with time, they had been replaced with more sophisticated and longer-​lasting material such as concrete, bricks and fences. They have been transformed, reinforced and increased in height and more barriers have been erected. A large diversity of layouts and physical settings can be observed. The most ancient and biggest barrier –​also the most sadly renowned –​stretches from the fringes of the city centre to the hills between the Shankill and the Falls area. Its main structure is a 1-​mile-​long concrete wall built in Cupar Way (Figure 2.1). The most recent walls are sometimes less than 30 ft long. Security gates close roads in flashpoints area. High fences divide back gardens or separate housing from the street (Figure 2.2). Ornamented brick walls, railings, bushes or sterilised grass areas enclosed by fences have become more common (Figure 2.3, 2.4). The trend to “soften” the barriers increased, as a Northern Ireland Housing Executive official said (interview with director of development, NIHE, June 2008). In its redevelopment projects, the NIHE had been integrating the existing security walls into the design of new-​built housing since the 1980s. The walls then tend to look like a property limit of mundane appearance, albeit a bit defensive (Figure 2.5). Additionally, the housing is sometimes built further away from the pavement or the houses are built with the back yards facing the streets in order to widen the space between two areas. Street layouts can be modified to shape self-​contained housing estates (Barakat 1993; Ballif 2012). This tends to sterilise sectarian space and reinforce ethno-​territorial claims. In the 1990s onwards, the NIO also led environmental schemes to give the peace lines a less harsh appearance. Although it was long a taboo, the question of dismantling the “barriers” had become subject to public debate in the late 2000s. Hailing the establishment of the power-​sharing government in May 2007 (with Ian Paisley as First Minister and Martin McGuiness as deputy First Minister entering office), the Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Hain deplored that “There are too many so called ‘Peace Walls’ still dividing communities in Northern Ireland”.12 A few weeks later, the NIO decided to build a 25-​ft fence in the grounds of Hazelwood Integrated Primary School in North Belfast, a purposely mixed school,13 a symbol of community relations work. A petrol bomb had been thrown at nearby homes and the school’s grounds were supposed to have been used by the perpetrators to gain entry to the area. The decision was not welcomed by the school board and provoked much public emotion. The main voluntary and statutory organisations interested in or responsible for interfaces gathered to launch a discussion on the process that resulted in the formation of the Interface Working Group led by the Community Relations Council and in a first report (CRC 2008). It set the principles that

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40  Florine Ballif

Figure 2.1 Cupar Way, concrete wall. Source: © Florine Ballif 2008.

will be adopted by all in the whole progress of action, the need for consulting residents and linking the removal issue to regeneration strategies. The statutory bodies (NIO, then from 2010 the Ministry of Justice, Belfast City Council and the NIHE) began to collaborate on a strategy for dismantling the “interface barriers”. None of them is the unique body responsible for the walls. Neither erecting nor dismantling a barrier is explicitly a governmental issue. There is no dedicated budget. Belfast City Council has no power regarding the issue and acts as a civic leader.14 The NIHE confronts the issues as the social housing provider. Each public body takes its own accountability as a trigger for action. The newly formed government set the removal of the barriers as a priority. The first objective of the government’s strategy programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration (CSI) was to “urgently address the physical and community division created by interfaces with the support of communities”. It claimed leadership by the Office of First Minister and deputy First Minister. According to many, CSI proved the government’s inability to deliver its policies;15 at least it pointed out the contradiction of leaving the decision in the hands of the population (Cochrane 2013:  250–​252). Indeed, the strategy stated “The ultimate objective is to create security and safety for the community in ways which would allow the physical interface barriers to be removed over time. Decisions can only be taken when the process has reached the point

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 41

Figure 2.2 White City, fence between back gardens. Source: © Florine Ballif 2001.

where people from the local community are ready to move forward” (6.18). The newly established Ministry for Justice in 2010 took over responsibility for the walls owned by the NIO.16 In line with the executive, it submitted an addendum to the Programme for government 2011–​2015.17 It resulted in the commitment to “actively seek local agreement to reduce the number of peace walls”.18 The Ministry for Justice also tried to assert itself as the leading institution and launched its consultative document. It focused on shared communities in committing to “work with communities seeking the reconfiguration or removal of physical barriers” (DoJ 2011: 6). Interestingly, it dismissed the use of the term “wall”. “These physical barriers have in the past been known as ‘peace walls’ although the term appears increasingly outdated” (DoJ 2011: 28).

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42  Florine Ballif

Figure 2.3 Duncairn Gardens, pedestrian gate. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

In May 2013, at unveiling the Together: Building A United Community document (OFMDFM 2013), Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, then First Minister and deputy First Minister, outlined a range of measures to tackle sectarianism and division including “reducing and eventually removing all interface barrier within 10 years”. They stressed that “Interface barriers will only be reduced and removed with local agreement and support”.19 Despite strong political commitment, the programmes had a low profile, because of the necessity to secure the consent of the local residents. The cautious attitude is backed by a survey commissioned from the University of Ulster, showing that although the general public (76%) would like to see

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 43

Figure 2.4 Alliance Avenue, DoJ environmental barrier. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

peace walls come down now or in the near future, 69% of the nearby residents maintain that the peace walls are still necessary because of the potential for violence (Byrne et al. 2012: 22). This stance appears as participative or inclusive decision-​making; nevertheless, there is a paradox or a political stalemate in putting the responsibility for destroying the walls on the most alienated and deprived communities living next to the interface areas. In order to secure this local consent, talks are held on the ground by NGOs. The International Fund for Ireland (IFI), an internationally funded organisation, promotes reconciliation between unionists and nationalists throughout all of Ireland. It funds a range of relationship-​building initiatives within and between interface communities to help them reach a position where residents feel it is safe for the walls to come down. In particular, its Peace Walls Programme launched in 2012 targets communities wanting to work on the removal of the walls. Partial opening of security gates The first experiment was launched on September 2011 and was widely covered by the local and UK-​wide press. Alexandra Park in North Belfast has been separated by a 10-​ft-​high steel fence since 1994. Ironically, the fence was set up the day following the IRA ceasefire in order to prevent recurring youth rioting in the park. The fence is not being demolished, but a gate has been built in it (Figure 2.6), after talks between community groups in nearby nationalist Newington and loyalist Tigers Bay led to an agreement. As Justice Minister

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44  Florine Ballif

Figure 2.5 Short Strand, NIHE wall. Source: © Florine Ballif 2000.

David Ford officially opened the gate, he declared “It challenges the belief that these structures must be a permanent feature”.20 As only a three-​month trial, the gate was to be open between 09:00 and 15:00 on weekdays and closed at night and weekends by municipal staff. After the trial period, consultation with the community proved it possible that the opening hours could be extended.21 At present, the gate is open for the same hours as the main park entrances. Community centres on both sides organise events for children and young people. However, physical accessibility does not guarantee equal use or social interaction. Avoidance strategies between groups could be observed in the public parks in Belfast (Abdelmonem and McWhinney 2015).

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 45

Figure 2.6 Alexandra Park, new gate. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

The important press coverage of the opening of the Alexandra Park gate was followed by extensive discussions about opening other gates. Most of them had been erected in the 1980s and 1990s to block car traffic or prevent pedestrian access, most of the time after targeted murders. When tensions lowered, mainly in the late 1990s and 2000s, some of them had been reopened daily on the request of local residents with the authorisation of the police. Opening times were posted on pedestrian gates. After 2010, decision-​making had been transferred from the NIO to the Minister for Justice and mediatised. Trial openings were not a new phenomenon but the major change was they were centralised at the ministerial level and reported by government press releases and newspapers. For instance, the opening of the Northumberland Street gate, near Falls Road in West Belfast, in November 2011, six days a week during daytime, and extended on Sundays after Christmas, was publicised this way.22 Parallel to the experiments, discussions about dismantling the gates begun. The DoJ decided on minor and partial removal and alteration to its structures. For instance, a pair of 3.5-​metre-​high security gates, with palisade fencing on either side, used to close access between Springmartin Road and Springfield Road. The gate at the top end of Springmartin near the junction with Ballygomartin was removed in August 2014. The Newington Street gate

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46  Florine Ballif was dismantled in November 2014. Others were transformed into less defensive structures, as at Brucevale Park in June 2013 and Workman Avenue in April 2015. The road barrier in Newington Street at the junction with Limestone Road was installed after a murder took place in 1988. Following consultation through the Interface Working Group, potential for change to the Newington Street barrier was identified. In February 2012, after local consultation led by the NGO Groundwork NI.23 the gate was then opened during the day, from Monday to Friday for a three-​month trial period.24 At first opposition from the residents came not only from fear of attacks, but from road safety issues. Traffic-​calming measures reduced their fear.25 In 2013 the International Fund for Ireland allocated £471,000 within the framework of its Peace Wall Programme to the Duncairn Community Partnership (DCP). The latter was established in the late 2000s to gather local community groups and inter-​ community NGOs in lower North Belfast.26 Within DCP, the North Belfast Interface Network27 led local consultation with residents, resulting in the decision to dismantle the barrier. Work done in November 2014 had benefited from great local press coverage28 and was celebrated as a success by the IFI and the Minister for Justice. In Brucevale Avenue, in North Belfast, a low gate and a steel palisade fence closed off the access between the two streets which run along the boundary of the former Girdwood barracks. The barrier was not used after the army left in 2005. North Belfast Interface Network engaged in consultations with local residents, politicians and local community groups. The first public meeting led the residents to accept the idea of removing the barrier, but only if there was an agreement to close the road to traffic. Meetings between the police and the residents took place in spring 2012 to discuss the DoJ proposals.29 Then the street was condemned by a Roads Service order in June 201330 and work was done in September the same year. The new barrier is nicely designed and allows pedestrian traffic  (Figure 2.7). Anyway, this work on the barrier was set up in the context of a severe dispute on the regeneration of the area. The site had been purchased by the Department of Social Development from the army. The master plan (2007) made provision for a mixed-​use programme including facilities, notably a community “hub” with a training, leisure and sport centre and housing programmes:  social housing and private affordable housing aimed at first-​time buyers (Muir 2014: 59). The community hub, funded by a Peace III European grant, was inaugurated in January 2016. Although hailed by Belfast City Council as offering new leisure opportunities to nearby residents, the up-​market leisure facility seems to have a wide catchment area outside the neighbourhood. A few yards away, on the other side of Brucevale Park, The Duncairn Centre for Culture and Arts (opened in 2014)  seems to accommodate better the local needs, while attracting people from all around the city (interview with local activist, September 2017). But the site remains underdeveloped, only sports grounds and left-​over space surround the indoor facilities. Since 2007

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 47 no political consensus has been found for mixed housing provision. The Catholic community asked for housing development, whereas the Protestant community demanded economic development. The issue is framed along the concurrent needs of the two communities; as the waiting list for social housing is far longer for Catholics and the demand from the Protestant side in the area very low, newly built housing units would be allocated mainly to Catholics. But it is too sensitive to allocate houses to Catholics in a perceived Protestant area. In the 1980s, the NIHE allocated houses to Catholics in Manor Street next to todays’ community hub, due to the lack of demand from Protestants. Catholic households were intimidated and the houses attacked, then demolished at a later stage by the NIHE. A  peace line was erected in 1986 and still remains. The lack of consensus on the housing issue led to the revision of the 2007 master plan. Only minor housing schemes had been built in the Girdwood area: the sites for housing had been moved to the edges, one to fit into Catholic territory and the other into Protestant space. The Brucevale gate, at the other side of the community hub, had been removed to give way to a nicely designed gate, but still performs the function of fixing sectarian boundaries. In preserving the status quo, the barriers preserve a kind of pax romana. In Workman Avenue, in West Belfast, a heavy metal gate closed the road and was only opened twice a year to let the unionist parade go through, with police protection to avoid incidents (Figure 2.8).31 The DoJ decided to replace the corrugated iron fence with a new gate after consulting the local resident

Figure 2.7 Brucevale Park, new gate. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

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Figure 2.8 Springfield Road, Workman Avenue junction, old gate. Source: © Florine Ballif 1999.

Figure 2.9 Springfield Road, Workman Avenue junction, new gate. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 49 groups on both sides about its style and structure (Figure 2.9). They did not have great scope for participation. Residents asked to change the colour to brown, as it was meant to be painted black according to the DoJ. The DoJ also offered bullet-​proof glass to residents living beside. Security cameras were installed.32 The new gate, opened during the day for pedestrians, is also part of a broader regeneration project in the area and is meant to give better access from the Protestant side to the new facilities in Springfield Road. The Belfast Metropolitan College campus was inaugurated in 2012. The newly built Innovation Factory offering office space for small businesses, despite the gate opening, has separate entrances on the nationalist Springfield Road and the unionist Workman Avenue. Again, non-​residential developments are meant to secure the stability of religious space. Art as a catalyst Draw Down the Walls is a cross-​community project which uses art to engage people in interface communities to imagine what Belfast could be like without barriers, whether they are physical or not, and to encourage dialogue between residents. It involves the community sector and an art gallery.33 The main work targets young people at risk living near the interfaces to engage in projects documenting their everyday life. The project also curates art work to engage with the community of interface areas to imagine a city without barriers. In 2011, the Madrid Street peace wall was covered with photographs depicting what could be seen see if the wall were not there. The temporary opening of the Flax Street /​Crumlin Road interface in summer 2012 was part of an art project called Ambulatorio Belfast, created by the Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. About 130 aerial photographs of north Belfast covered with glass were laid out to create a pavement on the stretch of road enclosed by the peace wall. The DoJ was involved as it had to carry out work on the structure: to open a heavy metal gate that had been sealed off for decades and to cut a gate in the heavy metal fence on the other side. The motto “draw down the walls” was provocative, but previous public consultations with residents from both sides of the interface secured their consent. It was agreed that the installation was to be temporary and could begin before the 12th of July, which showed a degree of confidence knowing that the period is troublesome. The gates were opened daily from the 9th of July and then definitively closed on the 4th of August when the exhibition ended. The wall-​less street dissipated the first reactions of fear, thus achieving the objective of starting conversations (Tate 2016: 81). The installation was visited by approx. 2000 people, mostly from the local area, also gaining a larger audience. Some residents used the installation as a short cut to their homes. Nevertheless, the effect of the art project on people’s live should not be overestimated, as the local community often finds it difficult to engage with artwork in interface areas (Hocking 2012). Moreover it was very temporary.

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50  Florine Ballif The Northern Ireland Housing transformative programme The Housing Executive owned 21 walls in 2016,34 most of them incorporated into the housing design through redevelopment projects and made of bricks, railing and mesh. Most of them have been made higher over time. The NIHE has developed a community relations policy since the 1980s. Recently its Community Cohesion Unit has engaged in delivering Shared Communities housing programmes. Since 2010 its Building Relation in Communities (BRIC) programme has been aiming at developing better cross-​community relations. A report delivered in October 2012 presented a “visioning tool” process developing proposals for the removal or transformation of the interface structures.35 The objective of the NIHE is to secure community support for dismantling the barriers. This “visioning tool” has been applied to all NIHE-​owned interface structures, allowing the initiation of a conversation with the community. Sketches and 3D images showed the residents how the area could look. The approach is the same as the previous softening approach, albeit more radical. The proposals consist of lowering the walls or replacing them with less defensive materials such as low walls and railings. After three years of extensive talks with the residents, the NIHE reached an agreement to dismantle the Crumlin Road wall on the Catholic side (Figure 2.10, 2.11). The ex-​paramilitaries supported the project and help to convince the tenants. The NIHE negotiated with each resident. A woman whose neighbour was shot dead in her home in the seventies opposed the removal of the wall. The NIHE offered to set up a panel instead of railings in front of her house and she accepted (interview with the Head of Community Cohesion unit, September 2017)  (Figure 2.12). In February 2016, work was carried out to tear down the brick wall and replaced it with low walls supporting a 10-​ft railing. The old vegetation was removed and new trees and grass were planted with new pavement. Press coverage was high and the event was hailed as a momentum for peace. The Crumlin Road wall was the first structure owned by the Housing Executive to come down, but was replaced by a lighter structure. Its more mundane appearance still differs from the ordinary layout of housing facing the street. Again, the issue of safety is also enlarged to include road safety, as the new barrier provides an enclosed area free from cars in front of the houses to let the children play. It also should be noted that these strategies fit the objective to promote good relations between communities and alleviate fears. They serve also to protect investments against the potential for destruction. On the other side of the road, the wall had been maintained in the absence of support from the community, still fearing attacks and the opposition of local paramilitary groups. Nevertheless, work to transform the appearance of the wall had been agreed and done in October 2017. This consisted of minor changes, including art installations, road and kerbing improvements, and a new peace-​line gate. The NIHE, the IFI and Justice and Infrastructure government departments provide the funding.

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Figure 2.10 Crumlin Road, wall on Catholic side. Source: © Florine Ballif 2000.

Figure 2.11  Crumlin Road, new railings replacing the wall, Catholic side. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

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52  Florine Ballif

Figure 2.12  C  rumlin Road, panel in front of the house of residents opposing the railings. Source: © Florine Ballif 2017.

This story-​telling of wall removal should be questioned. Redevelopment projects previously led by the NIHE often transformed the security walls into more mundane structures without advertising it in the press. The NIO removed walls or sections of walls before the NI Executive commitment of 2013. The most striking example is in Torrens Crescent. A brick wall had been removed as part of the regeneration of the area in 2010. This had been an NIO property, recognisable by the yellow brick patterns in the red brick wall. It was no longer an interface, since the remaining Protestant population had departed. The wall was demolished without any publicity. The debate on the number of barriers is still not closed. A  controversy erupted regarding 21 barriers that wouldn’t be taken into account by the NI Executive, and then would escape the 2023 demolition target. Indeed, the 2013 declaration took as its reference a list drawn up by the DoJ. But the BIP 2017 report acknowledges 116 structures, and is not consistent with the DoJ and NIHE figures totalling only  74 structures (including 95 separate elements): not only because the BIP report includes the seven new barriers erected since 2012, but also because the way barriers are considered differs. This is, in part, due to differences in how structures and materials are identified and catalogued and whether a barrier made up of intermittent sections of wall or fence is considered a single peace wall or multiple structures. Another point of contention is the debate about reclassifying some interface structures instead of removing them, if it’s proved to be impossible for structural reasons, linked to the road layout or road safety issues.36 This concerns

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 53 barriers which are subtle and transformed by roadworks, planning decisions or the development of new facilities. They then no longer exist solely as purposely built security barriers and serve other functions. This happened where streets had been redeveloped into cul-​de-​sacs to prevent trouble between two communities such as dead-​end-​streets near North Queen Street on the fringe of the centre. These streets, now facing major roads, are unlikely to ever be reopened. Another example is Albertbridge Road. The NIHE installed large planters to grow trees and shrubbery next to the footpath in front of the houses. They protect the residents from the gaze of the other community, as they’re facing the Catholic Short Strand area. But, as a six-​lane road is now adjacent to the houses, they provide a safe space from the road for the residents. The difference between defensive architecture and peace wall is slight and a matter of discussion. This illustrates the ambiguities of safety and security issues. Another type of barrier considering reclassification is the barrier now forming the boundary fence of the new Belfast Metropolitan campus in Springfield Road. Here the function of the barrier shifted from security to property; it may be erased from the list recording purpose-​built security walls. If reclassification can be relevant to some interface barriers, it won’t avoid the need to take the others down.

A provisional meaning? In 2017, it seems very unlikely that all the structures targeted will be removed by 2023. The bodies responsible for the interface barriers (DoJ, NIHE for the main) led their own programmes to replace or dismantle the barriers. Each governmental body is limited by the remit of its power and properties. Gates are open during the day and some of them have been replaced by alternative, less defensive structures. In a few places where they were no longer needed, brick walls, fencing or railings have been removed. The IFI, the NIHE and several NGOs lead talks with communities and facilitate intercommunity conversations. Despite triumphal announcements, the process is very slow. Nevertheless, the issue is now a political matter and this is a major change. The insistence on transforming the barriers should be understood not as concealing the reality of the conflict but as an attempt to transform community relations with the wall as a mediation object. Not only is the less defensive appearance of the structures valued, but also the fact that it is possible to see through the walls or gates. The increased visibility is one of the main criteria for progress in the DoJ or NIHE declarations to the press. There is an unspoken belief that the visibility could reduce the othering process and instead lead to more confidence in the other community. Taking the community into account has been discussed as a great paradox hindering action, and a way of blaming the policy failure on the community or explaining the slowness of the process. But it is also a means of ensuring the transformation is delivered.

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54  Florine Ballif Then, the interventions on the walls are minimum and don’t subsume ethno-​territorial divisions. All alternative structures (arty railings, shrubbery, buffering) mark the landscape durably and inscribe the boundaries on the ground. Yet the surer way to remove a barrier is a population change. We may think that the persistence of walls and ethnic boundaries is transitional. Little signs of change appear. Over the last decade of 2001–​2011, residential segregation has tended to slightly decrease in Northern Ireland and Belfast (Shuttleworth and Lloyd 2013). Admittedly, this may not be the case for the single-​identity enclaves near the interfaces. Socialising occurs in places of work or leisure which offer opportunity to interact with members of other religious groups. These social links tend to be greater than neighbouring social relations, which tend to decrease in today’s way of life (Shuttleworth et al. 2004). In interface areas, new ethnic minorities settle (Chinese, Indian, Polish), because they find cheap or social accommodation close to the city centre, or left-​over premises for community use. So far, these evolutions haven’t managed to reframe the interface issues away from the nationalist/​republican and loyalist/​unionist conflict, mostly because paramilitaries are still active in these areas. The renewed interest in Belfast from international tourists has led to the development of political tourism and also tends to fix the meaning of the walls as artefacts of conflict. The walls, as well as murals and memorials in the deprived areas which suffered from the Troubles, are now a tourist attraction. Many individual guides and community groups (often ex-​paramilitaries) or even mainstream tour operators organise “Troubles tours” or “political tours”, including a visit to the Cupar Way wall (Wiedenhoft-​Murphy 2010). Residents feelings are ambivalent about these new forms of tourism, whose benefits are very little or non-​existent for local shops or local residents, due to the fact that tourists only pass through the neighbourhood by taxi, coach or by foot, but don’t shop or consume. The walls could drive another matter of contention, that of the economic benefit of using the image of embattled deprived communities.

Notes 1 Although self-​denomination would refer to religion (Catholic or Protestant), the conflict is multi-​dimensional and the opposition is structured along political and constitutional lines: referring to an Irish identity whose horizon is a united Ireland or to a British identity maintained by the Union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain. Nevertheless, more and more individuals perceived themselves as Northern Irish (21% in the 2011 Census). Adding to that, people from an ethnic-​minority background do not frame their identify by this sectarian divide. 2 Protestants worship in many churches; Presbyrterians and Methodists are the most numerous. 3 Known as the Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement, it consists of two documents, the Multi-​party and the British-​Irish agreements. 4 2011 Census.

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 55 5 The attachment to language is highly symbolic. According to the 2011 census, 11% of Northern Ireland’s population possess some knowledge of Irish, whereas only a few thousands recognise it as their first language; 8% of the population claim some knowledge of Ulster-​Scots. 6 The Northern Ireland Housing executive is the agency responsible for providing social housing in Northern Ireland. 7 “Barriers to come down tomorrow”, Belfast Telegraph, 10 September 1969. 8 The Northern Ireland Office acted as the home office for Northern Ireland during the direct-​rule administration (1972–​1998, and when Assembly was suspended in February 2000, August and September 2001, 2002–​2007). 9 Notably under the provision of NI Terrorism Act, 2000. 10 Low-​intensity stone-​throwing perpetuated mostly by children and young people. 11 The 2017 BIP  report identifies 19 barriers in L-​Derry, Lurgan and Portadown. This chapter will focus on Belfast only. 12 Statement by Peter Hain, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on the restoration of devolved government, House of Commons, London, 9 May 2007. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/nio/ph090507.htm (accessed 18 September 2017). 13 The school system in Northern Ireland is segregated. Although there is nearly universal enrolment in publicly funded schools, the majority continue to be educated within single or majority identity settings. Notably, less than 1% of pupils attending Catholic maintained schools are Protestant and only 6.6% of pupils attending state-​controlled schools are Catholic. A few purposely integrated schools (65 in 2016) welcome 7% of the pupils (source: Department of Education). The first ones were created in the 1980s, such as Hazelwood college. 14 The BCC owns two interface barriers set up in the 2000s in two Belfast city parks: Waterworks Park and Ballysillan Park. Each consists of a section of mesh fencing erected at the park boundary. 15 The final document was never published because it did not gain support at the Assembly. It was also criticised for insisting more on division than integration. 16 Most of them, 58 barriers in 2011 (BIP 2011: 10). 17 Draft published in November 2011, and final document published by OFMDFM in March 2012 after public consultation. 18 Commitment 68 in priority n. 4; Programme for Government 2011–​2015. 19 Statement from the First Minister and deputy First Minister –​9 May 2013, Together Building a United Community. www.northernireland.gov.uk/index/media-centre/ executive-statements/statement-090513-together-building.htm (accessed 15 June 2016). 20 DoJ, Justice Minister To Open New Gate In Alexandra Park Interface Barrier, Press release,16 September 2011. www.dojni.gov.uk (accessed 4 July 2015). 21 Gemma Burns, “Divided park to extend opening”, North Belfast News, 22 December 2011. 22 “City interface gates to open seven days a week”, Newsletter, 23 December 2011. DoJ, Justice minister welcomes progress at Belfast Interface. www.dojni.gov.uk/ index/media-centre/news-archive/press-release-archive-2011/december_2011/ justice-minister-welcomes-progress-at-belfast-interface.htm. 23 A not-​for-​profit organisation working in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland to build positive relationships within and between communities through participative regeneration projects.

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56  Florine Ballif 24 DoJ, “Ford welcomes opening Of Newington Street barrier”, DoJ press release archives, Monday, 27 February 2012. www.dojni.gov.uk/index/media-centre/ news-archive/press-release-archive-2012/february_2012/ford-welcomes-openingof-newington-street-barrier.htm. 25 “Northern Ireland: Notorious Belfast barrier opened for first time in 20 years”, The Huffington Post, 27 February 2012. 26 North Belfast Community Development & Transition Group, Intercomm, Groundwork, North Belfast Interface Network, Tigers Bay Concerned Residents Group, Newington Residents Group, North Belfast Community Bridges Project. 27 North Belfast Interface Network was set up by community groups in North Belfast in 2002. It acts as a community resource to address community relations and interface issues, particularly aiming at developing relations and trust between the two communities. 28 Linda Stewart, “Security gate is removed at north Belfast interface”, Belfast Telegraph, 26 November 2014. 29 Police Service Northern Ireland, North Belfast Area Report, 3 Month Report, Quarter 1, April –​June 2012, figures extracted 2 August 2012; Progress against priorities identified in Local Policing Plan 2012/​13. www.psni.police.uk/q1_2012-13_​ beln_update.pdf. 30 Roads Service, Department for Regional Development (Northern Ireland), The Brucevale Park, Belfast (Stopping-​Up) Order (Northern Ireland) 2013, (Statutory rule 2013 no.156), 6 June 2013 /​11 September 2013. 31 On the last Saturday of June and on the 12th of July. A metal bar had to be cut each time, which cost £1000. The new gate is opened in the daytime. 32 Maurice Fitzmaurice, “Barrier at sectarian interface replaced with less formidable gate after cross-​community talks”, belfastlive.com, 2 April 2015 (accessed 20 October 2017). 33 North Belfast Interface Network, Lower Shankill Community Association and the Golden Thread Gallery. 34 The figure given by the NIHE official differs from the BIP report 2017. 35 The 19 NIHE ‘Peace Walls’: A BRIC project for the Sharing Visions Theme. Report by Urban innovations, 5 October 2012; Additional Peace Walls Addendum 28 November 2012. 36 Cormac Campbell, “Why is it so hard to agree the number of interfaces?”, The Detail. www.thedetail.tv/articles/why-is-it-so-hard-to-agree-the-number-of-interfaces, 22 May 2017 (accessed 26 October 2017).

References Abdelmonem, M.G., and McWhinney, R. (2015), ‘In search of common grounds. Stitching the divided landscape of urban parks in Belfast’, Cities 44, 40–​49. Anderson, J., and Shuttleworth, I. (1998), ‘Sectarian demography, territoriality and political development in Northern Ireland’, Political Geography, 17(2), 187–​208. Balcells, L., Daniels, L.-​A., and Escribà-​Folch, A. (2015), ‘The determinants of low-​ intensity intergroup violence:  The case of Northern Ireland’, Journal of Peace Research, 53(1), 33–​48 Ballif, F. (2009), ‘La construction des murs de sécurité et l’évolution de la politique de maintien de l’ordre à Belfast’, Cahiers du Mimmoc, 5. http://mimmoc.revues.org/422 (accessed 20 September 2017).

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Dismantling Belfast peace walls 57 Ballif, F. (2012), ‘Artefacts sécuritaires et urbanisme insulaire. Les quartiers d’habitat social rénovés à Belfast’, Espaces et sociétés, 150, 67–​84. Barakat, S. (1993), Civil unrest shaping the built environment in NI. The case of Belfast. York: Post-​War reconstruction and development Unit, Working paper (3). Belfast Interface Project (BIP) (2011), Belfast Interfaces, Security Barriers and Defensive use of space. Belfast: BIP Belfast Interface Project (BIP) (2017), Interface Barriers, Peacelines and Defensive Architecture. Belfast: BIP. Boal, F., and Murray R.J. (1977), ‘Belfast:  The urban encapsulation of a national conflict’, in S.C. Clarke and J.L. Obler (eds.), Urban Ethnic Conflict, a Comparative Perspective. Chapel Hill, Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Caroline, Comparative Urban Studies Monograph series, 3, 77–​130. Byrne, J., Gormley Heenan, C., and Robinson, G. (2012), Attitudes to Peace Walls, Research Report to Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister, Belfast: University of Ulster. Calame, J., and Charlesworth, E. (2009), Divided Cities:  Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cochrane, F. (2013), Northern Ireland. The Reluctant Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Community Relations Council (CRC) (2008), Towards Sustainable Security. Interface Barriers and the Legacy of Segregation in Belfast. Belfast: CRC. DoJ (2011), Building Safer, Shared, and Confident Communities, A Consultation on a New Community Safety Strategy for Northern Ireland. Belfast: DoJ. Feldman, A. (1991), Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hearty, K. (2015), ‘The great awakening? The Belfast flag protests and protestant/​ unionist/​loyalist counter-​memory in Northern Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 30(2), 157–​177. Hocking, B. (2012), ‘Beautiful barriers: Art and identity along a Belfast peace wall’, Anthropology Matters, 14(1). www.anthropologymatters.com (accessed 24 October 2017). Muir, J. (2014), ‘Neoliberalising a divided society? The regeneration of Crumlin Road Gaol and Girdwood Park, North Belfast’, Local Economy, 29(1–​2), 52–​64. Murtagh, B. (1998), ‘Community, conflict and rural planning in Northern Ireland’, Journal of rural Studies, 14(2), 221–​231. Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister (2013), Together:  Building a United Community Strategy. Belfast: OFMDFM. Shirlow, P., and Murtagh, B. (2006), Belfast. Segregation, Violence and the City. London: Pluto Press. Shuttleworth, I., and Lloyd, C. (2013), ‘Moving apart or moving together? A snapshot of residential segregation from the 2011 Census’, Shared Space, 16, 57–​70. Shuttleworth, I., Lloyd, C., and McNair, D. (2004), ‘Measuring local segregation in Northern Ireland’, Communication, International Population Geography Conference, University of St. Andrews, August 2004. Tate, S. (2016), ‘Tinkering with space: Heterotopic walls and the privileged imaginary of the “New Belfast”’, in M. Stephenson and L. Zanotti (eds.), Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space. London: Routledge, 69–​96.

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58  Florine Ballif Till, K., Sundberg J., Pullan, W., Psaltis, C., Makriyianni, C., Zincir Celal, R., Onurkan Samani, M., and Dowler, L. (2013), ‘Interventions in the political geographies of walls’, Political Geography, 33, 52–​62. Tomlinson, M. (1980), ‘Housing, the state, and the politics of segregation’, in L. O’Dowd, B. Rolston and M. Tomlinson, Northern Ireland: Between Civil Rights and Civil War. London: CSE Books, 119–​132. Weizman, E. (2007), Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso. Wiedenhoft-​Murphy, W. (2010), ‘Touring the troubles in West Belfast. Building peace or reproducing conflict?’, Peace and Change, 35(4), 537–​560.

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3  Walling through seas The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present Peter Chambers

Introducing the ocean in the political present: dependency and invisibility The ocean is a space that few have proven capable of taking and holding, and this is in part because we humans cannot live on it, let alone in it, without highly technical systems, cannot work there without our prosthetic machines and their seaworthy boundaries. The sum of this says:  ‘the ocean has to be kept out at all costs’, at all human scales and systems, especially and to the extent that we venture into it. But the ocean is kept insignificant back onshore in the city because –​perhaps –​it contains deeply threatening entities it carries toward us, entities we actively fail to reckon with, as surely as our attention recoils from the no less constitutive, no less negated urban worlds of abattoirs and sewage. In certain senses this is a rational recoil, because the ocean has always been open to killing us, even destroying whole cities –​ with overwhelming power and complete indifference. As have its most fascinating predators. Space inviting entry and resisting appropriation, before killing us without a thought; such fascination and recoil demand the enaction of boundaries. And so the open city is predicated on its closure to the ocean (Luhmann 2012: 34). Contemporary urban capitalist life would not have emerged in its current shape without crossing the ocean (Steinberg 2001); the nautical, modern seaborne counterparts to the archaic long walks and land bridges that distributed humanity after the last ice age. There’s a complex and productive circuitry –​ that continues to weave its way through us  –​in this modern social process of crossing, which can be worded in this intentionally complicating way. Throughout modernity, the ocean resisted the human appropriation processes that produced the world of modern cities that crossing it co-​enabled. And yet the oceans ‘themselves’, the oceans that provided the many passages to the urban here and now, did not yield to nineteenth-​century imperial conquest and its regimes of land appropriation, territorialising as primitive accumulation, conquest, then private property, now quiet enjoyment (Marx 1992; Schmitt 2006). Even as the war in the Pacific settled twentieth-​century imperial domination as American and not Japanese, the Pacific itself remained ‘out there’,

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60  Peter Chambers something that even the most powerful forces of empires could only ‘project force’ into. At the same time, following Sloterdijk (2013), the entire age of European expansionism was dedicated to resisting the ocean’s resistance to humanity’s grip on it, overcoming it by ploughing into it, boldly going, surviving and returning, crossing, charting, fishing and fighting over it. In the political present, in contrast, we have withdrawn the ocean from our endeavours, making –​and here Sloterdijk offers an analytic way into our relation to it –​a key ‘unexplicated background’ “underlying manifest operations” (Sloterdijk 2009: 9). With Steinberg, the ocean in the crossing-​made modern urban present is, to most, merely the ocean: ‘just’ that enclosed ‘provider’ out there, the far distant expanse below the bellies of our jet aircraft cruising 12 km above it, appropriate only as a site of resource extraction or a ‘distant battlefield’, the necessary ‘transport surface’ of the logistical traffic that brings us most of the stuff we desire, the ship-​brought things enabling you to read this chapter, whose tags say Made in China, not ‘carried over oceans’ (Steinberg 2001: 8–​ 39). In thinking through these points, with Sloterdijk’s invitation to explicate the background in mind, my critical opening is the following. In precisely this scene –​the scene of contemporary capitalism, the site of the global city and its urban walls –​the ocean also continues to resist sustained critical attention. The ocean is a barrier to thinking in our thinking –​this chapter explores why this is worth thinking about now with regard to urban walling, beginning with the following theoretical review.

An analytic blind spot in an urban theorist’s critical attention span: ‘the threshold of the ocean is the last frontier of history’ The ocean is an analytic blind spot in recent theories of sovereign power, sovereign walling, transformation and the emergence of territory, theories which remain intensely, shall we say, ‘continentalist’.1 This directs us toward a lacuna the size of the ocean in the most influential of recent critical, theoretical understandings of power and transformation. With significant exceptions (Schmitt 2006; Sloterdijk 2013; Steinberg 2001, 2015; Urry 2014), social, critical, legal and political theory has absorbed the prejudices of our society’s oceanic blind spot, and for the most part this has kept the ocean out of the main streams of theoretical contention. This is not just a warning for scholars seeking H factor, it is a beacon indicating the danger for any thinking that (a)voids most of the world: the ocean we not only live with and from, the ocean whose rising presents us with a future doom and planning challenge, the ocean that also co-​produces the urban world the majority of us now live in. This oceanic blind spot has also had a notable effect has on critical thinking about walls and borders –​and especially their productive relations to the spatial, political and urban. Again, there are highly notable exceptions in criminologies of smuggling (Pickering 2014)  and detention and carceral

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Walling through seas 61 geography (Mountz and Loyd 2014), but even here, the ocean is used as a valuable case study that explains the landlubbers’ domination of other landlubbers for the landlubbers. Sovereignty is something stretching from the land to which it always returns, power something projected into the sea in which it does not belong, attention driven out into the beyond of an example that gives a way of saying ‘the state and its borders and domination are not where (you conventionally thought) they were’ (Mountz 2011). So even here, though apparently onto centre stage, the ocean is a case that ‘serves’, rather than an enigma thought through in its immanence, depth and volume (Steinberg 2015), or for its negated place in the politics of the urban present, as I am seeking to do here. This is of course something of a provocation: why do we (who wish to think through walls and borders) keep (a)voiding the ocean? One quote that encapsulates this avoidance, difficulty, or critical indifference to the ocean comes to us from a recent interview with Paul Virilio. For Virilio, on the one hand, “borders are historical sites over which wars have been waged”. Virilio makes such borders synonymous with the land-​based walling processes such as captured by Brown (2010) and Rosière, Stéphane and Jones (2012), and contends that they have lost their significance because of the acceleration of reality, Virilio’s fundamental observational prism for war, modernity, and the twentieth century. As a result of acceleration, all border walls were built for the last war, and every walling  –​from Maginot and Siegfried to US/​Mexico and Israel –​thus signifies the disappearance of borders tout court: “when we build walls, it’s that borders are about to disappear”. Yet in contrast, for Virilio, the ocean remains as an ineliminable frontier of history; as line, threshold, end and edge, the coastline is “the one border that will never disappear” (Virilio and Goldman 2012: 69–​70) So on the one hand, the frenzied production of land walls are the disappearance of borders; on the other, the ocean’s edge is the one border that acceleration cannot disappear. In making this stark distinction, Virilio stages the oceanic blind spot in ‘continentalist’ thinking, glancing at which opens onto my contention and focus in this chapter. If you like, the following two points can be read like waves breaking against Virilio’s quote. Firstly:  the ocean can and has been socially constructed as a wall. In the example I explore, by 2016, after a two-​decade social process, it was capable of being construed as a total wall transforming Australia into a fully secured space to live ‘within’. Moreover, the inter-​active elements of this construction that we will explore –​ocean made wall, sovereignty made secure, identity enforced through the interdiction of arrival, the transformation of a request for care by the other into a threat to the national self –​sits in a non-​contradictory and politically productive relation to the way that jurisdiction is practised in and through the ocean, another key point missed if we follow Virilio’s line all the way to its horizon. I append the systems theoretical layer raised in this chapter’s opening paragraph to the critical studies of jurisdiction of Dorsett and McVeigh (2002, 2012)  by re-​activating thinking about a set of practices capable of observing

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62  Peter Chambers jurisdiction as the legal speech-​enabling unity of ‘authority over’ and ‘responsibility for’, re-​casting sovereignty as one among a number of emergent power effects sought and procured through this (Chambers 2015). The contemporary ocean is understood and practised as a vast and jurisdictionally complex zone and a political frontier whose existence is spreading thousands of kilometres beyond the shoreline and coastal horizon, in ways that are actively making history and forming new sites of conflict (Chambers 2015:  412–​416; Dodds and Nuttall 2015; Epstein 2008; Hong 2014). This is true not only in the aggressive pretensions of insecure states, as where the Russians plant cute flags on the Artic seabed, where the Party builds fake islands to claim as China for China. This theoretical point can be generalised to consider the role of global cities in contemporary capitalism, giving our ocean practices their place in our common politics and its political economies. It is global cities that are now the living centres of greatest concern to capital and the locations and labourers –​who make, secure, and work to eke out an undeportable place within its ‘walls’ (Sassen 1992, 2008; Brenner 1998; Brenner et al. 2003). Yet these privileged sites of the political present, where walls indeed drift back into the centre of the city, and as borders come to occupy the centre of political attention (Balibar 2004), they tend to be attentionally withdrawn from the ocean whose functional dependence they disavow or avoid noticing. And moreover:  they are co-​produced as onshore through the systemic production of the ocean as an offshore space. It is an exploration of this last theoretical claim that drives my concern in the two empirical sections, to which I now turn.

‘Stop the boats!’: the border, total deterrence, and the onshore construction of an offshore wall as invisible as it was necessary This section focuses on key points of mediation where the Indian Ocean was made into an Australian wall between 2001 and 2013: the audacious transposition of a huge space ‘out there’ into a tightening world of power and security ‘in here’, a projection of national sovereignty in global space. To re-​assemble and push along some key points discussed so far, I am urging that this oceanic walling is best understood as urban walling because it was done to bound, border and so co-​produce the spatio-​politics of a fundamentally urban capitalist social order. Even though its key operations took place far out in the Indian Ocean and were orchestrated deep in the bowels of Canberra, this was a walling that sought to secure the places that count economically and politically, Australia’s emergent global cities, Sydney and Melbourne.2 Moreover, it was –​and is –​stabilised by a social imaginary withdrawn from the ocean that supports an onshore way of life that has been read back to swing voters in marginal seats who (polling reveals) feel threatened by offshore approaches. At stake here is how national politics withdraws coastal (sub)urban life from the ocean in order to secure its bounded identity  –​this is what we have to contend with.

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Walling through seas 63 Throughout the 2013 federal election campaign, the eventually victorious Liberal-​National Coalition campaigned on the slogan ‘stop the boats!’ The phrase referred to the arrival ‘in’ Australia of people seeking asylum by boat, and called for a total end to boat arrival as a way of restoring the deterrence and control that had been the proud hallmark of the Howard government’s post Tampa Affair measures,3 from September 3rd, 2001 (Crock 2003). When elected in December 2007, the Rudd Labor government had wound back what it had argued were the most costly and inhumane measures that the Howard government had instituted as ‘the Pacific Solution’ (Australian Labor Party 2007: 222), notably the billions per year it cost to destroy the lives and mental health of a population of asylum-​ seeking men, women and children, by abandoning them to the daily threat of abuse and prolonged exposure to life-​destroying harm (‘Australia: Island of Despair’ 2016), through the infliction of indefinite offshore detention, in the name of deterrence. By 2007, the destruction of people’s lives was popularly re-​framed by the Coalition as rightful punishment and served up as a job well done that, polling indicated, gladdened the hearts of swing voters in marginal electorates: one 1998 poll indicated that Australians overestimated by 70 times the number of annual boat arrivals4 (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 48), and nothing since that time, very little reporting, and virtually no political rhetoric throughout the Howard era, had done anything to dispute this distortion or contend with its widespread electoral uses. In the face of these human effects, observed as morally catastrophic by those who opposed it (while in opposition), the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments came into office seeking to wind down offshore detention, wind back the militarisation of rhetoric, immigration and customs for electoral gain, and re-​focus policy toward framing people smugglers as evil criminals (Chambers 2010). This re-​focusing of blame toward smugglers was arguably less pernicious in its effects than the demonisation of asylum seekers that had been the hallmark of the Howard government between 1999 and 2001 (Pickering 2001; Saxton 2003). Yet in drawing toxic heat out of the fevered, wounding talk of “manipulative, queue-​jumping illegals’ ” of the turn of the century, the Rudd and Gillard governments held to what remained a policy of deterrence and control, effectuated less by the attention-​ grabbing cruelty of offshore detention than through the attention-​resistant efforts of transnational policing, maritime surveillance and maritime interdiction. This story emphasises the maritime-​focused aspects of these latter attention-​resistant elements. I do so to show how what kept appearing as ‘a morality play of villains and victims played out in a scene of cruel nature’, displaced the complicated, inter-​active contingencies of the onshore politics of border security, most notably the nearly invisible offshore wall its investor-​ beneficiaries had built back in 2001. As Operation Relex, from midnight on September 3rd, 2001, the offshore border security work  –​ordered by Australia’s commitment to securing its sovereignty from the threat of asylum  –​was deployed as the definite and

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64  Peter Chambers all-​ too-​ heavy materiality of the Royal Australian Navy and Surveillance Australia (A Certain Maritime Incident 2002:  13–​30). This was projected from the north-​west coast of the island-​continent toward the region where smuggler operations sailed directly south from West Java toward Christmas Island, a territory of the Commonwealth excised from the Migration Zone (Crock 2003). Relex’s theatre of operations was nearly 2000 km, and ran between Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef, with surveillance capabilities deployed right up to the maritime boundary with Indonesia, and boarding effectuated the moment a vessel entered Australia’s contiguous zone. Doing this required the operationally necessary use of 25 Navy warships (Stevens 2006: 229), not just patrol boats. It was a full-​scale military operation,5 explicitly recognised by the Royal Australian Navy as a blockade whose purpose was ‘sealing Australia’s maritime borders’ (Stevens 2006). Yet by 2007, as the early days of Relex had faded into the routine enforcement of what was amalgamated as Border Protection Command, border security’s maritime materiality began to pass beyond the horizon of national concern (though see Walsh 2015). In taking office late in 2007, as it sought to address the ethical qualms generated by the infliction of offshore detention, the Rudd government retained the many deployed weapons of policing, surveillance and maritime interdiction that secured it, though without the towbacks and turnarounds that had been used in late 2001 and early 2002. In so doing, the Rudd and Gillard governments missed the memo on total deterrence and its crucial implication for policy, rhetoric, and the socially necessary Australian walling of the Indian Ocean thereafter. This opens a critical space enabling us to develop a key theoretical point: for the time in which a socius commits to a wall, it reproduces itself as a walled, walling society. Labor avoided or neglected the nearly invisible social necessity of this, especially the walling power of maritime enforcement operations –​which had always been there, day after day from September 3rd 2001, and were continuing to have the following political effects, both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’. In constructing crossing and reaching the territory –​arrival –​as a security-​ threatening breach to national sovereignty, in August-​ September 2001, the Howard government transformed Australia’s maritime jurisdictions (Chambers 2015:  409–​416) into a security space hysterically sensitised to national sovereignty, for a future then rendered indefinitely threatened by any and all boat arrivals. This political alignment of breach, sovereignty and constitutive threat harboured a number of political effects; its full history is extraordinarily complex and cannot be told here. I offer only the following two, which I regard as the most important for understanding how ‘stop the boats’ resonated a decade later, in 2013, because it was already part of an oceanic urban wall, both necessary and invisible, both deep offshore and deeply (sub)urban, that had been placed there in 2001: 1. bounding the ocean as breached by arrival transformed the ocean between Australia’s north-​west coast and Indonesia, and more specifically the

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Walling through seas 65 north-​south sea route between west Java and Christmas Island, into ‘the border’, a precious thing rightly defended from all ‘threats’ to national sovereignty, while; 2. sustained and stable efforts to ‘protect the border from threats’, enacted through militarised rhetoric and the extensive use of military assets to blockade the ocean, transformed ‘the border’ into a space of operations wherein arrival was responded to as an urgent security matter. Further: total deterrence binarised the ocean by making it into a threatened space in which arrival  –​even one  –​was necessarily seen as a total breach of national sovereignty. This binarisation necessitates actual surveillance and operational control forever after, which means enacting total nonarrival offshore as border security, from then on, day after day. Anything else threatens the city with breach, anything else shows sovereignty has been lost. Surveillance and interdiction for total deterrence and control thus continues to operate in a metastable field of border security operations (Bigo 2002) where onshore rhetoric, having bestowed a sacred value on a reification, then has to actually ‘go out and wall the border’, where that border is, physically speaking, an ocean. This is not for the faint of heart, nor for the small of navy –​and in fact it can only work when you have a strong on-​water force who are not at war, facing off against a much smaller and weaker set of ‘threats’.6 Politically, it yoked the audacity of an onshore vision to the banality of offshore operations, which shows us something of how an ocean can be made a wall through the interplay of idealities and materialities, dreams and steel. This gets at what we might, by repossessing Whitehead, call ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ affecting much thinking about urban walls, bringing us back to Virilio’s assertions about the coast as eternal frontier. Bringing in jurisdiction and the ocean-​based work it actively orders shows something of how this walling transformed the ocean into a functionally necessary and politically central space securing the vast majority of urban lives withdrawn from it. By its own parsing (GAMSA 2013:  6), the Indian Ocean is an enormous expanse of water functionally differentiated into a number of internationally recognised jurisdictions, many of which Australia does not claim total or even partial sovereignty over (Chambers 2015: 412–​ 414). Walling that part of the Indian Ocean from the habitual approaches from Indonesia, and later Sri Lanka, meant that Navy and Customs were actually going out and interdicting all would-​be asylum seekers as their everyday work: whenever and wherever they appeared (which was of course fairly well known through surveillance and habit), before they could arrive. Only then (but always thereafter), Australia was in the position to wall itself by claiming itself as threatened where it was not, in order to enforce a sovereignty it did not have, by preventing people from claiming protection, by regarding them as threats. Maritime border security work is spatially extensive, no doubt, but following a key point that Marieke de Goede dubs ‘reflexive pre-​emption’

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66  Peter Chambers (de Goede 2012: 211–​216), it’s also important to note how sustained security work undertaken to wall the ocean has affected time and the future ‘in’ Australia. Over time, by enacting societally valued border security operations and their culture-​engendering effort to ‘protect the border from any/​all/​even one threat’, ‘the border’–​the ocean –​was transformed into a durable space of deterrence, a wall for asylum seekers that ‘held’ by denying them the territory, so securing a nation’s sovereign future, but only through the continuation of operations. As early as November 2001 this was explicitly described as a ‘thick grey line of deterrence’ by enforcer ‘insiders’, though this phrase only appeared at the time in the Navy’s newspaper (‘Thick grey line: Patrols aim to deter illegals’ 2001). Broader publics ‘just knew’ border security was working when arrivals did not arrive, just as they ‘knew it had failed’ when a boat re-​appeared  (Chambers 2017: 94–98). For its onshore publics, the success of maritime border operations as total deterrence of all arrivals is about the appearance of a disappearance.7 There’s a further entailment from this dialectic of (in)visibility for parliamentary politicking, one that emanates from but is not limited to its parochially Australian dynamics. Total deterrence ‘came ashore’ for the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, as something of an invisible wall to re-​ election. By making even one arrival a threat to sovereignty tout court, the Howard government induced the necessity of surveillance, enforcement and complete nonarrival, for all subsequent governments, regardless of their ideological commitments and observations of ethical disquiet. This point holds for post-​Mariel Reagan era deterrence, and should be considered in Europe’s Mediterranean at present (Chambers 2017: 163–169). In opposition from 2008, the Coalition made it a point of partisan difference that it was additionally prepared to carry out deterrence by towing back and turning around vessels, as had been done in late 2001, though evidence from the Relex era suggested this had exposed asylum seekers to the risk of drowning and enforcement staff to the risk of injury, as violent resistance escalated, and led to mass drowning, as sabotage spread (‘A certain maritime incident’ 2002: 26–​30). By 2013 the Coalition’s ‘stop the boats’ refined towbacks and turnarounds as integral to its final position, holding that only towbacks and turnarounds could have a decisive deterrent effect, and that that only their party had the hardness and conviction to carry this decisive intensification out. The ocean is a far better urban wall than a guarded concrete barrier, because as it works, so it disappears. The Howard government had generated the social necessity of retaining an ocean wall that many Australians did not really care to know about, that most did not know existed, that was ‘somehow’ just out there, beyond, operating. This social invisibility was not just the indifference of the indifferent, it was shared most intently by those giving critical attention to the evils of people smuggling and the cruelty of offshore detention. In 2013, Labor politicians continued to react to the Coalition’s hardline talk of towbacks and turnarounds as ‘cruel’, excoriating people smugglers

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Walling through seas 67 while never questioning deterrence or countenancing the social necessity of its totality. The emblematic report of its era, 2012’s Houston Report, required a panel of experts to sit for several weeks; they emerged with twenty-​two recommendations. Number nineteen touched on maritime enforcement, but only to say “the panel notes that the conditions necessary for effective, lawful and safe turnback of irregular vessels carrying asylum seekers to Australia are not currently met, but that this situation could change in the future, in particular if appropriate regional and bilateral arrangements are in place” (‘Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers’ 2012: 17). Border security itself was left untouched; the social life of Australia’s offshore urban wall undiscussed. Meanwhile, most onshore critiques continued to focus on the appalling conditions faced by asylum seekers held offshore, their absence of rights in the teeth of the immigration beast and its privatised contractors and Australia’s dereliction of its commitments to international humanitarian law (‘This is breaking people’ 2013). In all these ways, moral-​ethical and rights critiques of smuggling and detention ran  –​for years  –​a morality play of villains and victims, with border security and its politics absent as agent or factor. Talk was only ever ‘lock up the villains, look after the victims, stop the drownings’. Successive Labor governments thus followed those onshore publics most concerned with this divisive imbroglio into a strange realm of self-​induced, socially dispersed invisibility, a curiously inverted elaboration of the Emperor’s New Clothes in which the sovereign’s wall (worn by all the people) could not be seen. As this avoidance of constitutive politics played out toward election day on September 7th, 2013, the campaigning coalition knew to just keep saying ‘stop the boats!’ over and over. A  wall, so necessary and so invisible, had become integral to Australia’s sovereign identity. In September 2001 the Howard government had built a wall; by September 2013 the Labor government still didn’t see they had been made to pay for it.

‘No Way’: Operation Sovereign Borders, boat people cannot fly, and the global class relations and banal biopolitics backgrounded by our capitalist urban way of life With the Liberal-​National Coalition’s victory, its sovereign decisionism and the late 2001 maritime blockade they had always implied were re-​vivified as Operation Sovereign Borders. The ‘stop the boats’ election victory restored the Howard government’s 2001–​2007 militarised deterrence of arrival and total sovereign control of the border. On September 17th, 2013, the Abbott government enlisted a decorated ex-​Special Air Services squadron commander,8 General Angus Campbell, to serve Operation Sovereign Borders. At the time, news media echoed government publicity when referring to General Campbell, promoted into three-​star general when he was seconded, as ‘heading up

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68  Peter Chambers the operation’. Campbell’s was a role that, it was argued, politicised the military in the course of militarising parliamentary politics and the border (Grattan 2013; Wadham 2014). But if it ‘did’, what did Campbell actually ‘do’? It was never made clear to the viewing public what General Campbell’s actual role involved. Suspicions of puppetry and other kinds of insertive manipulation circulated alongside loose intimations of fascist futures (Grattan 2013; Wadham 2014), but these were tamped down by the way Campbell’s role was announced as secret and continued to appear silenced. According to the Abbott government, this secrecy and silence was necessary due to the national security sensitivity of any and all ‘on-​water operational matters’, which the government’s spokespeople use at any given opportunity to ‘declare that they had nothing to declare’ about border security (Chambers 2017). This, in turn, was offered as proof positive that the Coalition was delivering its electoral mandate by ‘operating the operation’ successfully. For most of Operation Sovereign Borders’ weekly briefings General Campbell was simply used, a silent figurehead who donated his rank, office and dignity to the executive to bestow the visual signature of symbolic authority on what was –​by the Liberal party’s express hand (‘The Coalition’s Operation Sovereign Borders Policy’ 2013) –​ an ideologically laden political project that would bestow the shine of medals upon its electoral mandate. For the summer of 2013–​2014, the Operation Sovereign Borders briefings offered Australian viewers a morsel of militarist spectacle. But given that this was summer, was such kitsch security theatre capable of punctuating the self-​ involved, pleasant humdrum of suburban Aussie life over Christmas, where attention drifts away from the gridlock and home renovation shows of the working year, toward the beach and cricket? We can’t know if Operation Sovereign Borders rated, because it ran outside ratings season.9 Moreover: this wasn’t nationalist Serbia or Putin’s Russia, which meant a campaign after the campaign, a deep ocean blockade happening while Australians were all at the beach or BBQs, rendered with such obvious signifiers and definite twang, conjured an atmosphere that was both vaguely disturbing and slightly bemusing. But this is also just a short description of the Abbott government’s peculiar grip on power, their signature grasp on how domination should be undertaken (First Dog on the Moon 2014). This strange combination of Abbott government affects was intensified when, in April 2014  –​a month after ABC online enlisted itself to declare ‘victory’ for the Coalition’s policy (Operation Sovereign Borders 2014)  –​a YouTube advertisement and made-​for-​Facebook print campaigned to continue Operation Sovereign Borders’ societal work. In stark contrast to the ‘avowed silence’ that had characterised the appropriated general’s appearances in the briefings of late 2013, the ‘No Way’ ads featured General Campbell speaking, with the video and pamphlet versions subtitled and re-​written in twelve languages. What follows is an English-​language transcription of the YouTube version of ‘No Way’,

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Walling through seas 69 It is the policy and practice of the Australian government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters. If you travel by boat without a visa you will not make Australia home. The rules apply to everyone: families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled, there are no exceptions. Do not believe the lies of people smugglers. These criminals will steal your money and place your life, and the life of your family, at risk –​for nothing. The message is simple: if you come to Australia illegally by boat, there is no way you will ever make Australia home. (Laughland 2014). As voiced by General Campbell, No Way is legible as an Australian expression of sovereign decisionism without exception and that can only really make full sense given the particular confluence of factors described earlier in relation to ‘stop the boats’. Here, what I’d like to pinpoint is how the ‘No Way’ ad continued the Australian work of walling the ocean –​from its others, for itself, in 2014, based on 2013 and 2001  –​through an interdiction that continued to do boundary work just as important for onshore and offshore audiences. Incidentally, this speaks to the sense in which the difference between building the Berlin wall and walling the ocean is that still you have to constantly re-​ build the ocean wall for it to ‘stay up’. A co-​present onshore audience, always implied, are assured smooth passage across the border by the interdiction of Others in Campbell’s performance –​but this audience must pay attention as its cost of passage. ‘No Way’ was a coin of the Commonwealth given value and placed into circulation through construction-​ effects made for both sides simultaneously: border security, both offshore and on. To bring some of the earlier correlations to bear on the two-​sides I  am bringing into focus with this example, we can use Sloterdijk’s idea of “the constitutive background underlying manifest operations” (Sloterdijk 2009: 9). ‘No Way’ pushes the social fact of substantive inequality into the background by the foregrounded (apparent) threat of ‘manifest operations’. A decorated hero is here to save the nation and warn away its threats; behind him a boat in a storm, the co-​warning of the ocean, a picture of cold death, exposure, abandonment, drowning. Just as the Rudd and Gillard governments had done, the hard gaze of Campbell  –​and the deadly oceanic background kept in frame  –​ co-​directs responsibility toward smugglers and seekers, and away from the interaction of a 40,000-​year-​old regional geography10 and two decades’ worth of onshore politics whose contingent selections mean that asylum seekers who use this ocean route do so because they are denied the skies, in the following way that also continues the work of walling the ocean. Boat people cannot fly. Australia has a universal visa system, and will not give visas to noncitizen asylum seekers to fly from Indonesia. The Commonwealth grounds them in Java, blames people smugglers and asylum seekers for the informal arrangements they subsequently make together: first

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70  Peter Chambers ‘no fly’, then ‘no way’, then a re-​presentation of the dangers of what ensues as being caused by unscrupulousness, the ocean and desperation, reuniting villain, victim and nature for their Sovereign Borders sequel. Once again, we see an avoidance of onshore’s implication in offshore, the global city’s desire to wall itself using the ocean. This even happens in critical accounts. As one example, an opinion piece responding to the 2012 Houston Report (which, as raised above, missed border security, but for raising the future possibility of re-​instating towbacks and turnarounds), talks about how “[t]‌he panel’s recommendations prioritise policies that are solely based on deterring refugees and do little to acknowledge the conflicts, persecution and regional dynamics which make people board boats” (Thom 2012). Here as elsewhere, the vast majority of system-​beneficiaries failed to see how securing circulation was operating in their favour: conflict, persecution and regional dynamics are all  read as external factors ‘out there’, somewhere; arrivals are always only offshore factors coming ashore,11 where offshore is itself construed as external, outside and other (whereas, of course, I am implying that offshore is integral to the production of ‘onshore’ [capitalist urban] life). Once we re-​introduce the withdrawn background of the universal visa system and its immediate implications for boat-​going asylum seeking, we grasp one precise sense in which the sea wall is also always about the aerobridge –​of course the Berlin Wall was always about the airlift, too. Simultaneously, this shows how the appearance of the maritime blockade of ‘no way in’ only works by effacing its aeromobile traces (Derrida 2009: 130–​ 131), blinding its audience to contingent, political, onshore predicates that are secrets that cannot be disclosed: offshore, on-​water operational matters, always. There is a further normative implication here. The offshore addressee, the individuals and populations seeking asylum, the people wanting to live in peace who are being told “there is no way you will ever make Australia home” show us (without showing us) that there is a global class of person –​populations of asylum seekers –​who cannot arrive in Australia now, indefinitely, for the foreseeable future. This backgrounded global class, and its co-​implication in our aeromobility, give us a site for struggling over basic twenty-​first-​century antagonisms and contradictions, while showing the improbability of actually contending directly with this as the stuff of our political life. For offshore audiences who cannot arrive, the obvious message is ‘don’t come’. But for onshore audiences, General Campbell’s is an occluded travel advertisement, co-​sponsored by Boeing and Airbus (as well as McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin and Austal). ‘No Way’ is striking in its rhetorical promise of stoppage, but really, cutting off the sea route effectuates a screening function that further secures aeromobility while supporting global logistics. This shows us how Operation Sovereign Borders can seek the national and sovereignty in a project whose ambit is global and whose concerns are capitalist, which also shows us how ‘Australian border security’ isn’t only or really about Australia or border security (Chambers 2017). To pinpoint the

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Walling through seas 71 way ‘expansive global’ interplays with the ‘tightening national’ here, consider the way in which the banal biopolitics of reflexive demography have interacted with an air travel that courts arrival and encourages departure and return, as follows. Between 1976 and 2014, Australia’s population grew by nearly 10 million people (13.72–​23.46 million), with net overseas migration as the bare majority cause. These millions of arrivals, a number greater than Austria’s contemporary population, came by plane,12 in the same years in which asylum seeking by boat emerged as a political issue, and not accidentally as Australia ‘stopped the ships’. In these same 38 years, 69,605 people sought asylum by boat in Australia. Each year since the late seventies, Australia has accepted roughly 12,000 humanitarian applicants –​most of whom, once more, were plane arrivals. None of this is accidental, it’s policy, popularly sustained over decades, and over the past two decades this expansion of population, which is about feeding GDP growth, has been fed into global cities, legitimated through the beneficent conjoining of economics and culture as globalisation and multiculturalism. ‘Stop the boats’ is yoked to a commanding ideological phrase of globalisation, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. With these figures and everything they imply in mind about how globalisation actually works, ‘No Way’ is voiced in a note of concern about criminality, exploitation and drowning that can only be seen as systemically false once we implicate ourselves as the beneficiaries of global aeromobility who do not wish to share this technical marvel of modernity with them. Civil aviation’s civility, and its civis, are precious privileges we do not wish to share. Deterrence is always something of a screen for a deeper desire for exclusive possession; Australia as a space of interest is the defence of an amalgamation of properties (GAMSA 2013). Phrases addressed to offshore people like “[t]‌hese criminals will steal your money and place your life, and the life of your family, at risk –​for nothing” occlude the more deeply held onshore truths of a fundamentally capitalist pattern of life that struggles to understand anything else but the utility and emergent-​social benefits of individual-​selfish rational calculation. The further irony, and irony whose lived experience is ruinous for asylum seekers negated by it, is that, in its entirety, the ad accuses its offshore villains and victims of doing precisely what is supremely valued back onshore: the selfish pursuit of rational interest, commodity exchange, the quest for family advancement, and the quiet enjoyment of private property. I have given Australian examples and statistics in this section, but the concluding point is more general; these are global issues, these are our contradictions. We ought to return analytic attention to the unglamorous, unexceptional biopolitics of reflexive demography and how it co-​produces and seeks to secure circulation in ways systemic, basic and common: the capitalist cities in which is we must live and work; its necessities are our categories of existence, its systemically generated contradictions become our subjective symptoms. Australia’s sea wall, and its European longings, belong in the place where they render our belonging insecure, in our global cities.

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Conclusion: dependency and invisibility, total deterrence and social invisibility, the negation of a global class of person and its improbable politics Twenty-​ first-​ century life has, for the first time, become majority urban, continuing a fundamental modern process of transformation (Hobsbawm 1989:  21–​22), the global pattern of urbanisation we’re living through. The majority of urban life is coastal,13 and yet, to return to an opening contention, much of urban coastal life looks away from its ocean. I write from one coastal city, Melbourne, whose CBD turns its back on its own old working harbour (Taussig 2000), its bay and beaches, in packaging itself as a river city of cultural events, cafes, laneways and street art (Dovey 2005). Beyond the horizons of this bounded world of wealthy urban life are the working oceans of global capital where the fish are netted and gutted and frozen, the transport surface (Steinberg 2001) over which container ships are kept in ceaseless circulation (Sekula and Burch 2012), the depths from which oil and gas is extracted, the deep Pacific in which our plastic garbage floats and turns in widening gyres (Urry 2014). This speaks to how willed invisibility marks functional dependency, a critical key developed through this chapter’s contentions, and one whose resistance to thought I’ve invited closer attention to by thinking through the walling through sea we’ve examined. The systemic importance of offshore centres, and the importance of the ocean in co-​ producing them, directs us toward one archipelago of sites we might explore further that –​regardless of their physical and social distance and size –​are related to one another because they are all ours. This redounds to another basic point I’ve explored:  all offshore sites and practices, including the walling effects sought through maritime border security and offshore detention, point back to our urban lives, that which supports them, that which we look away or recoil from. Australia’s social construction of the border, and the logic that ensued from insisting on the necessity of total deterrence, produced a seaborne, walling materiality that was –​and is –​huge in size, scope and cost. Initially, this was bitterly contentious (Marr and Wilkinson 2004), but by 2013 it was an urban wall all the more effective for its social invisibility. In his genealogy of the car bomb, Mike Davis has explored how the most salient political effect of this novel urban weapon lay in how it has changed urban cultures who eventually girded themselves in rings of steel as they withdrew into their ‘defensible’ green zones (Davis 2007: 7). Davis’s work seems all the more prescient when we consider that on September 24th, 2016 The Daily Telegraph reported that “Australia is creating a ring of steel around our borders, escalating air surveillance and sea patrols in response to the worsening refugee crisis in Europe” (Meers and Benson 2016). The phrase was then very publicly deployed on November 14th, 2016, to refer to what was described by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in a piece to camera for TV news, as “the biggest ever peacetime maritime operation in Australia’s northern waters”,14 intended to prevent the smugglers from testing our resolve,

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Walling through seas 73 now that a deal had been done to transfer detainees to the United States. The next day, Turnbull (2016) tweeted a highly processed image of defence assets over blue water, with the tag line: THE COALITION GOVERNMENT. STRONG DEFENCE. SECURE BORDERS Yet as of July 14th, 2017, the tweet has had only 130 retweets and 317 likes, much of the commentary harshly satirical, some of the retweeters impossible to parse as satirists or (more likely) alt-​right trolls doing cos play with white supremacist signifiers. But did anyone outside this Twitter bubble notice or care about Turnbull’s revivification of Australia’s urban wall as ring of steel? Although Australian news media dutifully reported the ‘ring of steel’ on November 14th, the phrase has had no further traction in public discourse and imagination. Turnbull’s ring was never all steel, no doubt, but it was undoubtedly still large, and a costly operation that involved the deployment over many months of fourteen vessels. But by late 2016, nearly three years after the declared victory of Operation Sovereign Borders, border security’s maritime operations have been so integrated into onshore Australian life that ‘the border’ is now read back to the nation it secures as infrastructure, a ‘strategic national asset’ (Australian Border Force 2014). In these ways, the early 2014 appearance of ‘No Way’ examined above can be read as a vanishing mediator between late 2001 –​when border security was still at the centre of parliamentary politics –​ and its place as of writing, beyond the shores of politics, beyond horizons of justice, almost completely invisible. As argued, this relative invisibility does not diminish, but in fact has assisted in how this integrated, embedded wall continues to function as a screen for substantive inequality. I’ve argued that this is less to do with national symptoms and wish fulfilment, and more the fading, securing, dominating effects of a polity orienting itself toward GDP growth in global cities via the importation of human capital by plane. In conclusion, this makes the urban walling process we’ve explored here about how capitalist social relations coalesced in the particularity of a political geography and cultural moment to necessitate the domination of an already vulnerable category of person. In the final instance, this allows us to observe ‘boat people’ as a global class placed beyond the shores of politics because they expose something we recoil from, in our urban lives, the people whose arrival would lay bare contradictions too fundamental to implicate ourselves in and contend with directly as our own.

Notes 1 Neither Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brown 2010) nor Homo Sacer (Agamben 2008) contains a single mention of the ocean. Some authors and collections responding to Agamben have explored offshore sites and floating

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sites as ‘camps’ (Diken and Lausten 2005), ‘without exception’ these sociological readings of the Homo Sacer series are still about social relations taking place between two people grounded in the deadly indistinction of the relation between sovereign power and bare life, not two people sailing on, swimming in or diving into, or dwelling with the ocean. 2 Australia’s current population is 24.6  million, increasing by roughly 330,000 per year; more than half of this increase comes through migration, and the bare majority of these people come to live, work, and settle in Sydney (5.07 million) and Melbourne (4.5 million). Sydney and Melbourne have a combined population of less than 10 million, which is approximately 41% of Australia’s population, yet they absorb roughly two-​thirds of its migrants and produced 67% of GDP in 2015. 3 The Howard government (March 1996 –​December 2007), a conservative coalition of the Liberal and National parties, led a refiguring of Australian political life via economic neoliberalisations (privatisation, outsourcing, offshoring), canny poll-​ driven politicking and culture wars (militarisation through nationalism, White Australian revanchism), projected overseas in lockstep with the US-​led War on Terror from it inception. For our purposes, most significant was the first Howard government’s shift toward a deterrence-​led approach to boat-​borne asylum seeking (from 1996), led by PM Howard, Peter Reith, Philip Ruddock and others. Notably, the shift to deterrence transpired as Howard’s cabinet ministers absorbed populist critiques of globalisation made by xenophobic nationalists (Pauline Hanson) at roughly the same time by refusing indigenous groups recognition for expropriation and directing ire toward vulnerable and conspicuous categories of migrants, as skilled temporary migration, roughly two-​thirds to Sydney and Melbourne, was expanded above natural increase. 4 Which means that the ‘average Australian’ (in these polled samples) anxiously imagined 14,000 were arriving in a calendar year in which 200 actually did, aboard 17 vessels. 5 The Royal Australian Navy has consistently viewed the use of its assets and personnel for border security operations as fulfilling its ‘constabulary’ (law and order/​ policing, as opposed to military and diplomatic) functions (Sea Power Centre 2006). This does not speak to how Customs understands the militarisation of its national screening functions in this field; nor does it give a full assessment of how we might understand Border Force as a designed institutional effect seeking to integrate and blend these forces (ostensibly separate in a liberal democracy). 6 Twenty-​five vessels is roughly half the RAN fleet as of 2017 (it has not expanded significantly since 2001), a deployment that would become laughable the moment there were a threat to national security comparable to the one most prominent in Australian cultural memory, that of Imperial Japan. 7 This, in turn, indicates the senses in which all border security projects are implicated enactors of a politics of visibility caught in a dialectic of the unnoticed and the invisible, the hidden and the abandoned, the secret and publicity, the redacted truth and the spectacular lie (Brighenti 2010; Dean 2002; Horn 2011). 8 Australia’s Special Air Services are an elite unit, roughly comparable to their New Zealand and British counterparts, who specialise in long-​range missions deep in combat zones, with very little support. The choice of an ex-​SAS soldier not only gave Operation Sovereign Borders immediate cred (a hardcore, proper soldier, not some pencil-​pushing bureaucrat or slimy politician). But it was also highly symbolic, for Prime Minister Howard had chosen the counter-​terror unit

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Walling through seas 75 of the SAS to board MV Tampa on August 29th, 2001 (Crock 2003), the event that demonstrated Howard’s intention to ‘draw a line’ on that day, and the trigger of the legislative measures that enabled offshore processing and maritime interdiction by September 3rd, 2001. 9 The Guardian (Laughland 2014) reported the following numbers:  “Campbell’s address, which has been translated into 12 languages, including Vietnamese, Bahasa and Arabic, has received only a few hundred views in English since it was uploaded a week ago. The most popular version of the message –​in Dari –​has been viewed more than 9,000 times, but the translation in Hindi has only been watched 13 times”. 10 The rough estimate of the last time a land bridge existed between the ‘island continent’ and the Indonesian archipelago; one theory suggests this is how Australia’s indigenous peoples ‘arrived’ here (a theory which is –​I mention without any evaluation of the merits of the theory either way –​also a disavowal of a history of indigenous navigation). 11 The fairly standard leftist addition here is the re-​inclusion of a critical discussion of foreign policy, specifically Australia’s enthusiastic participation in the US’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This gets us further, but really it only adds another ‘overseas’ factor, rather than implicating ‘there’ in the production of ‘here’. 12 With the demographically negligible exceptions of the sailors of the US Navy, global logistics, and round-​the-​world yachtspeople. 13 Fifty-​four per cent of the world’s population is now urban (UN); 60% of the world’s metropolises (>5 million) are located within 100 km of the coast, and this includes 75% (12) of the world’s biggest cities >10 million); 40% of the world’s population live within 100 kilometres of the coast (UN); 85% of Australians lived within 50 kilometres of the coastline in 2001 (ABS). 14 Turnbull’s brag does not hold water, however. Stevens (2006) gives hard figures on the Relex deployment, which (as above) puts it at 25 vessels –​including warships (Stevens 2006: 229). To put this in perspective, the Navy currently gives its publicly declared fleet as comprised of 49 ships, boats and submarines. The ‘Ring of Steel’ involved deploying six Armidale, six Cape Class and two support vessels –​only 14 vessels, with eight of these assets purchased for and dedicated to border security operations since its emergence.

References ‘A certain maritime incident’ (2002), 23 October. Commonwealth of Australia, available at www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_ Committees/maritimeincident/report/index. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Australian Border Force (2014), ‘The future of border protection’, www.ibrarian.net/ navon/paper/The_future_of_border_protection.pdf ?paperid=23143312. ‘Australian Labor Party national platform and constitution’ (2007), Parliament of Australia, available at http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display. w3p;query=Id%3A%22library%2Fpartypol%2F1024541%22. ‘Australia:  Island of Despair:  Australia’s ‘Processing’ of Refugees on Nauru’ (2016), 17 October. Amnesty International. www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ asa12/4934/2016/en/​.

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76  Peter Chambers Balibar, É. (2004), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bigo, D. (2002), ‘Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease’, Alternatives, 27(1), 63–​92. Brenner, N. (1998), ‘Global cities, glocal states: Global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary Europe’, Review of International Political Economy, 5, 1–​37. Brenner, N., Jessop, B., Jones, M., and Macleod, G. (2003), State/​Space: A Reader. London: Blackwell. Brighenti, A. (2010), Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, W. (2010), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Chambers, P. (2010), ‘The rising tide of border security’. Inside Story, 28 July. http:// inside.org.au/the-rising-tide-of-border-security/​. Chambers, P. (2015), ‘The embrace of border security: Maritime jurisdiction, national sovereignty, and the geopolitics of operation sovereign borders’, Geopolitics, 20(2), 1–​34. Chambers, P. (2017), Border Security: Shores of Politics, Horizons of Justice. London: Routledge 2017. Crock, M. (2003), ‘In the wake of Tampa: Conflicting visions of international refugee law in the management of refugee flows’, Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, 12(1), 49–​95. Davis, M. (2007), Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. London: Verso. de Goede, M. (2012), Speculative Security: the Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, J. (2002), Publicity’s Secret:  How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Derrida, J. (2009), The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diken, B., and Laustsen, C.B. (2005), The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. New York: Routledge. Dodds, K., and Nuttall, M. (2015), The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Arctic and Antarctic. London: Polity. Dorsett, S., and McVeigh, S. (2002), ‘Just so:  The law which governs Australia is Australian law’, Law and Critique, 13 (3), 289–​309. Dorsett, S., and McVeigh, S. (2012), Jurisdiction. London: Routledge. Dovey, K. (2005), Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne’s Urban Waterfront. Sydney: UNSW Press. Epstein, C. (2008), The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-​ Whaling Discourse. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. First Dog on the Moon (2014), ‘Australian immigration:  Too many asylum seekers on boats? Try the Australian solution. It works!’, 3 November. https:// firstdogonthemoon.com.au/cartoons/2014/11/03/australian-immigration/​. Grattan, M. (2013), ‘Morrison reacts to heat over politicising the military’. The Conversation, 13 November. http://theconversation.com/morrison-reacts-to-heatover-politicising-the-military-20325. Guide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA) (2013), Commonwealth of Australia. www.border.gov.au/AustralianBorderForce/Documents/ GAMSA%202013.pdf. Hobsbawm, E. (1989), The Age of Empire: 1875–​1914. London: Abacus.

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Walling through seas 77 Hong, N. (2014), UNCLOS and Ocean Dispute Settlement:  Law and Politics in the South China Sea. Abingdon: Routledge. Horn, E. (2011), ‘Logics of political secrecy’, Theory, Culture and Society, 28(7–​8), 103–​122. Laughland, O. (2014), ‘Angus Campbell warns asylum seekers not to travel to Australia by boat’, The Guardian, 11 April. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/11/anguscampbell-stars-in-videos-warning-asylum-seekers-not-to-travel-by-boat. Luhmann, N. (2012), Theory of Society, Vol. 1. Connecticut: Stanford. Marr, D., and Wilkinson, M. (2004) Dark Victory: How a Government Lied its Way to Political Triumph. London: Allen & Unwin. Marx, K. (1992), Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Meers, D., and Benson, S. (2016), ‘Ring of steel to protect our borders’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 September. www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sea-and-air-patrols-​ are-securing-australian-borders-like-never-before/news-story/135aea6297f4eb5074 4867245c980763. Mountz, A. (2011), ‘Specters at the port of Entry:  Understanding state mobilities through an ontology of exclusion’, Mobilities, 6(3), 317–​334. Mountz, A., and Loyd, J. (2014), ‘Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders’, Geographica Helvetica 69, 389–​398. ‘Operation Sovereign Borders: the First Six Months’ (2014), ABC Online, 26 March. www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-26/operation-sovereign-borders-the-first-6-months/ 5734458. Pickering, S. (2001), ‘Common sense and original deviancy:  News discourses and asylum seekers in Australia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 14(2), 169–​186. Pickering, S. (2014), ‘Floating carceral spaces: Border enforcement and gender on the high seas’, Punishment and Society, 16(2), 187–​205. ‘Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers’ (The Houston Report) (2012), Commonwealth of Australia, August. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/​ thebordercrossingobservatory/files/2015/03/expert_panel_on_asylum_seekers_full_ report.pdf. Rosière, S., and Jones, R. (2012), ‘Teichopolitics:  Re-​ considering Globalisation Through the Role of Walls and Fences’, Geopolitics, 17(1), 217–​234. Sassen, S. (1992), The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2008), Territory, Authority, Rights: from Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saxton, A. (2003), ‘“I certainly don’t want people like that here”: the discursive construction of “asylum seekers”’, Media International Australia, 109(1), 109–​120. Schmitt, C. (2006), The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press. Sea Power Centre (2006), ‘A First Analysis of RAN Operations, 1990–​ 2005’, Semaphore, 2 January, available at www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/ Semaphore_2006_2.pdf. Sekula, A., and Burch, N. (2012), The Forgotten Space. Wildart Films. www. theforgottenspace.net/​. Sloterdijk, P. (2009), Terror from the Air. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2013), In the World Interior of Capital. London: Polity. Steinberg, P.E. (2001), The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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78  Peter Chambers Steinberg, P., and Peters, K. (2015), ‘Wet ontologies, fluid spaces:  Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking’, Environment and Planning: D, 33(2), 247–​264. Stevens, D.M. (2006), ‘“To disrupt, deter and deny”:  Sealing Australia’s maritime borders’, in B.A. Elleman and S.C.M. Paine (eds.), Naval Blockades and Seapower: Strategies and counter-​strategies, 1805–​2005. London: Routledge, 225–​236. Taussig, M. (2000), ‘The beach (a fantasy)’, Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 248–​278. ‘The coalition’s Operation Sovereign Borders policy’ (2013), Liberal Party of Australia, available at sievx.com/articles/OSB/201307xxTheCoalitionsOSBPolicy.pdf. ‘Thick grey line: Patrols aim to deter illegals’ (2001), Navy News: the Sailor’s Paper, 17 September. www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/Navy_News-September17–2001.pdf. ‘This is breaking people’ (2013), Amnesty International, 11 December. www.amnesty. org/en/documents/ASA12/002/2013/en/​. Thom, G. (2012), ‘Houston report a major setback for refugee rights’, The Drum, ABC Online, 13 August. www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-13/thom-refugees/4195746. Turnbull, M. (2016), ‘The coalition government strong defence secure borders’, Twitter, 15 November. https://twitter.com/TurnbullMalcolm/status/798750085282611200. Urry, J. (2014), Offshoring. London: Polity. Virilio, P., and Goldman, S. (2012), ‘Celebration: A world of appearances’, Cultural Politics, 8(1), 61–​72. Wadham, B. (2014), ‘Operation Sovereign Borders:  dignified silence or diminishing democracy?’ The Conversation, 8 January. http://theconversation.com/operation​sovereign-borders-dignified-silence-or-diminishing-democracy-21294. Walsh, J.P. (2015), ‘Border theatre and security spectacles: Surveillance, mobility and reality-​based television’, Crime Media Culture, 11(2), 201–​221.

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4 Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative1 Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke

Washington: January 25th, 2017. Newly elected US President Donald Trump signs an executive order aiming at the construction of the so often announced 3200-​km-​long wall along the Mexican border, adding to the existing hundreds of kilometres of material barriers already in place. Trump declares that ‘a nation without borders is not a nation. Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders’ (D. Smith 2017). In ‘wall announcing’ and ‘wall building’ President Trump is certainly not alone. In September 2016, the UK government announced the intention of building a £1.9m wall along the highway bordering the infamous ‘jungle’ in Calais, in order to block the ‘residents’ of the makeshift camp from entering the highway and attempting to hide on the lorries waiting for the ferry to cross The Channel, on their way to the UK (BBC News 2016a). A few weeks later, despite the jungle having been entirely dismantled, the French authorities unveiled plans to extend an already existing wall in the same area (McAuley and Birnbaum 2016). These plans for new walls follow numerous other walls built in Europe since 2015, materially rewriting some of the most controversial borders in the Balkan region. Whilst some Schengen borders have been walled for decades, such as the Spanish border with Morocco (as illustrated by abundant existing academic work: see, among others, Buoli 2014; Mutlu and Leite 2012; Saddiki 2010; Van Houtum and Pijpers 2007), the ‘new walls’ are located deep inside the European territory. For example, the highly contested (also by the EU authorities) fence-​wall built by Hungary in 2015 on the border with Serbia to block the flow of migrants along the so-​called West Balkan Route (see BBC News 2015), and the walls marking key sections of the borders between Hungary and Croatia, Slovenia and Croatia, FYR Macedonia and Greece, and Austria and Slovenia. More walls have been announced to separate Hungary from Romania, and Austria from Slovenia and Hungary itself (and possibly Austria from Italy). According to Jones et al. (2017: 1): There are almost 70 border walls around the world, up from 15 in 1989 (Vallet, 2014), and these are just the most visible physical manifestations of what is a much wider set of state practices to control movement such

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80  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke as deployments of more border guards, seaborne patrols, and investments in new technologies to monitor more comprehensively events within state space, at the edges of their territories, and beyond. ‘Wall announcing’ and ‘wall building’ have thus become popular practices among some politicians in Western liberal democracies, in Europe and far beyond, practices that are presumably also appreciated by a growing part of the electorate. The proliferation of walls in the past decade or so  –​the most famous and possibly most studied of which is that built by Israel in the Occupied Territories to control the movement of Palestinian residents (Alatout 2009; Handel 2009; Jones et  al. 2016; Ophir et  al. 2009; Weizman 2007) –​seems to confirm a new global tendency to invest in very large, very visible and very expensive infrastructures of this kind in order to contrast the penetration of the national territory on the part of undesired subjects (Jones 2012; Jones and Johnson 2014; Vallet 2014). But why such a brutal return, in the age of Schengen, to old-​fashioned materializations of borders in Europe? Is the so-​called ‘refugee crisis’ the actual driver of such anxious walling of many European borders? Is the ‘terrorist threat’ a good reason to build walls for hundreds of kilometres, while intelligence services are normally much more interested in tracing the fluid and immaterial mobilities of the networks financing and organizing the related attacks? Are these walls simply the response to uncontrolled movement of undesired subjects? Or is there a deeper and different rationale behind the popularity of these walls? The new walls in Europe, with their rich dotation of electronic and biometric devices, have converted many borders into ‘war zones’ of sorts, resembling strange monuments to past landscapes dominated by the logic of barbed wire (see Netz 2004), landscapes we thought (and hoped?) belonged to a different century. It is thus important to interrogate this disturbing cartographic and material presence in many European territories, precisely in a historical moment in which many were expecting the gradual disappearance of physical state borders (Johnson et  al. 2011), or at least their substantial incorporation into the mostly invisible and pervasive biometric systems of bordering (Amoore 2006). In this chapter, in a dialogue with some of the existing literature, we reflect on the ‘immunitarian’ significance of these ‘new walls’ in the context of the populist wave calling for more real and metaphorical walls to counter the upcoming ‘invasions of irregular migrants’ and the impending terrorist threat (BBC News 2016b). It is widely recognized that walls are simultaneously material and symbolic manifestations of political boundaries and designated configurations of state power (Till et  al. 2013). As illustrated by rich academic work (see, among others, Leuenberger 2014; Vallet and David 2012) the walling of borders to block the arrival of ‘alien’ bodies of all kinds and provenance has a long history –​one has only to think of the famous Hadrian’s Wall built by the Roman

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 81 Empire or the Chinese Great Wall or, more recently, the global Cold War divide represented by the Berlin Wall. Established in 1961, this surveillance assemblage of minefields, watchtowers, ‘no man’s lands’ and checkpoints ran 124 miles around three western sectors separating East and West Berlin and acted on different scales: preventing people escaping to West Berlin but also representing the material and symbolic geopolitical divide marking the Cold War era (as demonstrated by the consequences of its ‘fall’ in 1989)  (Baker 1993, 2005). However, despite these numerous and relevant precedents, there seems to be a general consensus on the fact that the post ‘9/​11’ years have witnessed a true proliferation of walls (Vallet 2014). Recent academic debates have responded to the current increase in wall building by asking ‘why is this happening now?’ and ‘what are the most immediate effects?’. In a recent intervention Wendy Brown (Jones et  al. 2017:  2) notes that while many scholars have highlighted the paradox of such proliferation of walls and fences at a time in which ‘the most potent forms of power and violence today are uncontainable by physical walling’, a possible explanation for this proliferation resides in the fact that ‘the new walls were often a political-​theatrical response to eroding nation-​state sovereignty’ (ibid.). For Brown, in fact, ‘contemporary border walls function as symbolic and semiotic responses to crises produced by eroded sovereign state capacities to secure territory, citizens and economies against growing transnational flows of power, people, capital, religions, ideas or terror’ (ibid.). This is fundamentally why post ‘9/​11’ walls are different from those of the past, which were often built by nation states to claim territorial sovereignty and deter other countries from invading their territory (see, among others, Vallet 2014). The ‘new walls’ are instead largely built as a response to the uncontrolled movement of individuals and non-​state actors. In fact, the ‘9/​11’ attacks in New York, and later the attacks in Madrid and London or, more recently, in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Nice and Barcelona, to mention just a few, have shown how non-​state actors may intervene violently in Western cities as ‘enemy-​others’. This fear of the ‘enemy-​other’ is connected by Brown in her influential Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) to the increased difficulty on the part of nation states in governing their sovereign territory. Accordingly, the calls for new walls may be understood as a response to the decline of sovereign power in a ‘globalized world [that] harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription’ (2010: 7). Such ‘enemy-​others’, in these narratives, materialize in the figure of terrorists, but also of irregular (and errant) migrants. The walls are therefore meant to (presumably) control these uncontrolled movements and prevent unwanted enemy-​others from ‘penetrating’ the national space (on this, see Jones 2012; Jones and Johnson 2014; Vallet and David 2012). As Reece Jones argues in Border Walls (2012), with the implementation of the War on Terror and the fear of uncontrollable ‘enemy-​others’, walling has become an expression of the urge on the part of many nation states to

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82  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke promote and enforce the management of a population as homogeneous as possible, and located within clearly demarcated borders: an urge that predates several post-​‘9/​11’ political landscapes (Jones 2012; also, Feigenbaum 2010). For Silberman et al. (2012), ‘walling’ is a material manifestation precisely of this wish to constantly and repeatedly reproduce a clear line between who belongs and who does not; according to this radical separation, those who do not belong are often represented by two familiar, and not necessarily exclusive, images: the poor and hungry masses and the culturally aggressive barbaric, both in similar ways threatening so-​called ‘Western values’ (Brown 2010: 33). More specifically, Brown links the obsession with walling in Europe to two intersecting contemporary crises in Europe: The crisis related to internally uneven debt, growth, employment, trade and national self-​determination resulting from a common market and common currency in the absence of a common social contract and common polity, and the crisis related to sudden, substantial migration surges from the Middle East and North Africa, where frontline EU states are also among the EU’s most economically challenged. (Jones et al. 2017: 2) However, what is key to our argument is the fact that, despite these new walls consisting of intricate combinations of visible techniques  –​such as bricks, chain-​link fences, barbed wire  –​and less visible ones  –​such as infrared cameras and underground sensors  –​in practice they often remain rather porous and relatively unsuccessful in fully controlling the movement of such real-​and-​imagined enemy-​others (on the relation between walls and visibility see Brighenti 2009; on their porosity see, among others, Jones and Johnson 2014; Till et  al. 2013). As already noted in 2005 by Dean MacCannell, building impregnable fortifications is only possible in the imagination. Walls were, as MacCannell explains, historically built by ruling parties as intentionally porous:  in the late eighth and early seventh centuries B C , large Greek cities were already fortified with walls that contained openings and gates. These were used to permit a defending army to slip out at night and attack the external enemy, but also to create obvious points of entry for that same enemy, a key military strategy. Hence, their porosity was understood as a principle of security, not as the result of a failure in keeping the enemy out (MacCannell 2005: 38). The ‘effectiveness’ of the new European walls in fencing off ‘migrants’ remains indeed questionable, since any reduction of the registered presence of refugees  –​highly publicized by pro-​wall governments  –​normally corresponds to an increase of unregistered passages via the smugglers’ routes or, alternatively, the deflection of the migrant routes towards more viable, but often also more dangerous, itineraries (Topak 2014). The fact that walls remain porous, we argue, is key to the understanding of how they operate as dispositifs conceived to materially and metaphorically perform the supposed

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 83 radical difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. In fact, when political leaders emphasize in their speeches the powerful materiality of the wall, they convey almost an epidermic sense of reality to their constituencies: the wall will be there, visible, touchable, real, impenetrable, monumental, an imagery largely recalled by Donald Trump when campaigning for the US Presidency: ‘On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. We will use the best technology, including above-​and below-​ground sensors. (…) Towers, aerial surveillance and manpower, to supplement the wall, find and dislocate tunnels and keep out criminal cartels’ (Donald Trump, US President, August 2016 [Iyengar 2016]). However, if we try to look at the proliferation of walls from the perspective of their visual but also almost tactile presence, we wonder whether these ‘assemblages’ are actually about ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’, or if they rather represent a spatial technology aimed at symbolically governing the body politic of the concerned countries –​a sort of ‘self-​fencing’, an immunitarian practice to preserve the idea of a possible and final territorial integrity. To endlessly (re)create the perceived radical difference between an internal unified ‘us’ that needs to be protected from external ‘aliens’ (a term used by many state administrations to define the migrants or the ‘non-​national’), these very aliens ought to be perceived as always (potentially) ‘amongst us’, an inherent threat to the very existence of a national community defined also by a putative horizon of national territorial integrity. ‘Walled states’ in the Balkan region, for example, do not really want to entirely block the migrants’ flow. The persistence of migrants’ mobility and the related ‘crisis’ is in fact what legitimizes more walls, more walling, more security interventions, more violent border practices, more biometrics, and more money invested in such infrastructures and the related personnel. For the walls to work, we suggest, they thus need to remain relatively porous; and while their very existence and workings are at the origin of more deaths-​at-​the-​border in Europe (see, among others, Kovras and Robins 2016), the current management of walls is also keeping alive the possibility of penetrating, illegally, or under strict and limited control of the authorities, the presumably ‘immunized’ territorial body of some of these ‘walled’ nation states. Walls, from this perspective, can be a theatrical and spectacular performative presence of a protective nation state, which claims to be capable of keeping the enemy-​others out. During a time in which the media frame migrants as ‘flooding Europe’ (Timur and Nordland 2016) and Europe is often accused to ‘have lost control of its borders’ (Stevens and Tonkin 2015), walls often become the ultimate representation of a specifically exclusive (and delusionary) understanding of the state and its actual spatialities  —​ a representation actually materialized on the actual bodies of migrants roaming the continent. Before reflecting on the immunitarian dimension of walling the migrants off in today’s Europe  –​and hopefully complement some of the existing

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84  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke interpretations of the proliferation of walls in Europe  –​it may be useful to briefly problematize the official narratives concerning the necessity and the utility of these assemblages of exaggerated technologies of surveillance, control and biometrical intervention that we call ‘walls’. First, it is widely accepted in the relevant literature that the new European walls are not merely objects, material devices placed on some border to restrain (certain) people’s movement. They are rather a process and a practice: walls ‘do things’, they produce effects on the subjected populations, including those regularly living under their putative ‘protection’. Again, walling processes prescribe who belongs and who does not, ‘hardening’ accordingly the social edges between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Silberman et al. 2012: 1–​2). Walls are therefore a technology that is part of a broader ‘politics of walling’ alimented by populist and exclusionary ideas of danger and (in)security in the age of biometrics, or perhaps we should say, despite the pervasive implementation of biometrics. The extraordinary financial effort on the part of the Hungarian authorities to build (and promote via the global media) a spectacular high-​tech double fence along the Serbian border is one particularly telling example, followed by other countries in the region. The same could possibly said of the (in)famous techno-​walls installed by the Spanish authorities along the Moroccan border to prevent illegal migrants from entering the EU via the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Second, while walls cannot be analysed as separated from the walling processes taking place, the actual materiality of these walls, with their barbed wire, bricks and chain-​linked fences, and their fortified, monumental and immanently biopolitical dimension, should not be overlooked. It is enough to think of how the fence along the Macedonian border with Greece has affected the thousands of migrants who in the Spring of 2016 were trying to reach other European destinations: the barbed wire of that new wall has (literally) left deep marks on the skin of many of those who, during those months, left the makeshift camp of Idomeni to transgress the border and its apparatus of surveillance and control. We do not suggest resisting accounts that illustrate the multiplicity and proliferation of bordering practices today (Balibar 2009; Jones and Johnson 2014), quite the contrary. In line with Louise Amoore’s claims that the border has increasingly become the migrant body itself (2006), we argue that the brutal force these walls exude and the deaths-​at-​the-​border that result from their presence are an integral and essential part of how this reproduction of border practices is directly implemented on individual bodies. Border zones and the spaces at the edges of the nation states, especially the ‘walled’ ones, remain sites where the crude effects of processes of immunization (Esposito 2011) from the contamination of alien presences can be seen most clearly, and where they should be studied precisely for their immanent political (and sometimes vital) implications for those who are presumably kept separated by these very walls. Third, narratives and practices of porosity are inherent to this walling process. For example, the International Organization for Migration

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 85

Figure 4.1  The walling of the FYR Macedonia border in Idomeni, Greece. Source: © C. Minca.

reports that since walls have been built on the Hungarian borders, the official number of refugees entering the country has dramatically dropped, especially when compared to neighbouring Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia (International Organization for Migration 2017). One has only to think of the images in the media of multiple makeshift camps on the Serbian side of the Hungarian wall to see the efficiency in restraining people from trespassing across the border (Tomic 2016). However, during our fieldwork in the region we learned that the passages, while numerically reduced, have continued unregistered despite the higher risks implicated and the need to recourse to illegal means on the part of the migrants. Again, what clearly emerges from recent statistics (and fieldwork evidence) about migrations and refugees in Europe, and in Eastern Europe in particular, is that walls do not block the migrants’ mobility; they rather make these people evaporate and reappear elsewhere, where another wall may soon be erected (see Santic et al. 2017). Our point is that not only do migrants endlessly trespass across the walls built to stop them, but that trespassing is an inherent part of the walling processes. What is more, the porosity of the new walled borders of Europe does not materialize in the same way for all individuals, nor is it a static process.

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86  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke

Figure 4.2  The makeshift camp of Idomeni, Greece in May 2016. Source: © C. Minca.

While according to Till et al. ‘state borders have long been selectively porous’ (2013:  52), such selective porosity in Europe has become all the more visible since 2015 and the biopolitical interventions to confront the so-​called ‘refugee crisis’. For example, during a window period between 2015 and 2016 only refugees with the correct documents from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were let in by FYR Macedonia along the Balkan Route. The other migrants suddenly became stranded and left in a spatial and juridical limbo in Greece (Amnesty International 2015). However, this open window for refugees hailing from these countries did not last long, with FYR Macedonia forcibly returning thousands of them to Greece in March 2016, including Syrians and Afghans (H. Smith 2016). This selective porosity is precisely what gave origin to the infamous makeshift camp of Idomeni (see Figure 4.2) where in 2016, from March to the end of May, thousands of people-​in-​waiting resided in the open fields, hoping for the legal or illegal possibility of crossing the (walled) border (UNHCR 2016). Finally, if walls are officially erected in Eastern Europe to block the movement of migrants, but unofficially kept somewhat porous, it is because they respond to a fundamental immunitarian imperative of the state, a state that is still conceived of as an organic territorial body to be protected from

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 87 the real or imagined contamination of alien bodies. It is with a few brief considerations on the immunitarian role of walls that we would like to conclude this chapter. Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito explains the immunitarian paradigm by recalling how in bio-​medical language immunity is conceived of as ‘a form of exemption from, or protection against, an infectious disease; in the juridical lexicon immunity represents a sort of safeguard that makes someone beyond the common law. In both cases, therefore, immunization refers to a particular situation that saves someone ‘from the risks to which he or she is exposed (and to which the entire community is exposed)’ (2013: 58). His underlying thesis, as presented in Immunitas (2011) and several other essays, including the widely circulated ‘Immunization and Violence’ (2013) here recalled, is based on two key assumptions: The first is that this immunitary dispositive, which is to say, this need for exemption and protection that originally belonged to the medical and juridical fields, has spread to all sectors and languages of our lives, to the point that the immunitary dispositive has becomes the coagulating point, both real and symbolic, of contemporary experience. (Esposito 2013: 59) While recognizing that every society has historically asked for protection and was concerned with its own preservation, at the same time Esposito argues that ‘at the end of the modern period, has such a need become the linchpin around which both the real and imaginary practices of an entire civilization have been constructed’ (ibid.). It is enough to think of the role that immunology  –​continues Esposito  –​‘the science charged with the study and the reinforcement of immune systems  –​has shouldered not only medically but also socially, juridically, and ethically’ (ibid.). If we move ‘from the realm of infectious diseases to the social realm of immigration’ (ibid.), we have the proof of how the immunitarian paradigm has crucially penetrated the sphere of politics and the reproduction of the body politic itself: ‘the fact that the growing flows of immigrants are thought (entirely erroneously) to be one of the worst dangers for our societies also suggests how central the immunitary question is becoming’ (ibid.). If we read the current conflict in Europe in line with these perspectives, we can then see it as originating from: The dual pressure of two immunitary obsessions that are both opposed and specular: an Islamic extremism that is determined to protect to the death what it considers to be its own religious, ethnic, and cultural purity from contamination by Western secularization, and a West that is bent on excluding the rest of the planet from sharing in its own excess goods. (Esposito 2013: 62)

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88  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke When these two impulses –​concludes Esposito –​‘were bound together, the entire world was convulsed by what resembled the most devastating autoimmune disease:  a surplus of defense with regard to elements outside the organism had turned against the organism, with potentially lethal effects’ (ibid.). Incorporating Esposito’s account of immunity in his analysis of the current border crisis and the proliferation of walled borders in Europe, Nick Vaughan-​ Williams in Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond (2015; see also Vaughan-​Williams 2009) states that ‘the logic of immunity works at two border sites that nevertheless become increasingly interrelated (…):  internally, between individuals and the community that threatens their very identity; and externally, between the body politics and its outside’ (2015:  112). When discussing the increased cases of death-​at-​borders, Vaughan-​Williams (ibid.:  2) argues that, to understand contemporary border politics and the related proliferation of walls, we need to resist the mainstream popular belief –​often present also in academic interventions –​that the problem resides in the distance and putative incompatibility between the so-​called humanitarian paradigm and the security paradigm, both influential in the ways in which walled border are understood and managed. For Vaughan-​Williams, the border crisis in Europe is better understood as a crisis of autoimmunity, a crisis generated by a set of biopolitical bordering practices driven by ‘excessive protection’ that has developed into a pathology, an autoimmune disorder. Our reading of the contemporary proliferation of walls in Europe largely aligns Vaughan-​Williams’s conceptualization of the immunitarian dimensions of borders. We consider the proliferation of walls and their porosity as a direct manifestation of such disorder and of the implementation, inflicted on the bodies of the irregular migrants, of the immunitarian imperative. Inspired by recent debates in political philosophy on biopolitics (see, among others, Minca 2015; also Campbell and Sitze 2013), we suggest that walls should be analysed as spatial biopolitical technologies aimed at controlling, protecting and taking life (see Rijke and Minca 2018). The population body that the walls are supposed to protect is in fact all too often presented, in line with Esposito’s reading of the immunitarian paradigm, as a ‘territorial body’ to be kept immune from external contamination. However, while the idea of an entirely purified and uncontaminated population/​territorial body is clearly illusionary, a true fantasy, it has, however, the power to penetrate the popular nationalist imagination and produce fear of invasion and a related sense of insecurity among vast numbers of the electorate. The immunitarian imperative in relation to walling is thus reflected in a twofold objective on the part of some European state authorities: on the one hand, to aliment the constant fear of penetration of the national body politic by ‘nonbelonging’ uncontrolled subjects; on the other, to reassure the citizens/​ electorate that the wall will represent the final and definitive device necessary to control precisely such uncontrolled mobilities. In this sense, the walls are the true materialization of a specific military biological rhetoric, based on

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 89 references to invasion, flooding, contamination:  a defensive line, protecting with its barbed wire the population/​territorial body presented as constantly at risk. This is why the interplay between opening and closing, between (presumed) immunity and porosity, is not a contradiction in the grand narratives supporting the border politics at the origin of the recent proliferation of walls in Europe. This is precisely how walled borders are meant to work: by sealing off their internal population to reassure them that everything is done to restrain uncontrolled ‘foreign bodies’ from penetrating the body of the national community to be preserved in its integrity, while at the same time keeping that very possibility open, so that more refugees will try to go through and … more walls will have to be built and managed by increasing human and non-​human surveillance assemblages. According to Brown (Jones et al. 2017:  2), this new border politics tends to ‘blur the policing and military functions of states and also generate new vigilantism at the border’ but also an increase ‘in organized criminal operations (and [expand] their transnational links) for smuggling humans, drugs, weapons and other contraband across borders’. Paradoxically, or perhaps not so paradoxically, these interventions spark newly intensified ‘nationalist sentiments that in turn spur demands for greater exercises of state sovereignty, more effective walling and less flexibility in responding to globalization’s vicissitudes and volatilities’ (ibid.). Rethought along these lines, to speak again with Vaughan-​ Williams, contemporary biopolitical bordering practices should be conceptualized as immune systems. While their primary function is to develop a protective response in the face of a risk, borders have the potentiality to develop excessive, aggressively militaristic, and indeed autoimmune tendencies: The logic of immunisation works by using precisely that which it seeks to oppose in order to develop a resistance against it. But while in non-​lethal doses this operation may protect life, beyond a certain threshold Esposito argues that it may threaten that which it is supposed to protect: an autoimmune crisis. (Vaughan-​Williams 2016) Read through the lens of the immunitary paradigm, insists Vaughan-​Williams, Europe’s border crisis is an autoimmune disorder stimulated by the problematization of ‘irregular’ migration as an existential threat to the body politic. However, the immunitarian principle for a community, for any community, national or otherwise, as Roberto Esposito and others have clearly demonstrated, is potentially a principle of biopolitical self-​ destruction. Timothy Campbell in particular, when reflecting on Peter Sloterdijk’s work on immunity and community in Improper Life (2011), insists on the thanatopolitical dimension of all immunitarian political practices. For Campbell, in fact, ‘the thanatopolitical cannot be thought apart from contemporary and individualised forms of immunity and the devastating effects

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90  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke they have on community’ (2011: 89). In the individualized immunity regimes produced by this new biopolitical condition and the related biotechnologies pervading Western societies, in Europe as elsewhere  –​continues Campbell while reading Sloterdijk –​we have, paradoxically, on the one hand, the tendency to create immunological and national real-​and-​imagined collectives, on the other, ‘a situation in which the majority is ever more able to dissociate itself from the destiny of its own political community’ (2011: 93). Accordingly, thanatopolitical is ‘the name given to the end of communal protections and the death by exposure of those left without protection’ (ibid.). The new walls in Europe –​we would thus like to conclude –​may therefore be studied as the manifestation of the search for new forms of political prophylaxis perceived as capable of ‘keeping the enemy out’; at the same time, they may be understood as a thanatopolitical ‘dispositif’ fundamentally driven by (self)destructive imperatives of purity and protection paradoxically inspired by the immunitarian regimes that are emerging in contemporary Western democracies, and that aim at the (impossible) realization of uncontaminated individualized collectives. In this very sense, the new walls have literally deadly effects on the body of the migrant, but in the long run may also have deadly effects on the very life of the individual members of real-​ and-​imagined national communities that they are supposed to protect and preserve. Belgrade: January 25th, 2017. A freezing winter morning. More than a 1000 stranded unidentified ‘migrants’ dwell in the makeshift camp created by occupying a few abandoned warehouses behind the bus station in the core of the Serbian capital (Specia 2017). They live in dire conditions, exposed to extremely cold temperatures with almost no protection, other than blankets and random fires alimented by whatever materials they collect in the areas surrounding the warehouses. They have constituted a sort of no-​man’s-​land in the core of the Serbian capital. No water to wash, nor shelter to protect their sleep. Like ghosts coming from nowhere, they roam the nearby city centre and the warehouses, with their faces darkened by the fumes and seemingly no purpose or direction, stuck behind the walls built by some of the countries bordering with Serbia. They refuse to be incorporated by the Serbian hospitality system and be registered in the related camps. They wait for something to happen that will take them to the other side of the Hungarian wall or the Croatian border. They speak of the existing ‘holes’ in the fence, and they fantasize of worlds on the other side of it. The networks of smugglers, the only ones who are able to penetrate the assemblage of human and non-​human materialities making the wall, have attracted the refugees to Belgrade. And the promise of moving onward keeps them in this urban ‘jungle’ in such dire and precarious conditions. Many show the signs of failed attempts to pass the border: the broken legs, the scars, the frostbites. The walling ‘dispositif’ is clearly marked on their bodies. But they still hope to go through and they

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 91 know that it is possible; they know that this is precisely how ‘immunitarian’ walls work today in Europe.

Note 1 An earlier, shorter and largely modified version of this essay was published online as ‘Walls! Walls! Walls!’ on Society and Space (http://societyandspace.org/2017/04/​ 18/walls-walls-walls/​).

References Alatout, S. (2009), ‘Walls as technologies of government: The double construction of geographies of peace and conflict in Israeli politics, 2002–​present.’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), 956–​968. Amnesty International (2015), ‘Lockdown at the Macedonian border  –​illegal pushbacks of refugees to Greece’, 17 December (accessed 20 March 2017). Amoore, L. (2006), ‘Biometric borders:  Governing mobilities in the war on terror’, Political Geography, 25(3), 336–​351. Baker, F. (1993), ‘The Berlin Wall:  production, preservation and consumption of a 20th-​century monument’, Antiquity, 67 (257), 709–​733. Baker, F. (2005), ‘The Berlin Wall’, in P. Gangster and D.E. Lorey (eds.), Borders and Border Politics in a Globalizing World. Lanham: SR Books, 21–​50. Balibar, E. (2009), ‘Europe as borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(2), 190–​215. BBC News (2015), ‘Refugees ‘exhausted’ after Serbia-​Hungary border closes’ (accessed 20 March 2017). BBC News (2016a), ‘Calais migrants: Work to start on UK-​funded wall’ (accessed 20 March 2017). BBC News (2016b), ‘Guide to nationalist parties challenging Europe’ (accessed 20 March 2017). Brighenti, A.M. (2009), ‘Walled urbs to urban walls –​and return? On the social life of walls’, in A.M. Brighenti (ed.), The Wall and the City/​Il Muro e la Città/​Le Mur et la Ville. Trento: professionaldreamers, 63–​71. Brown, W. (2010), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Buoli, A. (2014), ‘Beyond the border: exploring cross-​scalar socio-​spatial dynamics of conflict, resistance and encounter at the Ceuta–​Morocco borderscapes’, Regional Studies, Regional Science, 1(1), 301–​309. Campbell, T. (2011), Improper life:  Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell, T., and Sitze, A. (eds.) (2013), Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Esposito, R. (2011), Immunitas. London: Polity Press. Esposito, R. (2013), ‘Immunization and violence’, in R. Esposito (ed.), Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. New York: Fordham University Press, 57–​66. Feigenbaum, A. (2010), ‘Concrete needs no metaphor: Globalized fences as sites of political struggle’, Ephemera, 10(2), 119–​133.

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92  Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke Handel, A. (2009), ‘Where, where to and when in the occupied territories? An Introduction to geography of disaster’, in A. Ophir, S.H.M. Givoni and S. Hanafi (eds.), The Power of Exclusive Inclusion:  anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. New York: Zone Books, 179–​222. International Organization for Migration (2017), ‘Migration Flows –​Europe’ (accessed 20 March 2017). Iyengar, R. (2016), ‘Read Donald Trump’s speech on immigration’, Time, 1 September (accessed 14 September 2017) Johnson, C., et al. (2011), ‘Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies’, Political Geography, 30, 61–​69. Jones, R. (2012), Border Walls, Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel. London: Zed Books. Jones, R., and Johnson, C. (eds.) (2014), Placing the Border in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Jones, R., Leuenberger, C., and Wills, E.R. (2016), ‘The West Bank wall’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 3, 271–​279. Jones, R., et  al. (2017), ‘Interventions on the state of sovereignty at the border’, Political Geography, 59, 1–​10. Kovras, I., and Robins, S. (2016), ‘Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU’s Mediterranean frontier’, Political Geography, 55, 40–​49. Leuenberger, C. (2014), ‘Technologies, practices and the reproduction of conflict: The impact of the West Bank barrier on peace building’, in E. Vallet(ed.), Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity? Burlington: Ashgate, 211–​230. McAuley, J., and Birnbaum, M. (2016), ‘France and Britain just beat Donald Trump to building a border wall’, The Washington Post, 29 September (accessed 20 March 2017). MacCannell, D. (2005), ‘Primitive separations.’, in M. Sorkin (ed.), Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace. New York: The New Press, 28–​47. Minca, C. (2015), ‘The biopolitical imperative’, in J. Agnew, V. Mamadouh, A. Secor and J. Sharp (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography. London: Wiley Blackwell, 165–​186. Mutlu, C.E., and Leite, C.C. (2012), ‘Dark side of the rock: Borders, exceptionalism, and the precarious case of Ceuta and Melilla’, Eurasia Border Review, 3(2), 21–​39. Netz, R. (2004), Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Ophir, A., Givoni, S.H.M., and Hanafi, S. (eds.) (2009), The Power of Exclusive Inclusion:  Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. New York: Zone Books. Rijke, A., and Minca, C. (2018), ‘Checkpoint 300:  Precarious checkpoint geographies and rights/​rites of passage in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, Political Geography, 65, 35–​45. Saddiki, S. (2010), ‘Ceuta and Melilla Fences:  a EU multidimensional border?’, 82nd Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Concordia University, Montreal. Santic, D., Minca, C., and Umek, D. (2017), ‘The Balkan migration route: Reflections from a Serbian Observatory’, in M. Bobić and S. Jankovic (eds.), Towards Understanding of Contemporary Migration. Causes, Consequences, Policies, Reflections. Belgrade: Institute for Sociological Research, 221–​240.

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Walls and the immunitarian imperative 93 Silberman, M., Till, K., and Ward, J. (eds.) (2012), Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Smith, D. (2017), ‘Trump signs order to begin Mexico border wall in immigration crackdown’, The Guardian, 25 January (accessed 20 March 2017). Smith, H. (2016), ‘Macedonia forcibly returns thousands of refugees to Greece’, The Guardian, 15 March (accessed 20 March 2017). Specia, M. (2017), ‘The desperate conditions inside a Serbian migrant camp’, The New York Times, 24 January (accessed 20 March 2017). Stevens, J., and Tonkin, S. (2015), ‘We have lost control of borders, says EU chief: Warning hours before summit comes as Britain faces £150m bill to support other nations despite not taking part in resettlement programme’, The Daily Mail, 24 September (accessed 20 March 2017). Till, K., et  al. (2013) ‘Interventions in the political geographies of walls’, Political Geography, 33, 52–​62. Timur, S., and Nordland, R. (2016), ‘Erdogan threatens to let migrant flood into Europe resume’, The New York Times, 25 November (accessed 20 March 2017). Tomic, L. (2016), ‘Migrants stranded in Serbian no-​man’s land’, Deutsche Welle, 28 July (accessed 20 March 2017). Topak, O. (2014), ‘The biopolitical border in practice: surveillance and death at the Greece–​Turkey borderzones’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 815–​833. UNHCR (2016), ‘Greece: Idomeni refugee site transfers’, available at www.unhcr.org/ news/videos/2016/5/5748522e4/greece-idomeni-refugee-site-transfers.html (accessed 20 March 2017). Vallet, E. (ed.) (2014), Borders, Fences and Walls:  State of Insecurity? Burlington: Ashgate. Vallet, E., and David, C.P. (2012), ‘Introduction: the (re)building of the wall in international relations’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 27(2), 111–​119. Van Houtum, H., and Pijpers, R. (2007), ‘The European Union as a gated community:  The two-​faced border and immigration regime of the EU’, Antipode, 39(2), 291–​309. Vaughan-​ Williams, N. (2009), Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vaughan-​Williams, N. (2015), Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaughan-​Williams, N. (2016), ‘Europe’s border crisis as an autoimmune disorder’, Green European Journal, available at www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/europes-​ border-crisis-as-an-autoimmune-disorder/​. Weizman, E. (2007), Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.

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5  Screening Brazil Footnotes on a wall Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni

We are walled in here. But India lies outside (Woolf, 2014 [1931]: 79) A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon (Smithson, 1996: 147)

0. The reclusive Colombian writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1977) used to write in aphorisms that he termed escolios, or glosses, commentaries applied on the margin of an ‘implicit text’. This chapter pursues a similar effort, albeit the following footnotes have been taken on the margin itself. Our starting point is an urban wall surrounding two villas in Cosme Velho, a leafy neighbourhood of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our end point is a wall shared by a public park and the headquarters of the largest commercial TV network of South America:  TV Globo. Between them a peak rises 710 metres over a forest. On its top sits a 30-​metre-​high statue of Jesus Christ, which can be seen from both walls. The peak needs to be crossed in order to cover the about ten kilometres separating the two walls. Yet, the path between two points on a map is not only traceable with a pencil, or walkable by foot. There may be another way. This involves speculative legwork. Standing before a wall, it is tempting to assume it as a barrier to overcome, a veil concealing a secret to be revealed. However, we find it interesting to probe the reality that its concrete body expresses. What matters to us is not knowing what is beyond this wall, but rather letting the contradiction it materialises emerge. Letting the wall speak. Therefore we did not engage in a revelatory enterprise but, somewhat close to a shamanic way-​to-​know, we let ourselves be abducted by the wall, so as to occupy its point of view and express it. Encircling the wall and ventriloquising it by means of our words and images, we engaged in a discussion on its economic, theological and aesthetic prolongations. Thus we realised that the two walls are mere building blocks of a larger one, a wall whose scale and materials, however, are of a wholly different kind.

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 95 This wall took shape in the 60s, the early years of the Brazilian dictatorship, and since then it has traversed the enormous political, social and economic changes the country went through, screening Brazil both synoptically and panoptically, within an all-​ingesting sphere of information and communication. For a long time this wall has been far too wide, invisible, porous, flexible and amorphous to be encircled, perforated, or climbed over. Yet, in the midst of one of the most severe social, political and economic crisis of the country, one that is quickly erasing the hopes that the seemingly unstoppable rise of the previous decade had generated, the wall begins to show some signs of deterioration, its form becoming intermittently perceptible, its stones letting widening cracks surface. Of course, possibilities abound for these to be swiftly repaired through a heavy dose of neoliberal cement. And yet, at the same time novel chances materialise for mapping and exploring these ruptures, and for beginning the slow process of dismantling these invisible structures. The elusive forces, pervasive imaginaries and historical layers of a society, we believe, can be somehow registered through a phenomenological engagement with its material surfaces. Therefore, the text that follows is the result of our attempt to speculatively encircle this intangible, elusive and implicit materiality, by engaging with an urban wall in Rio de Janeiro. Attending to the brick-​and-​mortar eloquence of what appeared to us as an emblematic and allegorical machine for producing immunitary interiors, we were able to reflect on its relation with the process of interiorisation through which Brazil has been walled in in the last decades:  a dense imaginary that has defined, constructed and anaesthetised its reality, whilst an invisible skeleton of financial and economic interests, environmental exploitation and political corruption was being erected around it. As Martin Heidegger once exhorted, one should ‘not give up the effort to practice planetary thinking along a stretch of the road, be it ever so short’ (1958: 107). Rather than exploring them separately, one should strive to locate the abstract within the everyday, the symbolic within the material, ‘the global in a local path, the universality of thinking in the grounded practice (figural and/​or literal) of walking where one is’ (Masciandaro 2010: 31; Joseph-​Lester et  al. 2016). Following these impulses we crafted a methodology in which walking, photography and critical analysis intersect: encircling this wall via ethnographic perambulation, attending to its position vis-​à-​vis the spatio-​ temporal coordinates of this city, following its trans-​local prolongations, transformations and translations into the site-​less materiality of that wall, and registering this transition into footnotes, as fragmented commentaries made of words and images on its implicit reality. The reader should be warned: this will entail digressions, which is unavoidable, since ‘the place of digression –​ Nicola Masciandaro writes  –​is the margin, the space into which commentary moves simultaneously away from, toward, more deeply into, and far beyond its text (2010: 31). Here, as elsewhere, Walter Benjamin’s words reverberate: ‘what for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determines my course’ (1999: 456).

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1. We begin at a crossroad. Here the tunnel Rebouças encounters rua Cosme Velho, in the homonymous neighbourhood. Lying on a side of the crossroad there is food, candles, a bottle of Cachaça .… The offerings made to the Exu every Monday, the day of the week to him consecrated. The Exu, born in Africa as an orisha (spirit) of Yoruba religion, migrated with the slaves to Brazil where he became part of the pantheon of Candomblé. The ‘man of crossroads’, as he is familiarly called, is the most subtle and cunning of the orishas. The protector of streets, houses, cities, the orisha of communication and patience, order and discipline, Exu is most importantly the messenger between the Orun (spiritual world) and the Aiye (material world). This liminal entity inhabits (urban) thresholds (house doors, crossroads) where he receives offers meant to support his work of transmission and translation between the worlds. Walking a little more, we get to a river, as minute as a creek. The city where it flows is named ‘the river of January’, except that the river mouth Amerigo Vespucci thought he was sailing through, when coining the name on the 1st January 1502, is in truth a bay, the Bahia de Guanabara. The name, nonetheless, stuck. In fact, into the Guanabara Bay and through the Flamengo beach indeed a river flows: the Carioca, around whose mouth the city of Rio de Janeiro was established. Rio Carioca provided the early colonisers with indispensable fresh water, which the aguadeiros (for the most part ‘water slaves’) filled barrels with, for the landlords to consume. Later an aqueduct was built to channel the precious water, and the iconic arch of Lapa, in the city centre, remains to testify to this effort. About seven kilometres long, this tiny river today, however, is barely visible. Francisco Pereira Passos, the ‘tropical Haussmann’, Rio’s mayor in the early 20th century and its most important urban reformer, decided on its underground canalisation to avoid the frequent floods (Rosso and Dias 2004). Since 1905 then, the Carioca has disappeared under the ground in the Cosme Velho neighbourhood, and remains invisible, only resurfacing intermittently, all the way to the Guanabara Bay. In the Largo do Boticário where the river begins its underground journey there is a blue plaque. It states that the Tamoyo, the Tupi people originally occupying the area, worshipped these waters, thought to provide beauty to women and virility to men.1 Here since 1567, few years after the foundations of the city, around the by then limpid waters of the river and the milder microclimate they provided, the neighbourhood of Cosme Velho thrived. Today this calm and leafy bairro nobre2 is one of the city’s major touristic destinations, home to the Corcovado station, where the train leaves to reach the Cristo Redentor, the iconic statue of Jesus Christ that overlooks the city and frames its visual imaginary. In Tupi language akari, or kari, is the name of a species of catfish that originally inhabited the river. Carioca would thus stand for ‘house of the akari’ [akari oka]. ‘Akari was

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 97 also the name given by the Tupi to the Portuguese invaders, whose armour resembled the skin of such fish. As a consequence, in Tupi language kari may also means “white man” ’ (de Souza 1946). Carioca would thus also stand for ‘house of the white man’ [kari’oka]. The river that disappears underground in front of us indeed enters a house of a white man, flowing through a grating, under a big wall. In the garden, behind the wall, it aliments a small pond where about 400 Japanese carps, we read, swim (Azevedo n.d.). When it resurfaces four kilometres later, about to flow into the bay, filled with illegal sewage dumps, it is a dark, fetid and poisonous stream of water. The wall around the garden is 644,004 metres long. Its perimeters encircle two villas. Around it, we walk.

Figure 5.1 

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2. As soon as the human began walking, lost was the stability provided by the ‘four leg square’, and the biped plunged into the disequilibrium and insecurity of verticality: ‘the very first cogito’, writes Michel Serres, ‘was a plan for a refuge to recover the lost ball’: architecture is born as an ontological necessity (1999). The upright posture liberated the hand, allowing us to use tools, as well as to communicate with increasingly complex signs. Technology and language, walls and words, and thus the capacity to build physical and symbolic interiors to ward off the outside were born out of the shaky condition of verticality (Leroi-​Gourhan 1964). It is with the Neolithic, the ‘age of the container’, that interiors were made relatively permanent via resistant materials and institutions (Mumford 1961). In a sense, Peter Sloterdijk suggests, inhabiting the world always entails a praxis of world-​making, producing psycho-​physical envelopes through a technical project, the project to interiorise the open into a totality, a world. ‘Living always means building spheres’, he writes, ‘immune-​systematically effective space creations’ where to carve a dimension in which to live protected from the outside (2011:  28). Neolithic’s newfound ability to build and live inside permanent interiors, Peter Wilson argues, thus set the stage for a novel mode of thinking in which the relation with the surroundings was reframed from one of identity to one of distance: ‘whereas the hunter-​gatherer (from ethnographic evidence) views the environment as a provider and protector, the builder extracts from the earth itself’ (2007: 117–​8). The wall materialised the condition of possibility of overcoming nomadism:  protecting the community, entrapping the flock, fencing the cultivated land, demarcating a difference between inside and outside. Within the concrete perimeter animals, humans, thought and god itself will be domesticated. In the ancient cities, politics, architecture and theology allied in this project, particularly visible in the monumental walls where power is most explicitly expressed, and its instituting act –​i.e. separation –​concretely materialised. As for Ernst Kantorowicz’s king, these walls have a double body. One is a physical and visual barrier made of stones. The other is an intangible and yet no less material frontier dividing divine, political, social and legal realms. Walls embody a constitutive duality in a further sense: they are screens that shield and communicate at the same time, incorporating the peculiar relation of (in)visibility that characterises power: security and spectacle, secrecy and transparency, seeing and being seen: a duality that was particularly explicit in the ancient city-​walls that had to guarantee the highest security and the highest visibility: the wall was to screen its inhabitants from the outside and, simultaneously, to screen its spectacle of power to the outside: ‘since truly present, the wall admits no doubts as regards the power that built it’ (Sloterdijk 2014: 256, our translation). In fact, the way in which power inhabits walls is complex. On a first level, walls manage to convince us at the same time of the strength and the unattainability

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 99 of what they are shielding. The hypnosis, however, does not last. Soon both the naked weakness of the sovereignty and the earthly fragility of the wall become evident. Walls thus appear as mere security devices to be overcome, climbed over, or destroyed. This is, however, their second level of deception: making us believe their sheer physicality is the problem, they manage to conceal the fact that the interiority they produce far exceeds their physical perimeter, instead prolonging and translating into trans-​local ecologies. This was already the case with the walls of Babylon, Sloterdijk (ibid.: 280) observes, which ‘neither represent necessary military devices, nor are mere megalomaniac expressions: they are morphological experiments’ in the possibility of building a totality, enclosing it into the form of an all-​encompassing immunological interior. This is wall’s cleverest trick: there is no secret beyond the wall, the secret being the wall itself, its form: ‘god has become wall and lives among us in the measure that we inhabit in him’ (ibid.: 243–​4).

Figure 5.2 

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Figure 5.3 

3. Standing before this wall we find ourselves tempted to assume it as a barrier to overcome, a veil concealing a secret that could be only revealed by penetrating it. If the basic mechanism of power is the secret, then the basic mechanism of critique is revelation. This is what knowing means in Western epistemology: a revelatory enterprise performed by an enlightening subject over an inert matter. In the Amerindian epistemology of Tupi descendants a different path is taken. Here knowledge is not the imposition of a point of view:  to know an object means to let it speak, that is, to let emerge the bundle of relations, affects and intensities that

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 101 constitute it and hold it together as such. This entails moving from epistemology to ontology, from the safety of a detached perspective to the uncertainty of an embodied p ­ erspectivism, where knowing means to take-​ part in the assemblage of which the object is already part: to be abducted, that is, a dangerous task usually performed by the shaman, a cunning diplomat able to master the arts of transition, translation and negotiation (Viveiros de Castro 2015). Thus we let the wall speak. In other words, we refrain from petrifying it into the game of interpretation or deconstruction, and instead engage in the multiple mediations in which it is entangled, attending to its semio-​ material and spatio-​temporal prolongations. We follow Yves Mettler in holding the ‘hope or belief that there is a possible operability for a physical site to relate to an abstract and shared idea beyond the site’ (2015:  39), that is, between the physical materiality of this wall and the complex field of forces and mediations constituting the sphere in which the country is immersed. We move, that is, from the static depiction of a site to the dynamic complexity of the plot into which it proliferates.3 Thus we slowly realise the specific trick this wall performs: by means of its physical materiality and the silent prohibition of the law that inhabits its fissures, the wall presents itself as an exclusionary device that keeps us outside of its lush interior. Yet, in truth it is the internal side of the wall we are contemplating, and it is inside of its all-​encompassing interiority that we have already been ingested.

4. Walls’ trickery does not come as a surprise. Tricksters are the spirits inhabiting them. Hermes, like the Exu, is the god that protects natural and supernatural boundaries, as well as the one that attends at the crossing and communication through them. The wall is simultaneously a hermetic locus of separation, and a hermeneutic threshold of crossing, transmission, translation and communication.4 At its junctures, however, a different kind of principle is made explicit:  the watchtower, the place of vision and scrutiny, a panoptical observation point in which the ubiquitous surveillance of power reveals itself: ‘nothing will remain hidden, the tower is observing you’ (Sloterdijk 2014: 251). In the watchtower dwells the all-​seeing giant, Argus Panoptes, whose panoptic surveillance Hera resorted to, when she wanted to spy on Zeus, her ever-​unfaithful husband. Power cannot stand prying eyes, however. Zeus recruited Hermes to have Argus eliminated. By definition, the all-​seeing giant could not be taken by surprise. Thus Hermes resorted to tricking him through sound. First he sang the panpipes, then he talked, talked and talked, his silky tongue slowly rapturing Argus into a deep sleep. Slaughter ensued. In his narration of the scene, Serres puts the accent on the radical difference between the two opponents, and the two senses they embody:  hearing and

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Figure 5.4 

sight. Argus relies on presence, phenomenology, the here of a watchtower: ‘all sites are local to Argus’. Instead, ‘Hermes works in a medium that knows no hermetic barriers’, he controls passage and transition, transmission and translation. If seeing is local, hearing is global, immersive, all-​ingesting: ‘however vulgar a sound is, it succeeds immediately in imposing itself on the surrounding area’, its strength does not rely on clarity (of an idea) but on speed (of transmission). The victory of Hermes, Serres argues, symbolises a radical shift towards a knowledge in which ‘the swiftness of a message is of more value than the lucidity of a thought’: ‘Hermes, the network, replaces all local stations’, as the analogical and phenomenological here of presence is overwhelmed by the digital and rhizomatic anywhere of the electromagnetic

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 103 spectrum in which every site is de-​territorialised into a resonating noise (Serres 2016: 39–​50; see also Mandic 2014). Having no centre, the network of communication makes presence superfluous and surveillance obsolete. Audiovisual or computer circuits make a mockery of the watchtowers … Hermes has taken over the world, our technical world exists only through the all-​encompassing confusion of hubbub. (Serres 2016: 49, 10) By letting ourselves be abducted by the hum of its Exu, we follow the prolongations of this wall into the semio-​ material sphere of information and communication, the all-​ ingesting medium into which it metamorphoses.5

5. In 1882, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, perhaps the most famous Brazilian novelist, wrote a short, visionary story titled Teoria do Medalhāo (theory of the medallion). By that time Machado had already abandoned the liberal romanticism of his early years, centred on a sympathetic depiction of the weak, and had moved to a sort of cynical realism, crafting novels in which the narrator ‘not only sides with social injustice and its beneficiaries, but brazenly relishes being of their party’ (Schwarz 2005). This short story perfectly exemplifies this turn. It is centred on an old man teaching a young one how to emerge and gain success in the public arena by becoming a ‘medallion’. The theory of the medallion is nothing but a strategy to adapt to, and prosper in, the ‘all-​encompassing confusion of hubbub’ that the age of Hermes prefigures. It consists in merging with the flows and rhythms of the public sphere, without impairing the superficial consensus alimenting the public debate, but rather keeping it alive, unhindered and, most importantly, free from ideas. Ideas, the old man explains, are the quintessential danger. A genuine medallion must refrain from creating novel ideas, and in fact he should learn to have none: careful not to read or study, he should also avoid silence, stillness, or loneliness (immobility, taciturnity and solitude are factories of ideas, the old man utters). Instead, he should keep the chatting alive, talk about platitudes, daily rumours, weekly anecdotes, gossips, clichés, feeding the constant murmur that prevents ideas from emerging (Assis 1994 [1882]). The theory of the medallion teaches one to purify the intellect by abandoning any pretence to create, contextualise, ironise, criticise, or imagine, so as to reach a ‘perfect sobriety’ and ‘common equilibrium’, disappearing in the background, camouflaging into consensus and common sense (ibid.).6 Appearances do not deceive because they hide some uncontroversial truth

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Figure 5.5 

behind, but rather because ‘one is never certain whose point of view is dominant, that is, which world is in force when one interacts with other beings’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998). The medallion knows that. In the society of appearances, as a cunning Zen master, he will renounce being anything so as to appear as everyone else, reflecting and reverberating everyone else. By letting the world flow in front of him, he would make sure the status quo won’t be modified and, being perfectly conformed to it, he would become able to exploit it. Here in nuce we find prophesised the neutralisation of thinking that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari diagnosed when lamenting the way ‘marketing experts’ reduce concepts to pre-​fabricated products to be consumed into a sterile ‘exchange of ideas’, a consensual conversation where

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 105 anything really new –​that is, incompatible with a consensual status quo –​is neutralised (1994). Message kills theory, Serres writes referring to the murder of Argus: the interiority of a medium kills the pretence of an external point of view (2016: 50). Roberto Schwarz (2005) notes that Machado’s is a twisted realism, which refuses to simply describe the everyday reality of social exploitation and rather personifies the inner logics of dominant power relations, according to ‘a procedure [that] consisted in joining the upper class at its most self-​satisfied, as if in order to praise it, but in fact to lay it open at its most unguarded’. There is something shamanic in this transformative capacity to personify the anonymous logics of power in a ventriloquistic fashion. No surprise the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (2013 [1959]), in a poem dedicated to Machado, gifted him with his future nickname: o Bruxo de Cosme Velho (the sorcerer of Cosme Velho). It is in fact at the number 18 of Rua Cosme Velho, few metres away from the wall we are facing, that the novelist spent the last 24  years of his life. In the 1970s the house was demolished to make space for an apartment building. Its ruins are no longer visible and yet, if one looks hard enough, they can still be sensed, invisible testimony to the ideology that has propelled the urbanisation of Rio de Janeiro since its foundation: ‘the ideal to erase and forget the city’s past, while projecting it towards the future’ (Gonçalves Dias 2008).

6. Inside the wall, in the luscious garden planned by the world-​famous landscape architect Burle Marx, wild vegetation grows. Swans fly in and out, over the wall. Until recently among them were also flamingos, a gift Fidel Castro brought when invited for dinner at the house, in 1992. Recently the pink birds have been relocated in the countryside. They were growing stressed by the construction works around the house, which is pink too. Inside the house sits a considerable collection of modern paintings from Europe and Brazil, accumulated across several decades by its original owner, Roberto Marinho, also the founder of the TV network Globo. The neighbouring villa, Casa Geyer, hosts one of the biggest iconographic collections in Brazil, 4255 items such as 19th-​century pictures, paintings, drawings and maps of Brazil. ‘What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind’, to overcome utility into completeness, that is, integrating the object ‘into a new, expressly devised historical system:  the collection’ (Benjamin 1999: 204–​5). In this interplay between object fetishism, wall decoration and cosy interiority, Benjamin saw a ‘dispositif’ of bourgeois oblivion, the materialisation of the desire to disguise and obscure socio-​ economic relations and camouflage historical strata into a domestic cocoon

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106  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni of autonomy and consumption. There is a picture of Casa Geyer in which the density of the collected things in the suffocating insulation of a cosy interior is shown at its most explicit: a room whose walls are completely covered in paintings, roof included.7 Whether the decorated walled interior was the paradigm of a society in which everyday life would be systematically screened from the reality of its socio-​historical conditions, then glass would express the revolutionary reinstalling of social transparency: ‘to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence’, Benjamin wrote while in a Moscow hotel, marvelling at his Tibetan neighbours whose rooms’ doors were always left open, as they belonged to ‘a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms’ (2003: 209). Following and somehow reworking Benjamin’s intuition, Sloterdijk (2013) expanded on the way the private and domestic interiority of the 19th century gradually spilled over the whole of society. Interestingly, it is exactly a famous piece of steel-​and-​glass architecture, the 1850s Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, that for Sloterdijk stands for the paradigm of a historical process he calls interiorisation, that is, the integration of social life into a series of technological, normative, symbolical, affective and physical enclosures:  the contemporary society of comfort. Adapting a discussion on 19th-​century Western bourgeois interiors to 20th-​century Brazilian elites is certainly hazardous, yet it may open allegorical trajectories worth exploring. To some extent, both the Marinho and Geyer collections camouflage their conditions of possibility into a secluded, walled interiority. At the same time, these decorated interiors overflow their spatial containments, actively taking part in shaping (i.e. interiorising) the socio-​ economic scaffolding of the country. The paradoxical extraversion of these interiors in a few instances took a literal form, and it is set to become permanent soon.8 Three times the Marinho collection was exposed to the public (1985, 2004 and 2013), drawing an ideal correlation with the successful career of Roberto as both collector and entrepreneur.9 These exhibitions played a key role in giving visibility, and thus valorising, these artworks, as well as allowing its owner to gain considerable tax-​deduction thanks to the Rouanet Law.10 Part of the Geyer collection was also exposed in the 2000’s exhibition Visões do Rio na Coleção Geyer (Visions of Rio de Janeiro in the Geyer Collection). Paulo Fontainha Geyer, its original owner, donated the Geyer collection and the 18th-​century house, formerly a coffee farm, to the Museu Imperial of Petrópolis, of which it is set to become an external venue soon. In 2015, in a request for clarification at the Chamber of Deputies, deputy Weverton Rocha asked whether this donation was part of the system of bribes, corruption and money-​laundering currently being investigated by the operação lava-​jato (operation car wash).11 The main target of the operation is Petrobras, the historical monopoly of the Brazilian petroleum industry. After the death of Paulo, his wife Maria Cecilia sought to withdraw about 200 works from the list donated to the Museu Imperial. In

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 107 August 2014 the museum denounced the disappearance of some of the works. Given their high value (some reaching more than one million Brazilian reais), the deputy Rocha was wondering whether they had been used to grease the transactions that accompanied the various metamorphoses of Unipar, a petrochemical group originally founded by Paulo, and ingested by Petrobras in 2010.12 Parallel to the Carioca river, an invisible stream of oil seems to be flowing. Contrary to the former, it enters dark and comes out clear, art-​washed. The complex relation between decorated surfaces, socio-​economic relations and historical layers is emblematically expressed by the very form of Casa Marinho, which Roberto began to build in 1939 as a faithful reproduction of a sugar mill at Megaype de Baixo, in Pernanbuco. This was no random sugar mill, but one deemed among the most important examples of this kind in Brazil’s colonial architecture. An image of the mill appears in Gilberto Freyre’s masterpiece Casa-​Grande & Senzala, a sociological account of the surfacing of Brazilian society, for which purpose the mill, as the materialised trace of the owner-​sugar-​slave triangle, was a particularly apt illustration. The mill disappeared in 1928, as rumours that it was soon to become national patrimony convinced the owner to blow it up with dynamite: if he was not to be able to keep the public away from the house, then the house was to be kept away from the public, forever. As we read on a dedicated blog, this mill ‘was an agonising symbol of an already remote past in which the sugar mill nobles

Figure 5.6 

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108  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni held, within their domain, absolute power’.13 Unexpectedly reappearing in Cosme Velho only a little more than a decade after its demolition, today it stands as an urban fossil of a past era whose logics of power and exploitation continue to exist, albeit in camouflaged forms.

7. Roberto Marinho [1904–​2003] was the son of Irineu Marinho, who in 1925 created the newspaper o Globo. In 1965, he founded the television network Rede Globo, which was to become the world’s second commercial TV network for annual revenues. Kick-​started by funding provided by the North-​ American group Time Life, which allowed the crucial purchase of high-​end transmission equipment,14 Globo was subsequently nationalised during the military regime (1964–​1985). This provided it with the necessary infrastructure to gain a nation-​wide reach and unified programming. Globo played a key role in providing a positive narration of the military coup, conveniently forgetting the contemporary political history of the country, and becoming the main propaganda machine of the dictatorship (Machado-​Borges 2003).15 Today, as we read on its website, Globo ‘reaches 99.50% of potential viewers’ in the Brazilian territory and monopolises the audience of a society in which television has been, and still arguably is, ‘the most powerful entity’ (Simpson 1993: 63). What is the relation between this plot of land surrounded by the wall we are facing, and the plot through which Globo built the semio-​material wall that has encircled Brazil in the last fifty years? What is the relation between the site in which the powerful live and the web of power that sustains them? Certainly there is often a tenuous link between the physical and private site of dwelling and the abstract non-​site of power, and any attempt to answer this question should carefully avoid fetishising power into a given place and person: as we know well after Michel Foucault, power is better understood as diffuse, anonymous, impersonal. Yet, we believe there is still a relation worth exploring, although one that is often allegorical, distorted, obscure. The masquerade of styles, as it unfolds across the nineteenth century, results from the fact that relations of dominance become obscured. The holders of power in the bourgeoisie no longer necessarily exercise this power in the places where they live (as rentiers), and no longer in direct unmediated form. The style of their residences is their false immediacy. Economic alibi in space. Interior alibi in time. (Benjamin 1999: 218) Benjamin’s reflection takes an interesting twist when applied to our context, where the very form and history of residences become emblematic of a mechanism of systematic colonisation and walling in of the common. Telling is the case of the villa the Marinhos built in Paraty, an old colonial town and

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 109

Figure 5.7 

prestigious touristic destination in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Praised by architecture magazines for its ‘structural ingenuity’ that ‘finds balance in the topography of the land, constituting an extensive open doorway and living space in the practically-​untouched nature’, the villa won the 2010 Wallpaper Design Award.16 In fact, its stylish masquerade managed to disguise its reality of exploitation, since the villa sits in the middle of a natural reserve, part of whose tropical forest was not only ‘practically touched’, but illegally eradicated to carve within the wilderness its sumptuous interiority (Brasileiro 2012). Curiously the beach of Santa Rita, in front of the villa, does not even appear in the otherwise detailed tourist map of the bay’s beaches.17 Although formally public, the beach is invisible on the map, and de facto privatised on the ground, as aggressive armed guards harass whoever gets too close (Antunes de Oliveira 2016).18

8. The site where the pink house stands was once covered by tropical forest. Cosme Velho, like the rest of the city, has been the result of a protracted quest for the urbanisation of wilderness. The forest of Tijuca, part of the homonymous national park, still closely surrounds the neighbourhood, which from the satellite image looks like a cocoon of built environment in the middle of vegetation. A  few metres from the wall’s eastern side are the

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110  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni favelas of Cerro-​Corá and Guararapes. As everywhere else in Rio, they perch on the hill’s slope, looking down at the asfalto, as close to it as they are far apart.19 Along the years, Globo played a key role in building a national unified imaginary, an interiority able to somehow transcend the local fragmentations of a vast country whose reality remains dramatically split along racial, socio-​ economic and geographical rifts (Hamburger 2005):  a function that was notably performed by the evening news and, as La Pastina et  al. put it, by ‘the dominant popular communication medium of Brazil, the prime time telenovelas on TV Globo’ (2014: 105). In the novels of Machado, among the precursors of the contemporary telenovela, a peculiar dialectic of the interiors unfolds, in the form of a significant ‘engagement with the threshold, a place between the inside and the outside’ which ‘serves as a crossroads for the encounter of conflicting forces’ (Vieira 2013: 43). In the hermeneutic manner of an Exu, the bruxo of Cosme Velho was a master of thresholds, relentlessly inhabiting the interiors of power in order to dissect and expose their inner logics by means of visionary allegories. Realism is also typical of Brazilian telenovelas, where an ‘unusually strong’ overlapping of the frontiers between fiction and reality occurs (Porto 2003: 37), an effect that is propelled by their close cohabitation with newscasts in the daily primetime,20 as well as dependent on their particular production model: telenovelas are ‘open works’, as their episodes are written no more three weeks before they are aired, thus constantly adapting the plot to sophisticated audience data, as well as adjusting to contemporaneous real events (Mattelart and Mattelart 1990). As a result, since the years of the dictatorship telenovelas have contributed to stabilise, protect and disseminate the dominant narratives of political and economic power milieus (Porto 2011), and they still have a significant impact in shaping the ‘daily life parameters of a national imagined community’ (Hamburger 1999:  42), framing the scenario in which social and political issues are discussed, or national elections take place (Porto 1998). To be sure, describing telenovelas as instruments of power merely reproducing the dominant ideology would be a far too homogenising picture of a complex and variegated popular genre, in which different and often controversial themes often coexist. Yet, differently from Machado’s, the realism of telenovelas only re-​ present relations of power, eventually reducing their description to ‘decorations’ of an interiority whose real socio-​economic and political conditions are conveniently left unspoken, as is perfectly, if anecdotally, illustrated by author Manoel Carlos’s frustration at his telenovela’s working-​class interiors being constantly embellished by the producers, so that they would ‘always exhibit a certain comfort and a lot of furniture’, and thus never seem ‘really poor’ (Porto 2011: 57). In fact, once we move from the narrative content of telenovelas to the interiority they express and produce, beneath the various narratives, contradictions and contested meanings traversing them what emerges is the coherent construction of a common world, one which is middle-​to-​upper class, white,

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 111 and resolutely urban, since this is the setting in which most telenovelas take place: namely, the interiors of leafy neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, of which Cosme Velho is a perfect epitome (La Pastina et al. 2014). Indeed, telenovelas may be said to reproduce the very interiority that the wall of Cosme Velho encloses, prolonging the socio-​economic and aesthetic forms of this leafy urban milieu onto the intangible media ecology of the country. In this sense, rather than simply projecting an illusionary image of comfort for the viewers to identify with, we may argue that the telenovela itself is comfort: as the hum sung by Hermes, it provides comfort in the immanence of being consumed, contributing to the soothing Globo-​isation of Brazil, whilst erasing both the conditions of existence and the conditions of possibility of this process of interiorisation.21

Figure 5.8 

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112  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni

9. That being said, we should caution against understanding the interiority within which Brazil is walled in as an immaterial, ideological veil to be simply torn apart by the work of critique. This wall may be invisible and intangible, and yet it is absolutely material. As Guy Debord explained, the spectacle is not an illusion, but rather ‘a Weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm  –​a world view transformed into a material force’ (1967). We also caution against understanding such interiority as homogeneous and uniform: while all-​encompassing, the spectacle is a heterogeneous and uneven imaginary where cracks and contradictions abound. Benjamin had already understood it, and the urban theory he built among the Arcades may be precisely read as the exploration of the imaginary of an epoch through its materialised traces, rags, refuse, incongruities, by means of a methodology –​ the ‘literary montage’ –​that entailed juxtaposing them without seeking a reconciliation into a single and coherent narration, so as to keep their tension alive, faithful to their contradictory heterogeneity (1999: 460). This is what we aimed to build through this fragmentary collection of footnotes. By means of gathering spirits, paintings, novels, birds, histories, laws, telenovelas, observations, documents, current news and other aesthetic, political, economic and geological images –​which were juxtaposed in both conjunction and disjunction with the pictures punctuating the text  –​we drew a cartographic mosaic meant to chart the space between the tangible and the intangible, the local and the ‘Global’, the visible and the invisible, this and that wall. Certainly we did not intend to build an all-​ encompassing panorama able to carefully describe the all-​ingesting sphere interiorising Brazil. This enterprise exceeded our ambition and capabilities. Instead, we aimed to explore the terra incognita between the phenomenological here-​and-​now of everyday urban life and the structural connections, impalpable imaginaries and elusive forces that constantly escape and shape it, by means of registering the inaudible stories the wall whispered to us. Some may frown upon this attempt to engage with such a complexity via these unassuming stones. Although the latter enclose the villa of Globo’s founder, does this make them methodologically significant? Are we not risking jettisoning decades of critical thinking about the impersonal and site-​less quality of power, by seemingly fetishising it into a given place and individual? Are not the real relations and connections constituting this imaginary to be sought elsewhere? Are we not, in the end, succumbing to an animistic fascination for an object whose muteness we have simply filled with our wild speculations? Perhaps. Yet we do not believe walls are mute, nor that the exploration or the elusive and site-​less connections, imaginaries and forces shaping a society must do with the local, the phenomenological, and the physical of the urban. In fact, the urban microcosm in front of us proved to be extremely significant in this regard, its socio-​economic and racial composition directly consistent

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 113 with the televised projection of an urbanised white, middle-​to-​upper class, most notably conveyed by the telenovela, the colonial aesthetics of the houses perfectly appropriate to the colonisation of the Brazilian imaginary carried out by Globo. The luxuriant elegance of the garden –​that the wall duly invisibilises from both the natural (the forest) and the social (the favelas) other –​aptly paralleling the aesthetic praise of the villa in Paraty concealing the reality of illegal eradication, and more generally the systematic colonisation of tangible and intangible commons that characterises the neoliberal moment of the country. In Kafka’s novel, the land surveyor is set up to measure and map a castle of which everyone seems to be aware, and whose consistency appears as extremely volatile: immaterial, invisible, impalpable; the castle is systematically unreachable to K., who knows about it, as everyone else, and yet is barred

Figure 5.9 

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114  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni from the possibility of experiencing it. As any attempt to actually perform his measuring and mapping activity is frustrated, we slowly realise that a measurement is in fact occurring: the measurement is the novel itself, the map is the plot. The writer, not the protagonist, is the land surveyor, and the Castle is a real and implicit text with respect to which Kafka’s novel appears as a series of commentaries on its margin. The present text should be read in this way. We did not aim at resemblance or accuracy, but rather sought to shape into words and images the account of our peripatetic surveying of an unreachable and implicit castle, turning the urban wall in Cosme Velho into a vessel to navigate the uncharted territory between the physical and the imaginary forms of the social.22

10. At the end we leave the wall. A few steps away lies the Corcovado station. Following the path of the electric train we slowly get to the Cristo Redentor, careful not to be run over by the taxis and mini-​vans incessantly carrying visitors up and down the hill. From the top we gaze down on the city but we do not see anything. The clouds engulf us, and yet the most photographed panorama in Brazil is clear in our mind. In fact we could not have seen it even if the sky were clear. We keep on walking down on the other side, soon reaching the hiking trail that steeply descends through the tropical forest all the way to the Parque Lage, a beautiful park situated just under the peak, on the other side with respect to Cosme Velho. After little more than an hour we exit the forest, into the park. In the 1960s, Roberto Marinho bought the park from the Banco do Brasil with the intention of transforming it into a complex of luxury estates. Yet, the by then governor of Guanabara Carlos Lacerda expropriated the land from Marinho, on the premise that the transaction violated the law on national historical patrimony. The head office of Globo news sits just next to the park, the latter’s thriving vegetation separated from the former’s concrete building only by a little more than 2-​metre-​high wall. When we get here on an early morning, the employees are already beginning to arrive. An old woman is sitting in front of the entrance. She is dirty, dressed in rags, and she is surrounded, literally covered with pigeons. Amidst their frenetic back-​and-​forth flapping she remains still, quiet, smiling. We stop, enraptured by the sight of this strange creature, a woman becoming-​ animal, an individual becoming-​multiple, a stillness becoming-​movement. We get closer and offer her a bottle of water. She takes it and smiles back. Why are you here, in front of Globo? Pedro asks. She keeps smiling and answers in a language that is foreign to us. It sounds like the sound of the wings flapping around her, its sound dissolves within them. It is not pity we feel towards her, nor another easily categorisable emotion, but a sort of ‘unnatural participation’ with this strange composition of human and non-​human traits, who expresses itself in ‘a language that is no longer

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Screening Brazil: footnotes on a wall 115 that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1980]: 258).23 We keep staring at her, while more and more employees enter the building, pausing briefly to look, an instant sur-​place, their expressions a tentative mixture of tiredness, curiosity, and haste. Then, they disappear inside.

Notes 1 Retrieved from http://​diariodorio.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Rio-​Carioca. jpg. 2 This term, literally ‘noble neighbourhood’, designates a middle-​to-​upper class neighbourhood. 3 On the relation between site and plot, see Mackay (2015). 4 If the relation between hermeneutics and Hermes has been explored for centuries, the Exu was also explored in a hermeneutic sense by Gates (1988). 5 Incidentally, sphere is among the meanings of the Yoruba word Esù. 6 It is interesting to compare Machado’s figure of the medallion with Perre Verger’s description of the archetype of the Exu as embodied by ‘People who have the art of inspiring trust and abusing it, but who have the faculty of intelligent understanding of the problems of others, and of giving thoughtful advice, with more zeal, the greater the expected reward. Misleading intellectual cogitations and political intrigues suit them particularly and are, for them, guarantees of success in life’ (Verger 1986: 295; our translation). 7 Available at:  https://ogimg.infoglobo.com.br/in/15813764-8e8-dfa/FT1500A/550/ casa-geyer-museu-imperial.jpg. 8 Both houses were set to be opened to the public in 2016, announced as part of the cultural legacy of the Olympics (Mazzacaro 2015). This has yet to occur. 9 See for instance how Lucio Cavalcanti, the curator of the 2013 exhibition, defined Brazilian abstractionism as a ‘vision privileging individual entrepreneurship’, immediately after defining Roberto as one of the major collectors of Brazilian abstractionism. Retrieved from www.exposicaoumoutroolhar.com.br/​ apresentacao.php. 10 The Rouanet Law allows 4% to 6% deduction of the income tax to companies or individuals whose projects have been approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. It is through this scheme that the Roberto Marinho Foundation –​the cultural and social responsibility arm of the Globo organization –​funds most of its projects (Menezes 2016). 11 Retrieved from www.camara.gov.br/sileg/integras/1381471.pdf. 12 Unipar initially merged with the Petroquímica Suzano, thus creating the petrochemical giant Quattor, the second largest in Brazil. In 2010 Quattor was sold to Braskem and Petrobas. The former thus became the biggest petrochemical company in Latin America. The latter, historical monopoly of the Brazilian petroleum industry created in 1953 is today a semi-​public, giant multinational corporation. 13 Our translation, retrieved from http://engenhosdepernambuco.blogspot.pt/2015/​ 02/megaipe-de-baixo-megaipe-megoapa.html. 14 At the time, this was an infringement of article 160 of Brazilian Federal Law of 1946 forbidding participation and partnership of foreign companies in the

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116  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni national telecommunications business. Recently declassified files have shown the strong interest the United States had in exercising a direct influence over the country and, more disturbingly, the role they played in supporting the incoming military coup, e.g. http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm. 15 A role Globo finally acknowledged in 2013, apologising in an editorial for its ‘mistake’ –​only to play a similar role in supporting the next ‘parliamentary coup’ (the Dilma Roussef impeachment) that would shake Brazil in the years to come (o Globo, 2013). 16 Retrieved from http://studiomk27.com.br/en/p/casa-paraty-3/​. 17 Available at www.diariodocentrodomundo.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ mapa-paraty.png?w=928. 18 In the wake of the controversy surrounding its illegal construction, and the still ongoing judicial procedure, the owners defended themselves by claiming the villa did not actually belong to them: legally, it appears to belong to the Agropecuária Veine Patrimonial, a company controlled by offshores based in Las Vegas and Panama, now under investigation as part of the lava-​jato operation: note 11 above. Incidentally, on the 19th of January 2017 a small plane carrying three people crashed in the sea off Paraty, a few miles from the villa, killing all its occupants, including the Supreme Court Justice Teori Zavascki, who was overseeing the lava-​ jato operation. 19 Asfalto (asphalt) denominates the ‘formal’ city, which sits on the flat land, as opposed to the favelas, which occupy the hills. 20 Globo airs at least three telenovelas daily, during the most important airtime, from 18:30 to 22:00, interspersed by the two main newscasts of the day, a local and a national one. 21 A comfort, of course, into which the majority of Brazil can only superficially enter, as the ‘power structures available to middle and upper-​class urban citizens’ remain dramatically out of reach to most of the population (La Pastina et al 2014: 1008). Incidentally, this comfort is produced via the discomforting of the working conditions of Globo’s employees, usually facing extremely long and stressful workflows. As reported by an anonymous former employee at Globo interviewed by us, while these standards are evidently in violation of Brazilian labour laws, by outsourcing and using seasonal contracts Globo manages to maintain a high level of production with few labour responsibilities, for which from time to time the company has to respond to the Ministry of Labour. This may result in employees filing labour lawsuits against Globo, as occurred to our interviewee, who sued Globo for physical and moral damages, joining another 700 similar lawsuits only in his/​her law firm (anonymous former Globo employee interviewed by the authors). Often ending up being tried in Brasilia, these resolutions are rarely reported in any media. 22 For this interpretation of Kafka’s novel we closely follow the parallel between Kafka’s land surveyor and the work of artists that artist and former social scientist Eric Baudelaire drew in a recent interview: ‘I think this is the kind of peripatetic surveying we do as artists engaging with the real, in accordance with Samuel Beckett’s definition of the task of the artist:  finding a form to accommodate the mess’:  retrieved from http://moussemagazine.it/eric-baudelaire-anna-gritz-​ 2017/​. 23 In this passage, Deleuze and Guattari are reflecting upon a text by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.

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References Antunes de Oliveira, R. (2016), ‘O tríplex da família Marinho’, Rede Brasil Atual, 11 February. www.redebrasilatual.com.br/blogs/blog-na-rede/2016/02/o-triplex-da-​ familia-marinho-6069.html. Assis, M. de (1994 [1882]), Obra Completa. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar. Azevedo, L. (n.d.), ‘Muito além dos flamingos’, Isto é Gente. www.terra.com.br/​ istoegente/edicoes/524/artigo152328-2.htm. Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (2003), ‘Surrealism’, in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brasileiro, A. (2012), ‘Brazil’s rich show no shame building homes in nature preserves’, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-08/brazil-s-rich-build-​ h omesin-nature-preserves. Davila, N.G. (1977), Escolios a un texto implícito. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura. Debord, G. (1967), The Society of Spectacle, available at www.marxists.org/reference/​ archive/debord/society.htm. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2004 [1980]), A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1994), What Is Philosophy? London: Verso. Dias, C.A.G. (2008), Urbanidades da Natureza. Rio de Janeiro: Apicuri. Drummond de Andrade, C. (2013 [1959]), A vida passada a limpo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Gates, H.L. Jr. (1988), The Signifying Monkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press Hamburger, E. (1999), Politics and Intimacy in Brazilian Telenovelas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamburger, E. (2005), O Brasil antenado: a sociedade da novela. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. www.redebrasilatual.com.br/blogs/helena/2016/02/agropecuaria-dona-da-​ mansao-da-familia-marinho-e-devedora-da-receita-5711.html. Heidegger, M. (1958), The Question of Being. New York: Twayne Publishers. Joseph-​Lester, J., King, K., Blier-​Carruthers, A., and Bottazzi, R. (2016), Walking Cities: London. London: Camberwell Press. La Pastina, A.C., Straubhaar, J.D., and Sifuentes, L. (2014), ‘Why do I  feel I  don’t belong to the Brazil on TV?’, Popular Communication, 12(2), 104–​116. Leroi-​Gourhan, A. (1964), Le geste et la parole. Vol. 1. Technique et langage. Paris: Albin Michel. Machado-​ Borges, T. (2003), Only for You!:  Brazilians and the Telenovela Flow. Stockholm: Dept. of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. Mackay, R. (ed.) (2015), When Site Lost the Plot. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Mandic, D. (2014), Copyright and Technology:  Hearing the Dissonance. Phd Thesis. London: University of Westminster. Masciandaro, N. (2010), ‘Becoming spice: Commentary as geophilosophy’, Collapse, VI. Mattelart M., and Mattelart, A. (1990), The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction. New York: Bergin and Garvey.

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118  Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni Mazzacaro, N. (2015), ‘Em 2016, Casa Geyer revelará pela primeira vez uma das maiores coleções iconográficas do Brasil’, 9 April. https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/​ bairros/em-2016-casa-geyer-revelara-pela-​primeira-vez-uma-das-maiores-colecoesiconograficas-do-brasil-15813767. Menezes, H. (2016), A Lei Rouanet. Muito além dos fatos. São Paulo: Fons Sapientiae. Mettler, Y. (2015), ‘Europe squared’, in R. Mackay (ed.), When Site Lost the Plot. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Mumford, L. (1961), The City in History:  Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. London: Secker and Warburg. o Globo (2013), ‘Apoio editorial ao golpe de 64 foi um erro’, https://oglobo.globo.com/​ brasil/apoio-editorial-ao-golpe-de-64-foi-um-erro-9771604. Porto M.P. (1998), ‘Telenovelas and politics in the 1994 Brazilian presidential election’, Communication Review, 2(4), 43–​59. Porto M.P. (2003), ‘Realism and politics in Brazilian telenovelas’, Media International Australia, 106, 35–​45. Porto, M.P. (2011), ‘Telenovelas and representations of national identity in Brazil’, Media, Culture & Society, 33(1), 53–​69. Rosso, T.C.A., and Dias, A.P. (2004), ‘Histórico do saneamento ambiental na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro: O caso do rio Carioca’, Revista de Ciência & Tecnologia, 4(1), 25–​36. Schwarz, R. (2005), ‘A Brazilian breakthrough’, New Left Review, 36. https://​ newleftreview.org/II/36/roberto-schwarz-a-brazilian-breakthrough. Serres, M. (1999), Variations sur le corps. Paris: Le Pommier. Serres, M. (2016), The Five Senses: a Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. London: Continuum. Simpson, A.S. (1993), Xuxa:  the Mega-​marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2011), Bubbles:  Spheres I  –​Microspherology. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2013), In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2014), Globi: Sfere II. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Smithson, R. (1996), ‘The spiral jetty’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press. Souza, J.F. (1946), Origem e significado do apelativo “Carioca”. Rio de Janeiro: Oliveirá. Verger, P. (1986), Orixás:  deuses Iorubás na África e no Novo Mundo. São Paulo: Corrupio. Vieira, E. (2013), Interiors and Narrative: The Spatial Poetics of Machado De Assis, Eça De Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998), ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469–​488. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2015), Metafísicas canibais. Elementos para uma antropologia pós-​estrutural. São Paulo: Cosa Naify. Wilson, P. J. (2007), ‘Agriculture or architecture? The beginnings of domestication’, in R. Cassidy and M. Mullin (eds.), Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered. Oxford: Berg. Woolf, V. (2014 [1931]), The Waves. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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6  Warsaw afterimages Of walls and memories Ella Chmielewska

There were bullet holes in the courtyard In an interview for The Guardian, responding to a question about influences on the filmic language of his 2013 feature Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski does not refer to cinema. Instead, he sketches a powerful afterimage of the 1960s city scarred by the trauma of war: … growing up in Warsaw, you grow up among tombs. There are plaques everywhere: 200 people were executed here, 30 people there. There were bullet holes in the courtyard I grew up in. Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground, then it became a morgue. It’s a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me. (Seymour 2014) Written and produced in Polish, shot with still camera in black-​and-​white and an antiquated format, this eerily beautiful film summons imaginaries shaped by having seen the city that saw war. It is an afterimage of a place left behind, stilled in memories of spaces, rhythms of language, textures of marked walls, in distinct sounds and shadows. Pawlikowski describes the writing and filming of Ida as seeking an understanding of what it means to be Polish. His search is framed by the memory of “a city littered with ghosts”, a place the filmmaker recalls with documentary resolve and poetic precision, a city that never left him. A place still raw from the experience of war destruction and freshly fractured by the tectonic shifts that followed it: “I needed Warsaw because it’s so clearly shaped by history.” And he remembers a time animated by a sense of awakening and promise: “It’s a time I feel close to. (…) After the war, after Stalinism and the police state, came this sudden explosion of possibilities: literature, cinema and the most brilliant modern classical music. All this pent-​up stuff just came bursting out” (Seymour 2014). This afterimage of marked walls, a vivid recollection of witnessing a place of one’s childhood in an ordinary moment of its radical transformations, a place strongly etched in memory, triggers a realization that Pawlikowski (who

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120  Ella Chmielewska was born in 1957 and left Poland as a teenager) also describes my memories of growing up in Warsaw. These are afterimages of a certain generation  –​ born around the momentous political shifts of 1956 and growing up at the time of urban re-​visioning of the 1960s –​imaginaries shaped by departures, disappearances, by images of the city left behind.1 This recognition takes me back to a sudden vertigo felt while watching his film for the first time and seeing Ida’s first encounter with a city, the scene that begins her meeting with her past. In the moment of watching, I find myself instantly transported to Warsaw in 1962:  I am on the streetcar number 6.  Standing on the wooden seat, with my face pressed against the glass, I’m reading shop signs along Targowa Street. I enunciate every syllable: PAS-​MAN-​TE-​RIA, AR-​TY-​KU-​ ŁY SPO-​ŻYW-​CZE …. I feel my mother’s hand on my back. The memory is visceral, vertiginous, not seen but felt in my body. It holds me throughout the spatial sequence of scenes that show Ida moving towards meeting her past, towards meeting Wanda. These images are like a set of live photographs, each held still yet registering movement. In each, I see myself seeing the place of my childhood. Each scene, a chiastic condensation of inside and outside, as in recto-​verso of turning a page, each a momentous threshold. Seeing itself first reflected in Ida’s face seen through the glass of a streetcar window, the street interior folds into cold shadows of a vestibule (brama), into a vertical swirl of a stairwell (klatka schodowa) lit by windows open onto the courtyard (podwórko). A turn on the landing, and the light from the doorway seeps through the latticework of the steps. A  brief pause at the door suddenly backlit, struck by the sound of the doorbell. Across the chasm of the threshold, into a foyer revealing geography of a vast apartment, and then a kitchen lit by a tall window. Wanda’s silhouette outlined by the courtyard light  –​Ida’s face refracting that light in listening. A  small photograph set on the peeling veneer of a kitchen table: a black and white snapshot from a family album, its thin white edges trimmed in a familiar scalloped pattern. A young woman with Ida’s face cradles a baby in her arms looking straight into the camera. In this moment of looking, within this concentrated rectangle of the photograph, Ida sees herself seeing her past.

Following traces whenever they appear on the surface In a lecture at the NFTS, Pawlikowski speaks about writing and filming Ida as his search for a form that would resonate with images, textures and rhythms of the formative place and time of his Polish boyhood: a certain landscape of 1960s Warsaw. This struggle towards form registers each scene as a discrete event, each stilling “a single action or gesture”, a singular view that holds pensive tensions. Each scene is photographic, concentrated, so that “every moment is a thing in itself ”. Each is paused in attentive “looking at looking”–​ it is to stay in imagination (Pawlikowski 2014). Like paratactic writing or a collage, it is to leave gaps and rely for continuity on intonation and rhythm not on a syntax of subordination.

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 121 The particular format, the use of the anachronistic 4:3 aspect ratio, has been remarked on by one critic as a stylistic “constriction of the frame” deployed as a moral tool (Lane 2014). This squarish format is not a mere style, though –​it is a framing of Pawlikowski’s memories. It was the format of filmic images of the time, as seen in Roman Polański’s 1962 Knife in the Water or the more pertinent-​to-​Warsaw Innocent Sorcerers of 1960 by Andrzej Wajda. These were the standard proportions of everyday images:  films, black-​and-​ white newsreels in cinemas before projections, images on a small TV screen. This aspect ratio with its verticality and portrait quality  –​together with photographs in illustrated magazines, posters displayed in the streets, advertising panels in public squares, and murals painted on tall blind walls –​would come to mould memories of that time. Popular images of the 1960s were preoccupied with the capital city (stolica) and its transformations. New walls were replacing ruins and new architecture and design reconfiguring everyday lives in homes and public spaces: mosaic walls of new cinemas, murals in cafés and milk bars, magazine covers in reading clubs, and white planes of so-​called “własne cztery ściany” [own four walls] –​places to live (or dream about) in a city under the desperate conditions of a housing crisis. Pawlikowski speaks of the vertical quality of the format and its aptness for portraits, for holding tension in key details of each scene. This verticality allows for the composition to register the singular angle of the still camera: looking upwards, from within the interior of the frame, as if placed below the surface. The formal constancy of the film holds the dialogue visually within textures and spaces of each frame. Words are precisely located. Sounds are composed visually: the sound of a voice in the darkness, a distant street noise filtered by the gateway shadows. The courtyard light pressing on the sheer curtain. The images are listened to, emotions held back as if holding one’s breath when overhearing a whispered conversation in another room. The film develops from this listening, from inside the scenes through openings to observed moments of seeing, to images experienced and witnessed –​lived through (przeżyte) and still being experienced (przeżywane). Images “that never left me”. I read this film as a documentary essay on the afterimages of Warsaw at the simultaneously ordinary and remarkable time when the city’s violent spatial history registered in the imposition of new construction upon the cleared ghetto, and the history of spatial violence was written in radical editing of memories and images of terror and death, departures and loss (Herscher and Siddiqi 2014). New reconfigurations of urban surfaces were under way. Still surrounded by memories and stories of those who lived through war trauma, growing up in Warsaw in the 1960s, one experienced first hand the exuberance of new (socialist) modernity and critical revisions (clearings and reconstruction) that would only later be understood. The local morphology of urban spaces and patterns of walls that saw war and witnessed the post-​war reformatting of that seeing shaped the sensorial world of a generation too young to experience the violence of the events of March 1968 in the university courtyard.2 Untold

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122  Ella Chmielewska stories, though, remained lodged in memories of overheard conversations, unexplained family snapshots, newspaper clippings, in the sudden departure of a school teacher, Mrs Taube, and in the ominous rumbling of low-​flying military planes one night in August.3 I experience Pawlikowski’s film as an essay on forms of spatial witnessing, a search for a form that would resonate with “rhythm, image and emotion” of the formative place that has witnessed him and has continued to (in) form his imagination, that has remained burned into his memory after the place itself had to be left behind (Pawlikowski 2014). It is a place of language and music, of tall shadows in the courtyard, of sounds of steps on stone stairs, and of knowing that the bullet holes, and the laconic numbers and dates iterated on stone tablets newly placed on still raw walls of the city, held real if untold stories of disappearances. Memories of loss. The sequence of stilled scenes in Ida is a poetically precise rendering of experiential events shaped by discrete configurations of images, urban walls and textures of surfaces. It is a geometry of light and shadow in black-​and-​white photographs emerging from cut open pages of Przekrój [Section] magazine. The city’s resurrection from ruins repeated in every photographic pairing of before and after. And symbols of national survival restated on monuments and banners, each figure of new social order recited at school events in the rhythm of official history. A kaleidoscope of interior scenes in Ida retells Warsaw’s “texture of the landscape” (Pawlikowski 2014). The aspect ratio of the images, changing spatial patterns and surface details configure memories of their specific place and time. The bespoke format frames Pawlikowski’s search for form that like a drawing, both in its making and its reading, necessarily oscillates between the articulation of new form and the predetermined structures of conventions, between a reflexive form (in)forming itself and a format which conforms to pre-​established schema (Dorrian 2015: 200). The critical sequence of scenes unfolds architecturally, as if turning from an elevation to an intricate section, exposing vertical aspects of composition and proportions of planes, stressing porosity of materials and surface tensions, revealing volumes in the intensity of light and the depth of shadows. These spatio-​temporal after-​images, in their composition and structure, resonate with a distinct generational experience of a fragmented and invisible city, a city that is the kind of complex symbol described by Italo Calvino in his lecture on exactitude –​one that holds “the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human lives”4 (Calvino 1988:  71). Looking back at his own writing and addressing future generations, Calvino posits that the attempt to express this tension in poetic reflection “tends towards a form”, crystallizes a “searching for something hidden or merely potential … following its traces whenever they appear on the surface” (Calvino 1988: 77). A  poetic concentration attains the “acme of exactitude” in the oscillation between two types of sensorial knowing: the invariance of abstract patterns and the constancy of external forms, the tension between density and continuity that “connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 123 thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss” (Calvino 1988: 76).

He sees what I see even now Czesław Miłosz begins his collection of Harvard lectures The Witness of Poetry with a remarkable textual frontispiece that summons a memory of seeing himself leaving the views of his childhood, leaving behind the place and the world that would vanish and persist only in the poet’s memory. The lectures were delivered and first published in English. A brief poetic text that opens the collection is in Polish, followed by its English translation.5 The reader, then, faces the language landscape of the poet’s childhood and the memory of images framed by its rhythm and textures: Zgubiło się pokolenie. Także miasta. Narody. Ale to trochę później. Tymczasem w oknie jaskółka. Odprawia obrzęd sekundy. Ten chłopiec, czy już podejrzewa Że piękność zawsze nie tu i zawsze kłamliwa? Teraz widzi swoje powiaty. … … Pochmurne niebo z jednym ukośnym promieniem. … Widzi co widzę dotychczas. Był jednak przebiegły, Patrzył jakby od razu rzeczy zmieniała pamięć. Odwracał się jadąc bryką bo chciał najwięcej zachować. To znaczy zbierał co trzeba na jakiś ostatni moment Kiedy z okruchów ułoży świat już doskonały. My generation was lost. Cities. And nations. But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, a swallow Performs its rite of a second. That boy, does he already suspect That beauty is always elsewhere and always delusive? Now he sees his homeland. … … An overcast sky with one slanting ray. … He sees what I see even now. Oh, but he was clever, Attentive, as if things were instantly changed by memory. Riding a cart he looked back to retain as much as possible. Which means he knew what he needed for some ultimate moment When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.6 (Milosz 1983: n.p.) For Miłosz, the place that shaped him and to which he has “remained faithful by writing in the language of [his] childhood” is simultaneously a witness and a participant in transformative events and as such it offers a distinct

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124  Ella Chmielewska perspective that is “accessible only to direct experience” of history. The place is a witness then in the same manner as poetry, “not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us” (Milosz 1983: 3–​4). In the moment of witnessing, in this direct experience of place in its temporal fragility, in the momentary “rite of a second”, we apprehend its historical dimension. Miłosz proffers in the opening lecture, ‘Starting from my Europe’: Historicity may reveal itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape, even in trees like those oaks close to my birthplace which remember my pagan ancestors. Yet only an awareness of the dangers menacing what we love allows us to sense the dimension of time and to feel in everything we see and touch the presence of past generations. (Milosz 1983: 4) Born in post-​Stalinist Warsaw, Pawlikowski’s generation grew up at the time marked by insistent attempts at radical editing of both wartime and postwar urban memories. The transformations that characterized that time –​the simultaneous instability of landscape and standardization of its textures –​were propitious, if set against the harrowing narratives of national History. The massive volume of the Palace of Culture set atop the razed city centre (and the obliterated ghetto) was confronted by the glass of Eastern Wall (Ściana Wschodnia) –​the first postwar modernist urban complex. The new vision for the city was unfolding in curtain walls holding new forms of shopping, neon-​ framed office buildings and the first residential tower blocks. A cosmopolitan vision of a European city. Towards the west, the stark white bulk of the monstrous Palace stared down blind walls and dark courtyards of the distressed tenements pockmarked by war. The emerging vertical lines of glass brick and tall windows of the housing estate Za Żelazną Bramą promised an escape from overcrowded apartments in war-​damaged houses –​‘eye-​sores’ and ‘road blocks’ as the old surviving tenements (kamienice) would be regularly labelled in the press –​to the freshly plastered luxury of ‘own four walls’. The city was undergoing reformatting documented filmically in the shift from the long grayscale sequence of construction hoarding and fractured urban interiors opening towards the ghostly Palace in Wajda’s 1960 Innocent Sorcerers, to a swirl of colours, a kaleidoscopic collage of faces and figures in his 1969 Hunting Flies where scenes in public spaces (a crowded bar, a busy sidewalk by the university buildings) are spliced with oppressive interior spaces. A tall window in a sculptor’s studio where one of the key scenes was filmed frames the only image of the fragile walls of the war-​scarred city. In Innocent Sorcerers, Warsaw unfolds from a small bedsit and a tall dark courtyard, through a socialist-​realist enfilade towards the white bulk of the Palace that closes off a freshly cleaved street interior. The street at dawn witnesses a group of friends, jazz musicians mock-​marching single file towards the Stalinist colossus. In Hunting Flies, select interiors repeatedly snare the protagonist already cornered in his life by the expulsion from the university. His

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 125 failed attempt to escape the entrapment is witnessed by the blank stares of a desolate tenement looking into the studio and its walled-​in garden. Wajda’s images of Warsaw are documents of ordinary spaces and surfaces found in the city at the time of filming, ready-​made locations for his portraits of subsequent war-​scarred generations  –​the city as a distinct mise en scène.7 His protagonists lived through the war and the disintegration of the city and grew up in the times shaped by subsequent demolitions, dispossessions, expropriations, relocations and (re)constructions. They witnessed and shaped the 1960s as young adults. For Pawlikowski’s generation, these filmic locations and their “entanglements of human lives” now underscore a certain premonition of imminent departures, the awareness of the year 1968 with its March events in the university courtyard, and the exiles to come.8 Growing up in Warsaw in the 1960s was shaped by vivid images and stories of the past set against the backdrop of the city undergoing reformatting, remoulding into a modern (socialist) metropolis. Ruins were prominent then in their historicity and fragility, in a constant process of disappearance, as new architecture and new large-​scale projects were transforming the landscape. Weekly obituaries for surviving prewar buildings appeared in the local daily Życie Warszawy [Warsaw’s Life] –​‘Warszawskie pożegnania’ [Warsaw’s farewells], illustrated stories foretelling demolitions. What remained after the wartime was systematically built over, comprehensively re-​interpreted and curated in monuments, urban displays and media images. The city’s surfaces with their materials and textures, urban topography, typography and toponymy were revised and re-​visioned to incorporate postwar soviet-​style interventions into a unified image of the national capitol. Earlier markers of urban memory, individually remembered places of burials, death in urban battles, and street executions, were being methodically replaced and edited by new design for Warsaw’s remembering –​a single art project unifying selected places of war trauma across the city with a standard stone tablet and its set inscription. The imaginary landscape of Pawlikowski’s generation holds memories of the city in the process of spatial reconfiguring and surface clarification. It is through these images, like the boy recalled by Miłosz, I “look back to retain as much as possible”. The filmmaker’s “awareness of the danger menacing what he loves” is shaped by his having left behind formative spaces of his imagination and the coherence of his first language. He sees himself seeing what he sees even now. He registers a sense of loss experienced in fragility of memory and in what is imminent in the past. For someone who grew up in Warsaw and left it behind, Pawlikowski (re)constructs the imaginary framed by such recognition of loss-​to-​come:  of textures of the landscape marked by now understood imminent departures, of knowing now a life story of a friend from the courtyard and those friends marching in Innocent Sorcerers. Of returns after decades of lives lived elsewhere and seeing the place of one’s childhood through the prism of past disappearances and new menacing destructions. And the absence not registered then:  the shattered clarity of language and standard aspects of memory. I read Ida as a road movie (film drogi) in which

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126  Ella Chmielewska the key character is a singularly marked Place shaped by a chronic condition of displacement, of precariousness of home set in the landscape insistently edited and permanently disfigured by both past and present (imminent) departures and (uncertain) returns. A frail familial Place under the persistent condition of loss.

A peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical In the lecture ‘Ruins and poetry’, Miłosz reflects on the extraordinary difficulty of finding the language for a personal account of loss, and the witness of catastrophe. The experience of poetry in wartime Warsaw epitomizes for him that challenge of expressing the poet’s singular encounter, in specific time and place, with the concrete reality of disintegration, “[t]‌he sudden crumbling of all current notions and criteria (…) characteristic only of the most stormy periods of history” (Milosz 1983: 81). As a remarkable exemplification of poetic forms having witnessed wartime, he presents the work of two Warsaw poets, Anna Świrszczyńska and Miron Białoszewski, who experienced the time of war in the place in which they grew up and which they saw destroyed. Both lived through the Blitz of 1939 and the Uprising of 1944. They saw the construction of the ghetto wall and the eradication of Jewish Warsaw within its bounds. They saw their city turning into an instrument of occupation and genocide:  evictions, relocations, dispossessions, annexations and conversions that took place in order to claim spaces as “Nur für Deutsche” and those designated for the others (Chmielewska 2013:  241). The urbicide that followed the forced deportations after the 1944 Uprising –​the systematic street by street destruction of the city emptied out of its inhabitants –​was registered by Białoszewski in a plain sentence closing his Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising: “I saw what remained of Warsaw in February 1945” (Białoszewski 2014: 251). The poet was 23 then. He wrote his memoirs 23 years later. Miłosz sees Białoszewski’s writing as “a faithful, antiheroic … description of disintegration: bombed houses, whole streets, human bodies disintegrate, as do objects of everyday use and human perceptions of the world”. It is “an aural mimesis” of the crumbling city: arrhythmic, interrupted by silences, in places stripped of syntax, reduced to inarticulate sounds and odd diction (Milosz 1983: 87). The poet’s language remains close to surfaces and objects, fusing the individual and the historical in minute details of ordinary events in specific places. Białoszewski describes the city as if in a section (przekrój). The buildings are cut open by bombs and shelling, their lives moved to the street level of passages, courtyards, barricades, dug up ditches, crossings, and of hope –​“To walk around! At the sunlight. Normally” (Białoszewski 2014: 223). Then he draws two cities underground. One is rendered in fragmentary sketches of singular locations at specific addresses. The labyrinth under the tenement at 14/​16 Rybaki Street is an interminable number of cellars, corridors, vaults and storerooms. These were “streets, squares, crowds,

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 127 life, the making of friends”. They were connected across the city by passages through courtyards and vestibules and by prayers (Białoszewski 2014:  31). And below, the poet sketches a network of sewer canals. It is the third city, an underground network beneath the underground Warsaw, “With traffic. With rules. Signs. At each fork, over the entrance into the sewer proper… was an arrow and the inscription ‘HERE’ in chalk on the bricks” (Białoszewski 2014:141). This experience of Warsaw from below, from within its collapsing walls, shelters and passages, culminates in his rendering of the scene of leaving the city, when “And at once everyone started coming out from all the cellars, vaults, holes. Onto the streets! (…) And sunshine. And the quiet …” (Białoszewski 2014: 224). Świrszczyńska was 35 at that time. She never returned to Warsaw after that exodus of survivors. And she took three decades searching for a language to describe her wartime experience and the 63  days of the 1944 Uprising. Miłosz remarks on the intensity in her compositions  –​or her images?–​gathered in a collection of poetic miniatures Budowałam barykadę /​ Building the Barricade (Miłosz 1996; Świrszczyńska 1979). Each poem is a document of a singular event. Each holds crystallized tensions. Each figures the disintegrating city within a snapshot of a discrete scene, a report on an instance of waiting, listening, fear, despair. Each is to stay in imagination. In tightly cropped close-​ups, events and gestures are condensed around objects. A paving stone. A sandbag. A mattress in a cellar-​turned-​hospital. A doorway separating voices. A photograph of a young woman under the hospital bed of a mortally wounded insurgent. The poet, a nurse in the Uprising, sketched the scenes she witnessed into surfaces and shadows, condensed the silence of a smouldering street into a small paddle of water on the pavement and pressed the fear into someone’s hand placed on the door handle. For a memory of one street execution –​one of those inscribed on the stone tablets recalled by Pawlikowski?  –​she never found adequate words.

His workshop has no ceiling Świrszczyńska’s poems render the city as a place that saw war and still retains the phantom pain of that seeing, “the place where million lived and then came an absence of that million” (Miłosz 1996: 67). They sketch miniature portraits from which the city is configured in fragments that seem to alight on the moments in which destruction is registered, like the interior of a flat exposed in a fire, a kitchen wall in a section of the building open by explosion. In those miniatures, in singular events of loss, the poet haltingly speaks of disappearances in and of her city. She traces tangents of seeing absence. Miłosz describes Świrszczyńska’s language as “most humble art of mimesis” in which “reality, as it is remembered, is paramount and dictates the means of expression” (Miłosz 1996: 85). In her “calligraphic conciseness”

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128  Ella Chmielewska he sees “a search for the line beyond which only a zone of silence exists”. In this concentration, he writes, “History is present in an object as an absence … [where] a peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical [takes] place” (Miłosz 1996: 91). In documenting a sense of an imminent threat in the here and now of witnessing, in registering the tenuousness of things and places, she “constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins” (Miłosz 1996: 97). Świrszczyńska grew up in her father’s painting studio. Her poetic imagination was shaped by its changing surfaces and planes, by its walls and its effects. In the poem ‘My Father’s Workshop’ she recalls it as a place where huge paintings “grew in corners … thronged, every day taller, beating their wings against the high ceiling”, “the window in the roof … white with frost, the coal/​used up …” (Swir 1996:  22). She returns to the atelier in her memoirs cited by Miłosz in his remarkable tribute to the poet’s life and work, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy [Oh, what a guest came to visit]. She recalls it as a place of her “second birth” and “the very structure of [her] reality”: Tall, imposing, magnificent, awesome. The paintings were everywhere on the walls, propped against the walls, crowded all corners –​vast canvases and huge cartoons –​historical compositions, designs for five meter high stained glass …. The floor was covered in nudes, figure sketches … studies of costumes, historical periods. (…) Father painted singing …. (Miłosz 1996: 9) Her description of the morning after the bombing raid in early September 1939 is a haunting scene of seeing disintegration. She places her micro-​report on her father’s seeing what remained after the night’s raid in Warsaw side by side with another account of his looking  –​a postwar scene in Kraków, his morning ritual of verification that the Wawel Castle has not disappeared overnight. The war-​time of the city of her birth becomes compressed into the adjacency of these two moments of seeing her father’s seeing, between the two poems, ‘He Did Not Jump from the Third Floor’ and ‘Father in Kraków’. A “distinct exemplification” of singular witnessing the violence in disappearance of place. Świrszczyńska: In the morning my father went To the Theatre Square. He saw. His workshop has no ceiling, Has no walls No floor.

After all, he has lived through a day in which a house disappeared with all his paintings painted in hunger and cold for forty years. (Swir 1996: 24–​25)

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 129 The poet condenses the loss of her father’s place of work and her “place of second birth” into the absence akin to Georges Perec’s insistent abrogation of the letter ‘e’ in his lipogrammatic novel La Disparition [The Disappearance]. It is a rendering of without, the disappearance as encrypted absence. Her two accounts of witnessing are fused between the pages in the book’s gutter.9 The absence of the singular is tethered to the still felt void on the facing page. The space between the poems holds the distinct time of the event of seeing, and the mornings of mourning to come: reliving loss in seeking reassurance in the concreteness of place, in the exactitude of the image carried across time of exile. It is “a peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical” in a fragment of a morning and a shard of time in mourning (Milosz 1983: 91). The memory of the loss left behind. Not an ocular after-​image but a spatial memory of loss, an embodied after-​view (po-​widok), an after-​loss like a phantom pain of the place that witnessed seeing. A suddenly felt absence carried from the place of birth to that of exile.

I forgot it was possible to hear no detonations For Mariusz Tchorek, an art critic, writer and therapist born in 1939, the wartime and postwar dates framing the fate of Warsaw also mark his formative experiences as recalled in his Life Story. “I was born in a city which within the first five years of my life would turn over the street level into flames, rubble and ashes, a bonfire of a sort, a gripping spectacle for a child to behold, one of the gradual disintegration of the man-​made environment …” (Tchorek 1981: 1). His earliest childhood memory is that of his grandfather’s tenement: “an enormous grey well, its walls studded with windows and faces” and the walled-​in garden with a single tree revealing to him the world of light and life, and another world invisible behind the wall, “a notion of being separated from the other side”. He recalls a roundup on Bracka Street as a geometry of a street corner singularly punctured by a blank stare of one captured woman: “Into that sharp-​angled square on Bracka (…) had been inscribed a new triangle, of shiny bayonets and collars with the double S.  And … the face … gone white, strangely staring out.” A shock of a suddenly changed view after an air raid:  “the building which was always there, before our window, spirited itself away” (Tchorek 1981: 4). Leaving the shelter under his father’s gallery on Marszałkowska Street before leaving the city, he sees “a different landscape formed itself as we stayed underground: piles of rubble, fantastic shapes of houses missing their front walls, overturn tram …”. And he is struck by the most “remarkable silence enveloping the gutted city. I forgot it was possible to hear no detonations”. The end of the war and the family return to Warsaw is marked by his accident with a detonator, a found object he picked up from among “the freshly abandoned ornaments of war”. His right hand, disfigured in the explosion, and for many years refusing to heal, shaped his relationship to material things and his resolve to collect views, glimpses, fragile images on the verge of disappearance. “The first scene I decided to save from oblivion

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130  Ella Chmielewska … was seen through a window on a tram with my mother on the way to a doctor: a cloudy grey sky with a single black speck of a crow just about to disappear behind the railway embankment” (Tchorek 1981: 13). In his lecture, ‘Place of Birth, Birth of Place’, given in 2000 in Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Tchorek reflects on the ruin as a memory of a singular place and time. He considers the place of that event, Ujazdów Castle resurrected from complete ruin in the 1970s. The building that housed a hospital during the Uprising was razed to the ground in the postwar editing of the city’s architectural history, which selected buildings deserving survival and those slated for destruction. Considering the singularity of marks remaining for two decades in place, on the ground of the escarpment, Tchorek reflects on the memory of ruination persisting in the outline of the foundation walls of the levelled building then echoed in the Centre’s logo. He also recalls a recent view of the deteriorated buildings of the Nitrogen Plant in Puławy where thirty years earlier he delivered the art manifesto that has remained a defining text of Polish avant-​garde, Introduction to the General Theory of Place (Polit 2009, Borowski et al. 2011). The 1966 event marked both the birth of Foksal Gallery and a premonition of a rift between its co-​founders already palpable in the text that considers Place a “gap in the utilitarian approach to the world” (Tchorek 2010: 20). Soon he would leave Poland to live abroad. Seeing from a window of a passing train this ruin of communist modernity is for him a moment of sensing dispossession of both familiar and familial: “And then the ruin, somewhere off to the side of consumption and production, reminds us for an instant through the train window that we have just passed (…) a Place (…) in which One is, having nothing” (Tchorek 2010: 21). This momentary “act of thinking the ruined structure” triggers his reflection on the ruined city of his birth, on singularity of place and loss. And he asks, “In what conditions … do the earth or the tree become differentiated, that is, hallowed? When and for whom does a place on earth or under a tree become holy?” (Tchorek 2010: 25). Tchorek wrote the lecture in his late father’s atelier, the place captured in 1969 in key scenes of Wajda’s Hunting Flies. At the time of his writing, the tall window of the studio still held the same view of the blind wall and dark windows of a pre-​war tenement along Foksal Street. In the film, the studio is a rented mise en scène, a transitional space with changing occupants. For Tchorek, it was a place where his father’s works mingled with gothic sculptures and antique objects, where socialist-​realist plaster casts sat beside new modernist forms, art catalogues (Rodin, Picasso, Maria Jarema, Henry Moore) side-​by-​side with wooden figures by the folk artist Leon Kudła. When Tchorek was writing Theory of Place, the wall plaques Pawlikowski recalls as still framing his memories and shaping his imagination were appearing on newly constructed and reconfigured walls of the city. In the capitol with nationalized property and centrally controlled iconosphere, the sandstone tablets (and freestanding monoliths in open areas) were highly visible both as individual markers and as a city-​wide project.10 For Tchorek, Warsaw walls

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 131 in the 1960s were both familiar and familial. On Marszałkowska Street, his younger brother’s infant face was rendered on one of the monumental reliefs from 1952. And his father’s studio was crowded with drawings, models and photographs of stone tablets inscribed with laconic statistics of wartime trauma, each enunciating MIEJSCE [PLACE]. Each pointing to a specific TU [HERE], tethered to an address listed in his father’s notebook. The 1948 competition for the commemorative project to mark places of public executions in Nazi-​occupied Warsaw was won by local sculptor Karol Tchorek and his stone tablets gradually indexed discrete places across the city with the Maltese cross and nameless numbers: 20, 350, 15, 6000, 9, c.300. They replaced earlier markers of local remembrance, giving a standard form to the memory of national loss (Chmielewska 2013). Echoing one another with their design and lettering, the plaques were memorable in iterations, each pronouncing:  MIEJSCE UŚWIĘCONE KRWIĄ POLAKÓW POLEGŁYCH ZA WOLNOŚĆ OJCZYZNY [A PLACE SANCTIFIED BY THE BLOOD OF POLES WHO DIED FOR FREEDOM OF THEIR HOMELAND]. They designated walls as places of memory scoring in inscribed surfaces micro-​histories of individual locations. Citing dates and numbers, they projected precision and singularity. Their repetitious form confirmed a uniform story of national heroism. Charting selected events witnessed by surviving walls, they outlined the city’s aphasia. In indexing individual places of street executions in the occupied city and killings in the 1944 Uprising, the tablets were silent on deaths in the Ghetto. Those few plaques that commemorated Jewish deaths –​ differentiated on drawings as ‘non-​typical’–​only underscored this absence. Their inscription called for CZEŚĆ ICH PAMIĘCI [HONOUR TO THEIR MEMORY]. Jewish death was not given MIEJSCE [PLACE]. It was indexed to the then invisible wall of the liquidated ghetto symbolised by the two sides of the Ghetto Heroes Memorial completed in 1948, and still remaining in the tall brick wall along the Powązki Cemetery.11

An act of thinking a ruined structure This large commemorative project secured for the artist a permit for studio space at the time when the socialist-​realist development in the city centre claimed the building where his gallery Salon Nike had been located since 1943. Evicted from Marszałkowska Street in 1951, the sculptor found a space in a ruined annex (oficyna) hidden in a courtyard behind a tenement across from the emerging Communist Party Headquarters. He constructed his workshop within a ruin and from ruins, assembling found fragments of buildings. He relocated the stone floor from Salon Nike (the tiles that witnessed Picasso’s visit in 1948). In the studio, a tall north-​facing window opened the blind wall and the skylight in the new roof enclosed the high ceiling. A mezzanine with an attic and a small cellar with a hatch door completed the self-​contained place-​ for-​work, a bounded fragment of the world amidst massive postwar clearing and demolition. In the walled-​in garden, the sculptor planted a chestnut tree.

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132  Ella Chmielewska He continued working in the studio on Smolna Street until his death in 1985. Then, for two decades that witnessed monumental political shifts, his son fought to keep and preserve the atelier. Tchorek saw the sculptor’s workshop as a material memory of the city, critical to understanding singularity of Place, “a place in which one is in encounter with ‘another’ ”. In a postcard to a friend written in the studio right after his father passed away, he describes it as “a sanctuary devoted to life itself in which many cultures and epochs merge to transmit a sense of wonder”.12 Upon his return to post-​communist Warsaw, it became a place of his return to writing on Place and art. His wife, the English artist Katy Bentall, recalls seeing the studio for the first time as a deeply moving experience, the image of an interrupted time that has never left her: I have always felt this ‘charge’ in Smolna. One that leads you to the point of despair and back again. The charge that holds so much mystery –​such a lot of crumbly plaster now. Karol’s huge heads that don’t know if they want to turn into bronze or not. And then there is the redundant tree trunk lying on the floor waiting for its transformation. A dressing up that never came because the sculptor died. So what can anyone do with these lumps of Art that slowly sculpt themselves into the history books? (Chmielewska et al. 2010: 28) It is from this place that she begun learning Warsaw. After her husband’s death in 2004, Bentall carefully rebuilt the interior, suturing within grey plastered walls the sculptor’s atelier with the theorist’s place of writing that informed “thinking the ruined structure”.13 Her art entered this new place of work, Pracownia [Studio], tracing the familial and familiar ties in its material, drawing the relations between the interior and the city, between an insider and the outsider in this city, resonating with The Theory of Place and other places that have shaped and held her life and art14 (Chmielewska et  al. 2010:  28). Within this nested place of work, the assembled archives of a Warsaw sculptor and the theorist of Place and art face each other in an exceptional situation of archival and artistic practice working with the material in situ.15 A custodian of the historic studio and its listed collection, Bentall works within her Pracownia attending to its objects and its archives in a creative process, in poiesis. She reads the material held within the fragile walls through the gauze of a foreign language, as if reading Warsaw with the syntax-​less language of Białoszewski –​mimetically, recognizing patterns, listening to pensive pauses and silences. In her artist books, installations, poetic montages and events, she plots the memories and histories held in place by discrete objects and documents (Jakubowska 2013). From this place, this “gap in the utilitarian approach to the world”, her work registers transformations of the city outside, shifts in art politics, memory and heritage discourses, and relentless pressures of urban development in the city still marred by the legacy of post-​ war expropriations and post-​ communist reprivatisation. Bentall’s

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 133 iPad  and the huge window cut into the war-​damaged north-​facing wall of her Pracownia record the new urban clearing, now dismantling the walls that witnessed previous destruction and rebuilding and the walls of postwar modernity that challenged and reformatted the Stalinist landscape. They document disappearing views, collect spatial after-​images of disintegrating city.

In the presence of these things In his project Warsaw: Tracking the City, the architect and cultural theorist Mark Dorrian explores ways of thinking about Warsaw that are made visible in disjunctive, “entangled and difficult-​to-​comprehend traces of the city’s past, broken lines, awkward objects of the present and conflicting visions for (impossible) futures” (Dorrian 2010:  5). He considers questions of experience, representation, memory and loss as central for Warsaw and for the post-​socialist city. He posits tracking as an approach to architectural thinking that takes account of ordinary objects, surface marking and traces in their encounters and transformations. This thinking necessarily attends to the very surface where the change is made visible, and where the consequences of the past accumulate (Dorrian 2010: 5). For Dorrian, the studio is a critical site of architectural production. Closely attending to the ways place effects work that is produced in it frames his approach to thinking “material prehistories” of Warsaw. His description of Bentall’s Pracownia, written for the design charrette held there in 2009, presents the studio as a place that both concentrates and opens poetic thinking about this city: The interior of the studio in Smolna is like a capriccio of Warsaw, a vision in which diverse objects from the city’s history encounter one another. It is less a place in which the visitor meets things, as one in which they meet one another before her speechless gaze. We are struck by the deep poignancy of the way that this small, fractured building has come to shelter this devastated city. How are we to understand the relation between the studio and what it contains? We might hesitate in calling it an archive, if by that we mean an array of objects pinned down by classification and consequently withdrawn from history. Does it not instead appear to be a place in which, to the contrary, fragments of the past are released and the historical is opened onto itself. Perhaps this is why we sense a strange vitality in the objects in Smolna. Far from being inert things, these objects carry a vital agency. In this place, in the presence of these things, we might even come to feel that it is we who are the objects of their dreams, as much as they are of ours. (Dorrian 2015: 200) In the charrette, architecture students were tasked with a careful listening to the interior with the video camera, investigating ways of thinking about

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134  Ella Chmielewska architecture through the form of a short video essay. I take the questions posed in Dorrian’s sketch of the studio to the examination of the sculptor’s archives:  how am I  to understand the relation between the city and the records of its memorial project held within this interior? Documents in varied formats, forms, scales and categories resist enclosure in archival boxes and cabinets. In their positioning in the studio, in different alignments and configurations, they form and transform connections with the city outside. A  tall stack of folders with blueprints travels around the studio pausing on wooden chairs. Unfolded, these drawings present a vast surface of inscription, a 1:1 rendering of the lettering drawn together from across the city. A  memorial surface unfolding on the stone floor relocated from Marszałkowska Street. The archive forms a densely detailed memorial surface. Each plaque is drawn separately, a hand-​crafted lettering referencing a specific event, shaping the tablet’s dimensions and proportions. Each is framed by exact wording, each carrying stamped approvals and evidentiary numbers, each checked against lists and site conditions. These records of singularity gathered in the studio form a kind of archival memorial in which places in the city come together with the histories of revisions, corrections and omissions evidenced in documents that informed each inscription and its placement. They hold as well the photographic memory of disappearance of earlier markings, urban revisions and histories of wall displacements (Elżanowski 2014). The documents of places of street executions (in field notes, photographs, lists, newspaper clippings, official correspondence, hand-​written copies of letters) reside here among the sculptor’s tools, his books and ephemera, sculptures and objects, family photographs and artefacts. Sketches of the wall plaques and inscriptions  –​hand-​drawn lettering recording unnamed deaths in plain numbers and dates  –​sit beside children’s drawings.16 Annotated lists of places of killing, the addresses that locate the events, notes on site conditions, side-​by-​side drawings of individual tablets and models in different scales. A stack of folded blueprints of 1:1 drawings of the inscriptions is watched over by plaster heads of poets. Miron Białoszewski, his head striking in its geometric synthesis, casts sideway glances from the windowsill. Mariusz  Tchorek’s well-​ used copy of Białoszewski’s poems placed nearby. On the shelf beside the stairs, a small model of the gravestone designed in 1962 for Władysław Strzemiński, the author of Theory of Seeing and its key concept of afterimages (powidoki). A  faded black-​and-​ white photograph of a boy playing in the courtyard  –​the year 1944 pencilled on the back. In the sculptor’s diary from 1956, a note on meeting with the Jewish Committee regarding a series of commemorative tablets. A small sketch of the menorah rendered in blue pen and below, in the sculptor’s handwriting, Warsaw Jews are given a Place:  ‘Miejsce uświęcone krwią Żydów poległych …’ [Place sanctified by the blood of the fallen Jews …].

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 135 On a shelf in the cellar, beside a group of plaster figures, a maquette of a gravestone slab with six names and ranks of insurgents, officers of the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) who “fell” (polegli) on 26 August 1944.

With both sides of the same thought In the studio, Bentall insistently places moulds and maquettes beside Karol’s plaster heads and figures. In these encounters, the mould (form) is not a mere transitional thing, a remainder of a process. It is one of the objects that Dorrian credited with carrying a vital agency. A witness to a particular time and place and a record of a singular event of thinking with surfaces. Its awkward exterior cradles the exactitude of form, holding the singularity of its interior shape and potentiality of iteration. The outer shell echoes the disfigured building held by the studio from within, pointing to the precariousness of the interior as a persisting condition of Warsaw walls. The studio, a place of work nested in the wounded fragment of an ordinary building (kamienica), forms a critical figure for the city that saw war and then witnessed its post-​war and post-​communist re-​formatting. Like a cast of Warsaw’s disintegrating memories, it figures the wall as both material and imaginary, both a ruin and a potentiality. In holding the concentrated archives of the city’s wartime trauma and memories it demonstrates the singularity of ruination. Framing the north-​facing window, a fragment of the blind wall persists in its material vulnerability, stilled in the place under threat. By remaining in place, the studio continues witnessing the impending disintegration, articulating a kind of “awareness of the dangers menacing what we love” that Warsaw poets of wartime have tried to touch in their searching for exactitude in stark bundles of words. A place of work twice built into a ruin, holding documentary fragments of memories of the city, in its continued fragility, the studio forms a unique observatory. Its tall window now viewing the new war-​zone of corporate destructions  –​the excavations and erasures of different pasts, the tearing down of walls that saw war, and that still in their very destruction testify to the troubled histories of the memory surfaces of the city. A  popular location for film and photography shoots –​sheltering northern light in its grey plaster walls –​it remains under threat of the encroaching development. Its interior assembles and reveals fragmentary histories and the uncertain present of ordinary local walls and their spatial memories. Its collection of archives and objects holds a kind of trembling that Warsaw poet Piotr Matywiecki, in his remarkable memoir Stary Gmach [The Old Library], calls “the present as memory”17 (Matywiecki 2016: 227). Writing thirty years after leaving the Library, where he worked for two decades, Matywiecki describes its interior as a discrete volume of time “breathing with history”, a kind of “mingling of space and time” where time was concentrated and alertly mobile and where thought interlaced with space

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136  Ella Chmielewska (Matywiecki 2016: 47). He recalls it as a place of seeing the experiencing of reading (przeżywanie czytania), traversing volumes of time and collecting thoughts. The library collection, with “its spaces of intertextuality” and places of connections, formed a unique architecture (Matywiecki 2016: 47). The poet-​librarian sees the loss of the interior space of the Library as a destruction of architectural integrity of its collection. And he asks what is not mobile, not removable, what remains in place when the place is stripped of its significant contents and its meaningful chance encounters. What cannot be dis-​placed and what becomes lost in relocation. For him, the most difficult aspect of witnessing the emptying out of the building before the Library collection was relocated to the new building was a distinct sense of loss of place (Matywiecki 2016: 43). This strongly echoed for him an earlier experience, the loss of grounding in the city of his birth that he felt in 1968 after the March events (Radziwon 2006). I am reading Matywiecki’s essay on loss of place of reading in a place that still, against odds, holds its objects and its collection, in the studio in Smolna Street on one of my now rare visits to Warsaw. In the morning, the light begins slowly filling the studio from above, as if falling upon the stone tiles. The arm of an enormous crane traces an arc above the roof window. I  am struck by the spatiality of Matywiecki’s memories. He recalls the building from within its interior, from within a volume of morning sound in the reading room. Remembering concentrated fragments  –​a pencilled note in a book donated by the mother of a dead poet, a singular moment of reading –​the poet-​librarian constructs a complex architectural interior of words, volumes and lives held by the steel spine of the book storage racks. It is not a memory of an old building, but a memoir of a critical Place in Krakowskie Przedmieście, whose spaces and collection shaped his poetic imaginary and whose windows framed the view on the university courtyard.

The present as memory I begin reading a collection Zdarte okładki (1965–​2009) [Torn-​off Book Covers] that spans Matywiecki’s poetic life, away from Warsaw. At home in Edinburgh, I read Polish poetry aloud, as if to construct the sound space for my thoughts to meet the words (Matywiecki 2011). These wiersze-​miasta [city-​poems] are spatial images composed for the city of his birth. “Warsaw accumulates the past in its body”, he notes in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, “in a way that sets it apart from any other city” (Radziwon 2006). Matywiecki sees Warsaw as simultaneously submerged in history and in destruction. His poetic concern is the present moment when the past becomes vivid, the here and now when poetry is written and is experienced in reading. Each of his poems is a discrete object with its vital agency, a poem-​house (wiersz-​kamienica), a poem-​wall (wiersz-​ściana). Each holds “a trembling in the image and a trembling thought” (Matywiecki 2009:  665). Each, a stilled fragment. Each is to

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 137 stay in imagination. In his poems, the memories are spatially experienced (doświadczane). Images are not seen but lived through, survived (przeżyte), and they continue being-​lived-​through (przeżywane), persisting their survival in memory (Matywiecki 2016:  40). This resonates with Mariusz Tchorek’s reflection on the persistent phantom pain that is not a mere after-​image, but an embodied after-​view (po-​widok), a chronic sense of absence –​the after-​sense (po-​czucie) stretching beyond time (Tchorek 1995: 56). In “Zdarte okładki” [Torn-​off Book Covers] Matywiecki writes: The memory lost me –​ I am juggling glimpses. A syllable. A sudden chill. With both sides of the same thought My voice calls out. But that thought Remains silent. (Matywiecki 2009: 82) The dates that frame the fate of the city of the poet’s birth also mark his life. He was conceived in the Ghetto and born on the Aryan side in 1943. His father crossed the Ghetto wall to fight and die in the 1944 Uprising. His mother survived the war and remained in Warsaw after March 1968. In “Ściana” [The Wall] the poet identifies with the wall: I am standing facing the wall. Shot. I am counting remembered time. There is no passage. I walked through the wall to the city I am a wall I am a wall That separated itself from its own fear. I am a metaphor. (Matywiecki 2009: 16) His poems-​images seem to be written from inside the city, as if looking from the interior of places, from underneath the city surface. In “Wycieczka” [An Excursion] An old apartment walks into the street. It cannot find its previous residents. … The shadow has no ceiling it has no floor. (Matywiecki 2009: 27)

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138  Ella Chmielewska In “Umarły” [Dead]: Looking from below the square I turn the city around me –​like a kaleidoscope. (Matywiecki 2009: 32) *

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Suddenly remembering some images taken in the cellar underneath the studio in Smolna, I  search through the filmic material from the 2009 charrette. One of the stills centred on the group of plaster heads and figures, registered an inscribed surface of a gravestone. I read out the names of the officers of the People’s Army “WHO FELL FIGHTING THE NAZI OCCUPANT ON 26 AUGUST 1944”: BOLESŁAW KOWALSKI, STANISŁAW NOWICKI, STANISŁAW KURLAND, EDWARD LANOTA, ANASTAZY MATYWIECKI …. Anastazy Matywiecki, the Warsaw lawyer-​poet whose writing was lost in the Ghetto, who crossed the Ghetto wall to his death in the Uprising, who was exhumed twice and buried thrice, whose son, Piotr Matywiecki, offers “thoughts for [my] words” and directs me towards thinking about Warsaw walls “with both sides of the same thought” –​is remembered within the collection of objects in the cellar in Smolna Street.18 *

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Meanwhile, on Warsaw’s noisy post-​socialist walls, Tchorek’s tablets have been struggling for visibility under constant threat of relocation and displacement, commercial pressures and competing memory discourses. The index of place, HERE (TU), reiterated on walls is increasingly imprecise, pointing to the closest opportune location, or passed over, evoking MEMORY not PLACE. The tablets  –​repointed, corrected, embellished, removed  –​cease to function as markers of specific remembering and become symbols in the shifting national memorial discourses. Restoration projects and proposals for revisions focus on refining patriotic terminology, correcting the wording of inscriptions. This scattered monument that clarified national trauma in carved letters and numbers on walls of the 1960s still challenges the standard form given to memory. And it underscores the persistent fragility of Warsaw testimonial substrates. Katy Bentall’s studio, holding its objects and archives, frames the memory of the memorial itself, the record of past revisions and the history of disappearances. While Pawlikowski’s filmic essay stills the imaginaries, this fragile Place preserved in a fractured building by the sculptor’s family, like the silence between the lines of Matywiecki’s city-​poems, still persists in sheltering this disintegrating city.

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Figure 6.1 Towards the Stalinist colossus. Source: photo by Katy Bentall, Warsaw, 5 April 2017.

Figure 6.2 In the walled-​in garden, the sculptor planted a chestnut tree. Source: photo by Katy Bentall, Warsaw, 26 September 2017.

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140  Ella Chmielewska

Notes 1 The generation born in the late 1950s experienced or witnessed waves of emigration from Poland marked by two key dates:  March 1968 (student and intellectual protest paralleled by anti-​Jewish campaigns and dissident repressions) and December 1981 (imposition of martial law that followed the emergence of the Solidarity movement and mass strikes of the late 1970s). 1956 marked the beginning of a political ‘thaw’ and the onset of ‘socialist modernity’ in the city, easing off the strong hold of socialist realism. 2 In March 1968, a major student and intellectual protest against the suppression of freedom took place at Warsaw University. Government security forces responded with brutal force and the beating of demonstrators in the University courtyard by paramilitary police became a lasting symbol of police brutality in the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). The March events were followed by repression of the dissidents, attacks on intelligentsia and expulsion of citizens of Jewish ancestry from work and studies. Mass emigration ensued. Some 15,000 Polish Jews were deprived of their Polish citizenship in the 1968 political crisis. See Ascherson (2008) and Stola (2002). 3 On the night of 20–​21 August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces, including Polish troops, invaded Czechoslovakia. See Ascherson (2008).   One of my most vivid childhood memories is that of visiting our  family in Częstochowa and being woken up at night by the sound known from documentary films on the bombing of Warsaw.   Pani (Mrs) Taube (neé Jeske) was a young chemistry teacher in my school. She held a farewell dinner for our class before leaving for Israel with her husband and their newborn child. 4 In the lectures written for The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture series at Harvard University, Italo Calvino offers a reflection on his own life in writing. The completion of the 1985–​1986 lectures was interrupted by the author’s death in 1985, on the eve of his departure for Cambridge. 5 Miłosz delivered The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1981–​1982, a year after he was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature. The collection was published in Polish by Instytut Literacki in Paris and until 1990 was available in Poland only in underground circulation and in a censored edition published in 1987. 6 Emphasis added. 7 Wajda’s first three films have dealt with key events in the city’s wartime history: A Generation (1955), Kanał (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Each script was written by a direct participant in the specific events. Bohdan Czeszko’s script for A Generation was based on the writer’s experience of Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Jerzy Stefan Stawiński based his script for Kanał on his memories of the 1944 Uprising and Warsaw’s sewers. And the script for Ashes and Diamonds was written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, who grew up in pre-​war Warsaw and experienced its occupation and its destruction in the Uprising. 8 From the cast of Innocent Sorcerers, a group of friends marching along Warecka Street towards the Palace, many departed Poland by the end of the 1960s:  Jerzy Skolimowski, Roman Polański and Krzysztof Komeda. Another member of the cast, Zbigniew Cybulski, who also starred in Wajda’s A Generation (1954) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), died tragically in 1967. Komeda, a jazz pianist and composer, who wrote the score for Polański’s Knife in the Water, died after a tragic accident in 1969.

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 141 9 Contemplating the positioning of these two poems (poem-​images), I am reminded of Ulrich Baer’s study of photography of trauma, Spectral Evidence (Baer 2002: 62–​63). Baer reflects on what it means “to give memory a place” and on the position of “the viewer as witness” and considers pages of the book and the separation of the book’s gutter in his discussion of absence in the photograph of the place of trauma (Baer 2002: 61, 101). 10 For a summary of the legacy of the 1945 Dekret Bieruta [Bierut Decree] and property nationalization in Warsaw, the complex situation of property rights and reprivatization see Dymek (2016) and Fudała (2015). For a discussion of clearing the ruins and the iconosphere in the city see Chmielewska (2007). 11 The wall of the ghetto became visible in markings on the pavement and the specially designed plaques in 2008–​2009. See Janicka (2011) and Zaborowska (2004). 12 In 1991, Mariusz Tchorek secured the heritage registration for the studio, an extraordinary status for an interior space in an ordinary ruin. This followed the 1985 registration of Karol Tchorek’s Collection as heritage of cultural significance. 13 Working with the architect Małgorzata Wagner in 2005–​ 2006, Bentall accomplished a unique restoration project of a purpose-​built atelier within the war-​ damaged tenement. The architect worked with the original construction drawings and archival documents to repair and conserve the sculptor’s workshop while modernizing the space for use as a contemporary atelier. The heritage status of the studio, although now recognized in the development plans for the area, does not guarantee protection against development as the pressures on the properties in the city centre and the pressures on the City of Warsaw Conservation office have been mounting. See Stopa (2012) and Chełmiński (2017). 14 Bentall’s installation ‘Familial Ties’ explored the relation between places, the studio and the family. Exhibition Figury Retoryczne. Warszawska Rzeźba Architektoniczna 1918–​1970. Królikarnia, Muzeum Narodowe Warszawa, 14.06–​11.10.2015. 15 The implication of place in archival research and the significance of personal archives and individual memories for studying the city are made vivid in Pracownia. It is an extraordinary experience for the researcher to work with the archival material in-​situ, working through the material within the space that holds the library, objects and personal histories. For a discussion of working-​with the private archive see Ashmore et al. (2012). 16 Though its elements are in constant use in the studio, the archive is carefully catalogued and indexed. The comprehensive inventory of the tablets in situ was done in 2011 by Agnieszka Wagner for the Foundation Tchorek-​Bentall. The inventory has been deposited in the City of Warsaw Office for Culture (Biuro Kultury Miasta). See also Chmielewska (2015). 17 Translation of Matywiecki’s work is mine. 18 In 1944, Anastazy Matywiecki was buried three times:  first under the bombed building at Freta 16. He was exhumed in 1945 and laid down in a marked grave in Krakowskie Przedmieście, not far from the University Library. In 2008, during the revitalization of the street, the burial site was dug up by construction workers –​ the stone slab marking the grave of six officers was interpreted as symbolic, a mere commemoration not a marked place in the ground. In 2009, the remains of the insurgents (and other unidentified remains found in the site) were buried in Powązki Cemetary. See Urzykowski (2009), Kowalczyk (2016), Matywiecki (2011).

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References Ascherson, N. (2008), ‘The Polish March: students, workers, and 1968’, openDemocracy, 6  March, www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/the_polish_march_students_ workers_and_1968 (accessed 12 November 2017). Ashmore, P., Cragg, R., and Neate, H. (2012), ‘Working-​with: Talking and sorting in personal archives’, Journal of Historical Geography, 38, 81–​89. Baer, U. (2002), Spectral Evidence. The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Białoszewski, M. (2014), A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. New York: NYRB. Borowski, W., Ptaszkowska, A., and Tchorek, M. (2011), ‘An Introduction to the General Theory of Place (1966)’, in A. Alberro and B. Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 44–48. Calvino, I. (1988), Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chełmiński, J. (2017), ‘Będzie można zwiedzać uratowane przed likwidacją pracownie znanych artystów’ [One could visit famous artists’ studios saved from liquidation]. Wyborcza.pl 03.12.2017 (accessed 3 December 2017). Chmielewska, E. (2007), ‘Sites of display’, in P. Martyn (ed.), City in Art. Warszawa: Instytut Sztuki, 135–​152. Chmielewska, E. (2013), ‘Vectors of looking:  Reflections on the Luftwaffe’s aerial survey of Warsaw, 1944’ in M. Dorrian and F. Pousin (eds.), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Chmielewska, E. (2015), ‘Pamięć miejsca. Tablice, archiwum, pracownia’, in Figury Retoryczne. Warszawska Rzeźba Architektoniczna 1918-​1970. Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe, 81–​108. Chmielewska, E., Chmielewska, A., Tchorek, M., and Carter, P. (2010), ‘A Warsaw address: a dossier on 36, Smolna Street,’ The Journal of Architecture, 15(1), 7–​38. Dorrian, M. (2010), ‘Warsaw:  Tracking the city. Introduction.’ The Journal of Architecture, 15(10), 1–​5. Dorrian, M. (2015), Writing on the Image: Architecture, The City and the Politics of Representation. London: I.B. Tauris. Dymek, J. (2016), ‘Your house is now ours’, Krytyka polityczna & European Alternatives, http://politicalcritique.org/cee/poland/2016/your-house-is-now-ours (accessed 18 October 2017). Elżanowski, J. (2014), ‘Monuments and material dislocation: The politics of commemoration in Warsaw’, in A. Madanipour, S. Knierbein and A. Degros (eds.), Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe. New York: Routledge, 88–​102. Fudała, T. (ed.) (2015), Spór o odbudowę. Od gruzów do reprywatyzacji. Warszawa: Muzeum. Herscher, A. and Siddiqi, A. I., (2014), ‘Spatial Violence,’ Architectural Theory Review, 19(3), 269–277. Janicka, E. (2011), Festung Warschau. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Jakubowska, A. (2013), ‘Katy Bentall and Pracownia’, Seminarium Na Miejscu. Warsaw:  National Museum and Foundation Tchorek-​Bentall, www.krolikarnia. mnw.art.pl/dzialalnosc-naukowa/seminarium-na-miejscu (accessed 12 November 2017). Kowalczyk, J. (2016), ‘Piotr Matywiecki, “Którędy na zawsze”’, culture.pl 11.09.2016 (accessed 12 November 2017).

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Warsaw afterimages: of walls and memories 143 Lane, A. (2014), ‘Road trips: “Ida” and “Chef ”’, Current Cinema, The New Yorker, 12 May. Matywiecki, P. (2009), Zdarte okładki (1965–​2009) [Torn-​off Book Covers].Wrocław: Biuro Literackie. Matywiecki, P. (2011), Myśli do słów [Thoughts for Words]. Wrocław: Biuro Literackie. Matywiecki, P. (2016), Stary Gmach [The Old Building]. Warszawa:  Biblioteka “WIĘZI”. Milosz, C. (1983), The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miłosz, C. (1996), Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy. O Annie Świrszczyńskiej [Oh, what a Guest Came to Visit. On Anna Świrszczyńska]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak. Pawlikowski, P. (2014), ‘How we made Ida: Paweł Pawlikowski on the journey from script to film’, The Guardian, Friday, 21 November. Polit, P. (2009), ‘Foksal Gallery and the notion of archive:  Between inventory and place’, Afterall Online Journal, 21, Summer. Radziwon M. (2006), ‘Tematy wieczne i swoje:  Rozmowa z Piotrem Matywieckim’ [Conversation with Piotr Matywiecki], Gazeta Wyborcza, 17 September. Seymour, T. (2014), ‘Paweł Pawlikowski:  I was a lonely guy in a weird city’, The Guardian, Thursday, 18 September. Stola, D. (2000), Kampania antysjonistyczna w Polsce 1967–​1968 [The Anti-​Zionist Campaign in Poland 1967–​1968]. Warszawa: ISP PAN. Stopa, M. (2012), ‘Likwidacja? Nie. Restoracja!’, WysokieObcasy.pl 19.01.2012 (accessed 12 November 2017). Swir, A. (1996), Talking to My Body. Translated by C. Miłosz and L. Nathan. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. Świrszczyńska, A. (1979), Budowałam barykadę /​ Building the Barricade. Translated by M.J. Krynski and R.A. Maguire. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Tchorek, M. (1981), Glimpses from the Stairwell. Life Story, manuscript. Mariusz Tchorek Archives. Warsaw: Foundation Tchorek-​Bentall. Tchorek, M. (1995), ‘A body on the stretcher, or the (In)Tangible Given of Unism’, in Władysław Strzemiński 1893-​1952. Materials of the Conference. Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 52–​62. Tchorek, M. (2010), ‘Place of birth, birth of place’, The Journal of Architecture, 15(1), 20–​29. Urzykowski, T. (2009), ‘Grób, którego nie było w ewidencji’, wyborcza.pl 13.10.2009 (accessed 23 August 2017). Zaborowska, M. (2004), ‘Three passages through (in)visible Warsaw’, in S. Forrester, M. Zaborowska and E. Gapova (eds.), Over the Wall/​After the Fall: Post-​Communist Cultures through an East-​West Gaze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 97–​119.

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7  Wall terrains Architecture, body culture and parkour Emma Nilsson

I am on my way from the central station in Lund, Sweden.1 Walking right next to me is one of the 17 traceurs2 who have gathered this Saturday morning. It is summer and this year’s parkour jam in Lund/​Malmö has just begun. First stop is a parking deck next to a housing block constructed in the late 1980s. The sky is grey, and when the traceurs start warming up with some passé murailles,3 a soft rain begins to wet run-​ups and landing points. Drizzle such as this doesn’t cause severe problems with concrete surfaces. But other materials  –​such as metal sheets –​become slippery and therefore dangerous to jump on. The weather does not only make it wet, but also cold. Bodies have to be kept warm; luckily, the well-​known Bollhuset sport centre is nearby. Here is a possibility to maintain vigour by training indoors on gymnastic mats and benches. Parkour can, at least in its original sense, be sorted under a larger group of activities labeled spontaneous sports (Neuman 2008:  22), since it lacks regular training hours, trainers or premises. Arriving at Bollhuset the traceurs wait for an opportunity. Soon a class is finished and they negotiate with prior bookers on using the hall until the next session. The traceurs appear to be well known and their promise to have everything in order is taken for granted. Mats are laid out, benches placed on the floor and they start practising long jumps and somersaults. Many of the traceurs are skilled and able to overcome significant lengths and heights, maintaining precision. When time is out the rain outside has passed. The difference between my own and the traceurs’ bodily abilities is obvious, but it is on our way to Bollhuset that the consequences in relation to urban materiality become notable. We approach from the eastern side and the first thing we encounter is the grass field of the sports ground. It is enclosed by a high mesh wire fence and the traceurs easily leap over. I  cannot possibly mount it and I am forced to take detour. My plan is to follow the traceurs for the whole day and I am starting to worry. Is this just one of many barriers I will confront and not be able to overcome? Will I manage to get to all spots they are going to train at? It hits me hard: the terrain shared by the traceurs is definitely not one of mine. To talk about this experience as an encounter with a terrain (Steinbock 1995) is to describe a certain familiarity established between a human, her

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Wall terrains 145

Figure 7.1 Lisses, France. Source: photograph by Emma Nilsson.

activities and the milieu where this activity takes place. Terrain is also an analytical tool that can be used in order to get a deeper understanding of the relationships that are produced between the materiality of architecture and a bodily appropriation of it (Nilsson 2010). Architectural objects –​like walls or wire fences –​are material figures powerful enough to discriminate by sheer size and materiality. They act, sometimes on behalf of someone’s delegated will, such as in the will to fence a grass field. Other times their action is less predictable, working as challenging obstacles on part of the traceurs’ course. Most of us have experienced climbing or running on walls, sneaking through holes in fences or crawling through hedges. For some this transgression of boundaries is innocent and playful, for others it is more crucial in terms of escape or survival. Depending on the reasons and previous experience of wall-​crossing we approach walls with different tactics and strategies on how to make them work for us. Thus, the effect of a wall as barrier or gateway cannot only be understood as depending on the materiality of the wall and acquired bodily skills; urban bodily experience must also be understood as something linked to a shared understanding on how to deal with urban materialities. When walls  –​like mesh wire fences  –​are linked to different bodies and body cultures –​such as the researcher’s or the traceur’s –​we need to acknowledge their role in an affinity of traceurs, holding a common understanding on how to move, where to move and, the reasons for moving. To categorize

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146  Emma Nilsson walls as ‘obstacles’ is then to recognize that walls are part of a configuration of materialities making it possible for the traceur to articulate (rather than hinder) a certain kind of movement. Looking from the point of view of the traceur this implies that walls are not necessarily a category as such, but objects defined by what they offer in terms of movement. In the same way that we cannot understand what constitutes a body without asking the question “what can a body do?” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1988]) we thus need to ask the same about walls. Building on an understanding of walls and bodies as specific articulations (Haraway 1991, 2003, 2008; Latour 2004, 2005), I  will use the traceur and the development of parkour as my main example to develop a multiple and relational perspective on walls and bodies by describing how they are part of articulating and stabilizing different terrains. But in order to understand how terrains are articulated and made stable we must first take a deeper look at the traceur and how this body emerged as a possibility in the early 1990s.

Body articulations Traceurs often claim that the guiding principle of parkour is the flight: to get from one point to another using the least energy. You often find this explanation when reading the discourse of parkour, but as a precise model for explanation it proves quite misleading. Parkour is rarely that energy-​efficient. Surely corners are being cut jumping over stairs, rails and walls, but more often the movements are characterized by a phrasing akin to a disciplined choreography. The fact that parkour might be a training mode, as well as a way of moving through the city, means that many of the movements are reiterated by training at special spots: “locations rich in obstacles” (Jump London 2003). As much as parkour is about overcoming obstacles it is also about incorporating these in a consistent movement. How to engage with architecture with one’s body always carries the possibility of many different expressions, but how such an encounter is articulated is not arbitrary. Nothing, as we know, comes out of nothing, and the fact that the traceurs made their first saute de brasses in Lisses, a suburb of Paris, is linked to a specific urban setting. Some traceurs say that parkour always existed, like an inherent potential in the human body, and that parkour is something that David Belle and Sebastian Foucan extracted and gave a name and a philosophical orientation to. Belle and Foucan are generally mentioned as the founders, and to claim parkour as something universal, as Foucan does in the movie Jump London [2003], is to both balance his own part in history and give parkour greater weight. But rather than an autochthonous body knowledge, parkour and the traceur’s technique is a repertoire of movements developed over a long time as one of many possible answers to specific times and places. The traceurs’ basic movements are a translation of Georges Hébert’s (1875–​1957) méthode naturelle, which in turn is a translation of the body

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Wall terrains 147 techniques Hébert learned from the African indigenous people he came into contact with as an officer in the French Navy (Hébert 1942). Méthode naturelle is built up around movements designed to develop strength, agility and stability in a versatile way. The exercises preferably take place by training on the equipment part of military obstacle courses. The French words for these are parcours des combattants, thereby the name parkour. David Belle’s father was stationed in Vietnam before moving to Lisses. During his time in the army he had excelled in the obstacle course and later transferred these abilities to his son and his friends (Atkinson 2009: 170 ff.). The military obstacle course is a conventionalized simulation of the barriers that a soldier might encounter in war. Here we find one of the fundamental differences between méthode naturelle and parkour: the latter has freed itself from a tailored course in order to take on the walls of the living city. Lisses was the place for a shift: from a body shaped by the military obstacle course to the tracer’s articulation of French suburbia. In the transformation from hunter and gatherer to soldier, it becomes possible to trace the interactions between body materiality, body technique and urban materiality. And, in order to understand what it is that constitutes a ‘traceur’, it seems inevitable to not take the precursors and the entities that shaped them into account. This is not to say that the traceur is a passive result of a historical course of action. Rather it is a body that has taken shape by acting and being affected by other bodies (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1987]; see also Buchanan 1997). It is this sensitivity to being moved that is emphasized when Latour asks how to talk about the body: [T]‌o have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-​humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead. (Latour 2004: 205) The art of being affected coincides, according to Latour, with the ability to articulate, or to “take on board the artificial and material components allowing one to progressively have a body” (Latour 2004: 210). As an example of how the body is shaped under the influence of artificial and material components, Latour takes the training of people who use their noses in the perfume industry, a learning process that among other things employs the so-​ called mallettes à odeurs. These are series of scents put together to let the nose encounter the sharper ones first and then gradually learn to distinguish between more complex compositions. The bodies that go under this training are transformed from an unarticulated relationship to the scents of the palette into a ‘nose’ with a very precise ability to ‘read’ fragrances. Latour’s concept of body is embedded in Actor-​Network Theory (ANT), where objects  –​such as bodies  –​are understood as assemblages of a wide range of materialities both human and non-​human in character (Latour 1986; 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). From the example of the perfume-​nose follow

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148  Emma Nilsson at least two important principles. The first implies that in describing an object like a body it is not a question of defining it as such, but rather of tracing and listing all those elements that enable and maintain a certain kind of bodily effect. The body-​as-​a-​nose would not exist if it wasn’t for “the teacher, the kit and the session”, and so they are all part of a specific network of actants “allowing one to progressively have a body”. The second principle regards the multiplicity of bodies that are performed during the training. For Latour every significant shift in the ability to distinguish between fragrances represents a shift in body, since bodies are only considered stable (the same) objects as long as their ability to behave does not differ (cf. Law 2002). An individual can therefore harbour and be part of many different body articulations that take different shapes both over time and in different spaces. With the example of nose training Latour dissolves the boundaries of the body and includes the palette of scents, its molecular composition, the laboratory, the teacher and the spaces where the learning process takes place. But, and this is an important objection when dealing with bodies shaped by architecture, in Latour’s example the body is primarily treated as the result of a finished course of action. Latour travels along the realization of a programme (Latour 1991): to train articulated noses in a perfume industry. This is a biographical and cumulative perspective which makes sense if, for instance, we want to understand the making of noses in the perfume industry  –​or the making of parkour bodies. If we instead place ourselves from the point of view of the traceur, such a description tends to treat her more as an effect of all the other actants than an active dynamic actant among others. In order to make Latour’s concept of the body useful within architecture, we would have to complement the body as a result of network biographies with the body as part of network situations, since the influence of architecture on the traceur differs depending on which of these networks, or assemblages, that are taken into account. The traceur is an articulation of temporal, spatial and material conditions that today can be recognized as parkour, but whose lines of association can be traced back to the situation of Parisian suburb in early 1990s. Parkour can be seen as an assemblage of heterogeneous objects, such as the French colonial system, the éducation physique, martial arts, Bruce Lee, children’s play, superheroes, fictional movies such as The Matrix [1999], deck-​accessed dwelling blocks with exterior stairways and a commercial like Nike Presto’s Angry Chicken [2002]. At the same time, the traceur articulates a whole different set of temporal, spatial and material conditions when she is performing a series of jumps and turns on a specific configuration of walls. Some of the objects listed in the biographical account would reappear in the situational, but others will also be added. The bodily abilities of the traceur consist of a capacity to generate energy and a precision in run-​up and landing points in order to maintain balance and a continuous movement. These are no doubt qualities that coincide with many other activities that require advanced body techniques. What differentiates

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Wall terrains 149 the traceur from most of us is not only an ability to use the mere body as a tool to move in an energy-​effective and clean way, but to articulate a material scenario which does not consist of designed objects standardized in relation to their purpose in parkour. The traceur builds her articulation on a number of basic movements, different ways of carrying the body over, under, or in between the obstacles that an environment can present. There are several variables that determine how movements are formed and performed. The different vaults and the possible combinations of them is one, the environment is another. A third variable comprises the traceur’s specific body. All bodies differ in agility, strength, but above all size. Therefore, even learning strategies built on imitation are informed by an adjustment of the movement to the specific body of the traceur. Imitation is never only mimetic.4 Different bodies give a variation in movement combinations and in how they relate to the environment. Signe Højbjerre Larsen, who has both written about and practised parkour, describes this relationship and how it discriminates the traceur from for example the gymnast who must adapt the body to standardized movements (Højbjerre Larsen 2008: 70 f.). Gymnastics lack the kind of tentative testing of a movement in relation to a material scenario that is present in parkour. Consequently the body of the gymnast is to a higher degree left behind at the training centre, unlike the traceur who always carry it with her as a continuous directed attention and anticipation (ibid.: 40). A similar interrelation is described by Dave Sedgley in the movie Parkour –​ The Nature of Challenge (Maunders 2009), and how he has abandoned other forms of training, since his abilities in these sports did not make him feel capable in general life. The reason parkour is able to satisfy him on that score has partly to do with the mental training that follows the courage to master obstacles one previously did not think were possible. But also because the technical skills of the body are applicable in an everyday environment, and are carried with him as a constantly practicable possibility. He shares a common understanding within parkour: every challenge is individual and one should not compare oneself with other traceurs. This goes not only for how different traceurs manage the same architectonic obstacles, but also for the kind of materialities they choose to challenge themselves. Observing traceurs performing parkour, it becomes important to acknowledge that many bodies are present simultaneously and that their articulation is both biographical and situated. This highlights the dependency on spatial and temporal relations in order for different bodies to be put into motion.5 A  performative perspective releases the body from a fixed position, but in order to seriously consider the polymorphic character of the body, without losing it to a pluralistic view (Law 2004: 61 ff.), we must tie it to the processes, artefacts and techniques that are present in the making of different bodies (Mol 2002). This also implies taking into account the hybrid nature of human beings and their non-​exclusive status in relation to other entities, the porous boundary between humans, non-​humans and technology and the influence fiction has in creating alternative bodies (Haraway 1991, 2003, 2008).

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150  Emma Nilsson Since the body is a situation where events superimpose and interlace, it becomes a spatial location in which these processes have a certain duration and stability. This makes it important to consider which materialities should be included in the category of the body. The same individual can articulate a wide range of body techniques and body materialities, and is thereby not fixed in a position that has to hold forever. Some experiences can be carried out and activated in new ways as part of a new body articulation, but which ones these are and how they are transplanted depend on the techniques and materialities that come with a certain body. For instance, my sister-​in-​law, who transports herself by wheelchair after an accident in her twenties, found that after incorporating the wheelchair into the materiality of her body she more easily switches over to the body of the driver. This has to do with the technique of reversing being such a fundamental one in how both the wheelchaired-​body and the car-​body are articulated. When treating the body as an articulation of many different configurations dependent on and affected by a wide range of materialities, times and spaces, it also becomes easier to see how all articulated bodies, no matter how personal or individual, are part of a broader affinity of body culture.6 Thus, the polymorphic body emphasizes that one and the same individual bears traces of many different body cultures and accommodates many different bodies. It is from this multiple and relational body perspective that urban materialities such as walls must be examined, and it is from such an understanding of the body I will outline the concept of terrain.

Terrain is a kind of familiarity In a general understanding, terrain is associated with a raw or naturally shaped ground. It is often used to describe something which is not arranged and difficult to pass, for example in connection with certain vehicles, such as four-​wheel-​drive cars, or in opposition to an arranged track, such as in terrain running. The English word stems from the French, which has a somewhat broader spectrum of denotations and, according to Solà-​Morales (1995: 119), it carries an urban quality not present in English.7 Here terrain is given a more specific definition, building on to an operationalization made by the philosopher Anthony J. Steinbock (1995).8 Following Steinbock, terrain signifies a milieu that is typical for a specific action, group or species. Terrain is something familiar and accustomed: “the milieu we especially count on” (Steinbock 1995:  163). And this familiarity is, according to Steinbock, a kind of attention acquired by a recurring use (ibid.:  162). In the narrowest sense of the concept, terrain is used in order to describe the specific milieu of a certain species. But, the concept is not limited to a discussion on the relations between the two entities human body/​ environment. Terrain should rather be understood as something shaped by a specific activity, lifestyle or function making it possible for a hunter to share the same terrain as a hunting dog, but not necessarily so with a hiker walking the same landscape (ibid.:  164). This relationality opens up a possibility to

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Wall terrains 151 gather materialities that doesn’t follow a categorization departing from a certain kind of place or landscape type. It also makes it possible to take on board the political-​legal constitution of terrains and to a greater extent deal with the territorial (Brighenti 2010a, 2010b, 2014; Kärrholm 2004, 2007, 2008) implications of certain body cultures being able to activate and articulate their terrains. Terrain is something that arises in relation to a specific activity. Just as body can be understood as a figuration articulating a specific set of materialities and skills related to a specific activity, terrain describes the encounter between a body and a milieu. Terrains are incorporated, we carry them as a bodily memory that can be activated (not applied!) under other circumstances than those where it once arose. In the same way as an individual can harbour many bodies it can also incorporate many different terrains. A terrain can be abandoned in favour of another when a certain body is renegotiated, and certain bodies can die if a terrain is erased. Though this chapter mostly uses the concept terrain to describe the relations between materialities in body articulations and the milieu they are activated by, it is important to emphasize that terrains can be activated and articulated by a broad spectrum of objects not necessarily falling within the borders of either the individual body or the boundaries of a particular place. Terrain is thus something more than the potential qualities latent in a material surrounding. Architectural objects such as walls are part of the production of different terrains, but this should not be interpreted as terrain being the same as architecture. However, architecture does have a part –​among others –​in terrain production. The relations between body (as articulation) and a milieu are shaped under different circumstances and with different conditions. Sometimes it is a question of an utmost personal and individual terrain being articulated, revealing itself in the encounter between one individual and her environment. Other times it is an activation that takes place as part of a larger affinity of body culture with a specific, even though continuously negotiated, understanding of what it means to do this activity. When a terrain is subject to a production shared by a larger affinity, it becomes more clearly identifiable in relation to the codes and rules of this affinity.

Tracing a terrain biography Located approximately 35 km south of Paris, Lisses forms its own municipality but is part of a lager administrative entity [communauté d’agglomération] together with, among others, Evry and Courcouronnes. The easiest way to get to Lisses is by train to the station at the administrative centre. The station is located between the municipalities alongside a commercial centre and housing areas from the mid-​1970s. Since, 1991 the area offers higher education, the Université d’Evry-​Val d’Essonne, as well as a cathedral designed by Mario Botta and erected in 1995. The university is vocationally oriented, focusing on the local economic and social situation. Apart from this, the

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152  Emma Nilsson area is characterized by concrete architecture from the 1970s, newer hotel complexes, a large supermarket and newly built housing blocks. The agglomeration is divided by a six-​lane highway, the A6, and this has to be crossed in order to get to the northern parts of Lisses and the area where David Belle and Sebastian Foucan grew up. My field assistant Björn Nilsson and I  move on foot and after a while we reach a recreational area with a small lake.9 By the lake is the climbing sculpture La Dame du Lac, designed by Pierre Szekely (1975). On this 17-​metre-​high curved concrete wall the first traceurs learned to manage ever more daring distances and more advanced combination of movements. We walk. From the station of Evry Courcouronnes, over the highway to La Parc du Lac, further south passing some sport fields and a small skate park, through the alley between Ecole F. Mistral Elémentaire and Gymnase du Long Rayage with its emergency stairs, ending at the small neighbourhood centre and the white-​painted family houses with exterior stairways (Figures 7.2–​7.4). Our path is in a way a trip backwards in parkour terrain biography. It feels somewhat like a pilgrimage. Because in part I look for, and in part they reveal themselves, all the places presented over the world in parkour forums by photo documentations made by traceurs on trips to Lisses. All of them are gathered in an area small enough to be grasped almost immediately. The school is closed for autumn vacation, but the café at the corner is open. It is located close to the small concrete bollards Foucan so elegantly walks on in the movie Jump London [2003] in order to show where he and his childhood friends started their bodily transformation into traceurs. The architectural characteristics of the housing area in north Lisses are typical of late 1970s multifamily housing in France, and several attributes are also common to housing areas built in the rest of Europe at the same time. There is a small commercial centre where traffic is separated by small shifts in ground levels, low walls and strategically placed bollards. The primary school close by is housed in a low building where classrooms are arranged as one-​ storey pavilions creating out-​door places in between. The housing next to the commercial centre has galleries and external stairs leading to the courtyards created in between the three-​to four-​storey buildings. The courtyards are paved and lifted a little higher above the ground, creating a base around the buildings accessed by a couple of steps. If I place myself close to the school’s wall and jump I can almost reach the joint between the cobble aggregate of the wall and the smooth concrete surface of the roof slab. The same surface occurs on the lampposts. The concrete of the dwellings is not as rough, but neither is it smooth in the way concrete gets when cast in steel or wooden moulds. Rather, it resembles the texture of rough casting. It is foremost by a bodily appropriation that the traceurs articulate their terrain, and the connection between appropriation, proximity and time is particularly evident in the early history of parkour. This was the traceurs’ home environment, where they spent much time climbing, jumping or just

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Figure 7.2 La Dame du Lac in Lisses, France. Source: photograph by Emma Nilsson.

hanging around as children in general do. They played tag, but rules and escape routes became more daring. The playing field expanded and with that creativity. Ninjas and superheroes were the leitmotivs (Christie 2003). Over time movements became more advanced and by the age of 15, they conquered the school building, the gymnasium, the emergency stairs and the interstitial spaces created by them. Meanwhile Belle’s father introduced the teenagers to the training methods of Hébert, méthode naturelle (Atkinson 2009; Jump London 2003). The basic movements and their execution could later be associated and articulated in a common milieu. When new terrains arise it is foremost by association and appropriation.10 One of the reasons for this is that association and appropriation are connected to pure play (Huizinga 1955; se also Nilsson 2010). If appropriation signifies the playful testing of a new milieu, then association captures the ability of play to establish new connections and relations. Here the rule-​making of play and playground is open for negotiation and the material scenario not pre-​ encoded. In the strategic and tactical production play is harder to identify. It has been institutionalized. Rules and playgrounds are fixed. Initially, in Lisses there must have been a great tolerance of the movements of teenagers. Today, there are small signs banning climbing mounted everywhere. When the mayor of Lisses is interviewed in Jump London, he explains his position. He could agree on letting the youngsters practise their

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Figure 7.3 Emergency stairs, Gymnase du Long Rayage in Lisses, France. Source: photograph by Emma Nilsson.

acrobatics, but then it should be “under safe circumstances, with proper equipment and mattresses, not on school roofs under school hours, or on nursing homes frightening the elder” (Jump London 2003: 8′00″). Aside from the prohibition as such and the inability to comprehend that Lisses’s global reputation is linked to its part in the genesis of parkour, the statement and signs also reveal something about processes of recognition and legitimization of urban life. As much in the mayor’s explanation as in the text on the signs, parkour is equated to climbing and jumping in general. Traceurs are (at least at the time of the interview in Jump London) not recognized as bodies with a set of specific

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Figure 7.4 Courtyard and external stairs in Lisses, France. Source: photograph by Emma Nilsson.

bodily skills, moving with a particular flow. This can be compared to billboards with a crossed skateboard or stylized body moving on a skateboard, placed in public places. Sure, these highlight the conflict arising when skaters do not keep within their proper place (such as designated skate parks), but they have nevertheless regained a status as their own distinct activity where the sign for skating is an icon recognizable for both skaters and non-​skaters. Skating is in general a more widespread body culture and this is the result of a stronger institutionalization of its performance. But similar processes are traceable within parkour as well. Over time parkour has gained a more fixed form and established itself outside Lisses.

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Terrain formation and imagery The expansion of parkour from Lisses has happened thanks to moving images. There is Luc Besson’s movie Yamakasi –​Les samouraïs des temps modernes [2001], but also an advertisement such as Nike Presto’s Angry Chicken [2002] and the documentary Jump London (Christie 2003). Parkour, which was developed under influence of the global web of the Internet, does not have any major magazines, as for instance skating had (Borden 2001). Their role has been replaced by web forums, video-​sharing websites like YouTube, advertising movies, documentaries, music videos, computer games and commercial teams. That which evolved as one movement has branched and taken a couple of related shapes such as free running, urban freeflow and urban tricking. Parkour is no longer one object, but many (Mol 2002; Law and Mol 2002). This interesting imagery tells about the double connotations of performance which parkour embodies as being simultaneously about execution and presentation. It also tells how important imagery is for the articulation of bodies, their configuration and a common understanding of what a certain place can offer. The video sequences and photographing connect traceurs to a parkour affinity that in several ways is present during the sessions. These traceurs may not be there in the flesh, still they work both as accompanying participants and audience. The recordings serve several purposes:  to show other traceurs the possible combinations that a specific spot allows for, but also to convey a style of one’s own and record a capacity later evaluated and commented on on the web sites where videos are published. Here the trips many traceurs do to Lisses play a significant part. By going to Lisses, traceurs from all over the world appropriate those architectural configurations that gave birth to parkour as a specific movement activity. Through imitation of previous traceurs’ movement combinations at exactly the same places, history is literarily linked through one’s body. Since many traceurs have visited Lisses, the images they document themselves with become a kind of teaching material, describing what can be done, and what has been done. But for some, like the parkour group Team JiYo, it is also about a tactical production, when contributing with their own kind of movements at spots known by “all” other traceurs. This is, for example, evident when they film a series of backflippings at La Dame du Lac and incorporate the parkour sculpture into the motives of free running (Højbjerre Larsen 2008:  49).11 Many other urban body cultures use images in this way, thereby making also those outside of parkour, skating, buildering, etc., familiar with the kind of architecture they are dependent on. Skaters are, for instance, often used in architectural renderings of urban places in the making, in an ambition to show diversity, thus reproducing an image of skaters as an “alternative youth culture”. In the strategic and tactical terrain production that follows an accumulated body cultural history, new material scenarios are established. The suburban materialities of Lisses are certainly generic enough to be identified at

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Wall terrains 157 other places, in other countries. But when parkour is transferred to Lund, Copenhagen or London, a whole range of new materialities are involved. The same processes involving these new environments also produce new ways of articulating them. There are, for example, the shows or championships some practitioners take part in. Yet another material scenario is the emergence of specific parkour parks, environments tailored to fit the training requirements of traceurs. Having outlined the concept terrain and terrain production, I will now turn to architecture and describe its roles in articulating terrains.

Terrain topologies and walls Differences in urban materiality are significant for the articulation of different terrains. In order to talk about the role of architecture in the activation and formation of terrains, it is important to first understand that architecture can be seen as carrying several different spatialities or topologies (Law 2002). How architecture works, what part it plays in terrain production is then dependent on which topology it is linked to. For instance, the climbing sculpture La Dame du Lac takes on different roles depending on whether it is understood as a network, fluid or metric (Euclidian) object (Law 2002; De Laet and Mol 2000; Law and Mol 2002). As a network object, the sculpture is an architectural configuration maintaining a body cultural affinity. It is part of a strategic terrain production, which also mobilizes video sequences, other traceurs, web sites for sharing videos and trips to Lisses. When an individual traceur or a group of traceurs take on the curved concrete slab with its projecting ledges, folded slabs and bulbs, La Dame du Lac also acts as a fluid and metric object. A terrain object is fluid if it allows for many different constellations of actors, and if these different constellations in different situations are associated with the same kind of object. The traceur has an accumulated skill that enables her to associate the climbing sculpture and its parts with other, partly identical, configurations, and these associations might allow her to recognize and climb it even on the first attempt. If La Dame du Lac is regarded as a metric object, this emphazises how the traceur is faced with a specific challenge of overcoming the precise geometry and materials of La Dame du Lac, which in turn relates to the individual traceur’s body and its technical skills. To accomplish a combination of movements on La Dame du Lace is to appropriate one of parkour’s more charged places, and it can at the same time also be seen as part of a tactical terrain production. By acknowledging the fluidity of architecture, simultaneously counting its specific material and metric qualities as equally valid mediators, it is possible to describe architectures’ concrete effects without tying architecture to reductionist typologies. But in order to continue this work the topological rules of fluid and metric objects must be translated into an architectural parlance: sort and material figure (Kärrholm 2004, 2007, 2008). Sort describes architectural kinships relating these to action contexts without falling into a categorization

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158  Emma Nilsson supposing an underlying structure or archetype. Material figure12 highlights that (architectural) objects are stable metric figures with specific material qualities. Certainly, the first could not exist without the second:  an object always has an extension (a figure), and an extension always has a materiality (texture, density, etc.). But with the term material figure a possible slide in meaning is emphasized, showing that sometimes it is the qualities of materials rather than their precise extension that is effective, and at other times it is precisely their extension that is crucial for an event. Walls can be understood in terms of sorts and material figures, and a good way to explore the relations between sort and material figure is to look to buildering and the specific climbing culture that arose at Cambridge University at the beginning of the last century. In his book The Night Climbers of Cambridge (2007 [1937]) Whipplesnaith tells us that it is the small measurements that are crucial in order to reach high and the richly ornamented neo-​gothic architecture of Cambridge almost seems tailored for the nightclimbers’ striving upward (Nilsson 2010: 185 ff.). The terrain of nightclimbers is shaped by two main sorts, external drainpipes and that which in climbing tongue is called a chimney, “a fissure between two walls in which the climber has his back against one wall and his feet against the other” (ibid.: 29). Other architectonic sorts nightclimbers depend on are eaves, cornices, window nooks and facade decorations –​ledges to rest on and brace from. As sort the pipes are reliable since they are easy to recognize and can offer long hauls up facades. As material figure they are less dependable. To those who are unfamiliar with drain-​pipes, it might seem that one is as good as another. To the climber each pipe has its own individuality. It may be loose, or tightly clamped to the wall. It may touch the wall, or stand half an inch out so there is finger-​room behind. It may be as thin as a man’s wrist or as thick as his thigh; the former is better for handgrip, the latter for knee-​grip. The surface of the wall may be smooth, or it may be rough, offering a certain amount of friction-​hold for the feet. Sometimes the pipe is bound at intervals with iron, sometimes not. It may go past window-​ledges which serve as resting places every fifteen feet, or it may be fixed to the bare wall. Sometimes it is in a corner, or better still, a foot or two away from a corner. It may be near a street light, or in a place where only the moon and the stars reveal the man who is climbing. It may go right to the top, or it may end a few feet short of the roof. (Whipplesnaith 2007: 23 f.) Sort, which is effective when a terrain is articulated even though actors, relations and material aspects differ somewhat, is foremost produced by association and relies to a high degree on a bodily memory. A  terrain is active as long as a certain sort can be associated with a certain body. The sort “external drainpipes” can be associated with others since the hand or the

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Wall terrains 159 knee recognizes other drainpipes. Earlier climbing has accumulated a knowledge and the climber knows what to do with her body when encountering a certain sort. The material figure is also linked to a body memory but tells of a more specific relation between body technique and materiality. The sort external drainpipe gives access to the terrain of facade climbing, but it is its qualities as material figure that determine whether it is actually useful. It is in the encounter with a certain body that the significance of sort as material figure reveals itself. In Copenhagen a specific place is popular among traceurs since the diameter of rails makes them easy to grip (personal communication, Højbjerre Larsen). This relation between sorts and material figures also works in the opposite direction when planners and architects design in order to exclude certain bodies. Skaters are more commonly the target of these actions (Borden 2001; Von Scheuring 2007) but this is also the case when unwanted public sitting or sleeping is hampered by sloping surfaces and dividing gaps or armrests. Although the manipulation is done within the material figuration of the sort, it is the identification of the sort that gives access to a certain body and a body cultural affinity. The repertoire of sorts that are part of a skating, sitting or sleeping terrain is identifiable also for those not part of theses different affinities. But the identification assumes a body recognized outside of that specific body cultural affinity. The fence nowadays surrounding the climbing sculpture La Dame du Lac represents just another moment in the traceurs’ articulation and not the restrictive effect it is meant to create. And the text on the sign is not enough to talk to the traceur, who is not out climbing in general. For her the climbing sculpture is accessible not only physically but also as a meaningful situation in the context of a specific body culture. Making a body culture visible assumes a strategic terrain production. Such a strategic production is for example made effective when the sorts and material figures a terrain is dependent on are built. Skate parks have contributed in making the skater’s body commonly recognizable, and it is possible to regard the emerging parkour parks as part of a similar strategic terrain production.

Exploring the topologies of parkour During my field trip in Lisses, I finally understood why parkour was invented here. This is not surprising after all, since it was the interaction with the architecture of the housing estates that activated and articulated the terrain of parkour, in turn making Lisses the point of departure for the traceurs’ production taking place at other locations. But, rather that being a way of expressing a circular argument, my recognition echoes that even I, by watching countless parkour videos and following the traceurs in Lund, can identify and associate parkour with a number of architectural sorts. The same recognition is also confirmed by other practising traceurs for whom such an association is accumulated as a bodily memory and ability (Højbjerre Larsen 2008:  46). This indicates the strategic terrain production accompanying a body cultural

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160  Emma Nilsson affinity, but also the capacity of moving images to produce and make terrains visible, even for those who do not master the body technical repertoire. Maybe the lack of collective and commonly accessible imagery can explain why nightclimbing never spread from Cambridge to, for example, Oxford. The architecture of the housing estates in Lisses allows for a succession in appropriation. The bollards, the steps, the low school building, the galleries and the solid railings of the exterior stairs all have jump-​friendly measurements possible to overcome and grow into, in order to finally conquer the most advanced situation of parkour environments:  the climbing sculpture La Dame du Lac. In Lisses, the traceur’s appropriation was gradual and an experience shared by a smaller group. Other outsiders could also easily identify and associate such a bodily appropriation with a group of youths known to them. Today when parkour has become a global object there is a higher degree of technical skill that needs to be captured by an inexperienced beginner. This requires a whole lot of courage from the individual traceur in order to test, fail and improve in the eye of the public. With an established discipline, the need to train in environments that are both mentally and materially permissive becomes important, and thus the emergence of places designed for the purpose of parkour. The parkour park in Copenhagen was ready in August 2009, and is located in Ørestaden, by the metro station Vestamager. The park is part of PlugNPlay, a 25,000 m2 big investment in outdoor activities made by Copenhagen’s municipality on grounds that are to be built with houses in the future. Thus the park is temporary. Maybe the economic crisis will prolong its lifespan, maybe its popularity can serve as an argument for letting it stay, interspersed between the planned buildings. The park is free and open for all. Copenhagen municipality considered the parkour park to be risky, but the anxiety proved groundless. The parkour part in the activity area is the most frequently used and it is very popular among children and youngsters aged 10–​12 years. At weekends it is full of people. More experienced traceurs also use it, but mostly on weekdays and evenings. The park was designed by the members of Team JiYo in collaboration with the architect Eik Bjerregaard and Jesper Kondrup. They started from the basic movements of parkour and from the building elements that could articulate these in rich combinations. More than an ability to drill the same movement over and over again they strived for a variation in heights and distances to support movements where body energy  –​flow  –​could travel in long sequences. Many of the elements in the park are modelled on other parkour spots (personal communication, Højbjerre Larsen). For instance, the concrete stair is designed after a famous stair by the shore of the Thames Festival Pier in London. The different heights of the steps make it possible to exercise vaults according to body size and experience. Three longitudinal walls supporting two ramps reference the place beside Botta’s Cathedral in Evry Courcouronnes. The walls do not run totally parallel, but converge,

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Wall terrains 161 giving an accelerating effect when bouncing from wall to wall. In the park these relations are further reinforced. The tilted wall in the park is not a common architectural sort, and here it is purposely built for training and beginners. The gradient pulls the body centre of mass closer to the wall and makes it easier to keep balance when running up the wall making vaults. Next to it is a vertical wall which traceurs can advance to when they master the technique. The motif of the tilted wall comes from the area around Kulturhuset Islands Brygge, but in the park it leans slightly more. Islands Brygge is one of Copenhagen’s more popular parkour spots. With the parkour park, yet another important place can be added to the community of traceurs. Sand gives a damping ground, making falls less painful for the body. The park has several kinds of ground material that are softer than the ones usually encountered in the city. Except for the sand there is also grass and rubber asphalt. In one part of the park there are three small walls of different heights. The measurements are decided on by the shortest and tallest members in the group, and the heights in between. For some reason the ground level at this place became lower than planned, resulting in the walls rising 40 cm higher than intended. They can therefore not be used exactly for what they were intended (personal communication, Højbjerre Larsen). An unintentional uncertainty has found its way. There is a crucial difference between the park and parkour’s more generic urban environments. In the park certain movements are exercised, whereas the city is the place for discovering and investigating new possibilities. The park is to a higher degree technique-​oriented, while the less custom-​made environments make the traceurs more focused on the architecture and what to do with it (personal communication, Højbjerre Larsen). This can be compared to one traceur in Lund who wanted to go to Sparta (a student housing complex in Lund) “because he had stuff he needed to do there”. Sparta can be regarded as a particularly rich spot that one gets to know well, and that can be used as a training locale to exercise certain movements. For Team JiYo the park ensures a training studio, but this does not exclude the configurations urban materiality has to offer. However, the attitude is more playful towards these more ambiguous materialities. The fact that the park is a refinement of urban environment is also evident in the materials used, almost exclusively smooth concrete and steel. In the movie Parkour  –​The Nature of Challenge (Maunders 2009) one of the traceurs demonstrates a challenge he has given himself: a stair with a landing that ends at a wall of concrete elements whose horizontal joints make room for a space of some centimetres in depth. The traceur in question started his exercise by jumping from the lowest step in order to land on the wall, holding himself put by the small space given to the fingers by the joint. Gradually he had increased the leap and was now able to do it from the top step of the staircase. The sort of materialities articulated by the traceur in the movie are

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162  Emma Nilsson not offered in the parkour park, but in the other urban environment they are still accessible.

Walls and body cultures The body of the traceur was shaped  –​among other things  –​by something that can be described as a modernistic suburban materiality. That this is an architecture that does not solely signify a geographical location becomes evident when following in the footsteps of traceurs. While many of the popular parkour sports are not located in peripheral areas, they do contain the same material and spatial configurations characteristic of suburban housing environments. The link between the articulation of a specific body and a certain architectural style is not straightforward, though. The industrial area of St. Lars in Lund (Figure 7.5) is in its architectural expression far from the Sparta student housing complex designed by Bengt Edman (Figure  7.6). But the industrial area features a rationality and a successive adding of building elements that in some parts give a similar variation in heights and distances. Both environments are useful for the traceur. If the nightclimbers of Cambridge are dependent on the articulation of small dimensions, then the kind of environments traceurs brace against are characterized by building elements creating a sequence that varies in heights and distances. This is an architecture moulded so that every function is given its own spatial and material articulation. Through my training as an architect I  could say that the kinds of environment looked for by traceurs are characterized by an architecture that is section driven, while the nightclimbers of Cambridge seek an architecture that is facade driven. This is an architectural difference between the two terrains, which is also emphasized by nightclimbers moving outside buildings and traceurs moving through them. The nightclimbing body articulates the facade and the body of the traceur articulates the section. To label the architecture traceurs are dependent on as section-​driven is not the same as attributing to them the vision of architects and their professional gaze at the built environment. But the section captures spatial relations crucial for the activation and formation of parkour terrain where walls rarely act as singular objects but as part in configurations of horizontal and vertical surfaces. Verticals surfaces like walls are not important as such; their meaning is derived in relation to other vertical and horizontal surfaces offering the body a possible continuous movement. This means that, in parkour, terrain the wall as a sort dissolves. As a material figure, though, it is still effective as part of other sorts: concrete slabs preventing cars from driving off raised parking decks and ramps making them accessible, a walking path wedged between such a parking deck and a brick wall enclosing the storage of a supermarket; steps, landings and railings directing and supporting vertical movement to a two-​storey building with a flat

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Wall terrains 163 walkable roof; wooden pergolas segregating between resting and running in schoolyards, bollards and inner corners; mesh wire fences separating grass fields from bicycle lanes. What is striking about parkour is that the architecture traceurs are drawn to promote a strong territorialization, but the trajectory of the traceurs’ movement often plots a neglecting of this territorialization. Traceurs strive on the territorialization of other terrains and the topography created by them. In doing so, the traceurs not only become traceurs in their own terrain formation, they also inform us that however strong the history of urban walls is as objects segregating and sustaining different territorial claims, we can never

Figure 7.5 St. Lars industrial area in Lund, Sweden. Source: photograph and photo montage by Emma Nilsson.

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Figure 7.6 Sparta student housing complex in Lund, Sweden. Source: photograph by Emma Nilsson.

take the category “wall” for granted. If, in order to describe the relationality of the body, we have to connect it to the artefacts and the techniques present in the production of a specific body, then this also holds true for architecture and urban walls. Just as people are part of an infinite number of heterogeneous assemblages, architecture is not something self-​referential. Walls might be concrete objects, but the way this concreteness is played out in a given situation is an effect related not only to individually incorporated skills but also to shared understandings determining whether a walls acts like a fence, something to be crossed or as part of a configuration of a different kind: an obstacle in an urban parcours des combattants.

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Notes 1 This chapter builds upon material produced as part of my thesis; Nilsson 2010, Arkitekturens kroppslighet. Staden som terräng, Lund. The findings accounted for here build chiefly upon observations made during three different field studies: (1) a summer jam in Lund in July 2009 where I followed participants at seven different places; (2) a study on Plug n Play in Copenhagen, one of the world’s first and largest parkour parks, visiting it both on my own and together with Signe Højbjerre Larsen, a member of the performance group Team JiYo, a group that also took part in designing the park; (3) a one-​day field trip in October 2009 to Lisses, France (the place where parkour was born), complementing observations made by studying videos of parkour performed in Lisses and published on the community website parkour-​videos.com. 2 A traceur is someone engaged in parkour, developed in the Parisian suburbs. Traceur is French for ‘tracer’ or ‘free runner’ –​another common name for persons doing parkour or ‘free running’. 3 Passe muraille is one of several basic movements that traceurs execute separately or combined with others like saute de brasse/​cat leap, turn vault, lazy vault, underbar, saute de chat/​monkey vault, speed vault and reverse vault. The terminology varies somewhat between different countries and affinities, and all names used in this text are collected from the Swedish parkour forum www.le-​parkour.se. 4 In some movement techniques the relation between teacher and student is built upon a mimetic imitation to such a degree that it is readable what teacher a practitioner might have had. In for instance capoeira the specific characteristics of the maestro’s way of moving are so distinct and so thoroughly inscribed in his disciples that you even can distinguish at what time during the master’s life they have studied under him (Downey 2005: 42). But most often a learning process where skills are incorporated into a repertoire of one’s own is an interplay between imitation and improvization, perhaps most evident in music education (Schön 1987: 175–​216). 5 A similar distinction between the difference of spatial and temporal dependencies related to a biographical or situated ‘body’ have been discussed by Gill Valentine in the article ‘Theorising and researching intersectionality: A challenge for feminist geography’ (2007) and by Kärrholm et al. in ‘Interseriality and different sorts of walking: Suggestions for a relational approach to urban walking’ (2017). It is also being developed within disability studies (Gleeson 1998l Imrie and Hall 2001) and its queer cousin crip theory (Kafer 2013). 6 Even the most fundamental body techniques are part of a body culture: a bodily skill like resting has at least three different techniques that differ from culture to culture and manifests itself in sitting, squatting (Mauss 1973 [1935]) or standing on one leg (Lindblom 1949). Every body culture carries a common set of behaviour and prevalent perceptions upholding each body technique. Such a fundamental skill as walking comes with cultural differences and cannot be seen simply as a sign of human “nature”. This doesn’t only apply to ways of walking and preferred footwear, but also to preconceptions on for example the impact of walking on cognition in child development (Ingold 2004). All these techniques are accompanied by different material scenarios and depend on different architectonic situations. This shows that competences we all have also tell about a cultural interrelation to the body, and architecture supports this in several different ways.

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166  Emma Nilsson 7 The concept terrain outlined here is not equivalent to what Solà-​Morales describes by the term terrain vague (Solà-​Morales 1995). For him terrain is foremost an aesthetic category, but the ambiguity of urban landscape highlighted by it is targeted by the conceptualization of terrain presented here. 8 For Steinbock, terrain is part of an overall ambition to generate a transcendental phenomenological philosophy which is better at dealing with contemporary issues related to (cultural) identities and (social) differences (Steinbock 1995: 1–​11). My use of Steinbock is selective and does not scrutinize his view of phenomenology, but I  find that the meanings he puts into terrain are substantial enough to be treated as something in itself and adoptable into a different theoretical context. A similar ambition to transform phenomenology from within worth mentioning here is Sara Ahmed’s (2006) Queer Phenomenology and her writings on how orientation in the lived world is never a neutral act of perception but something guided by preferences and previous experiences. 9 See footnote 1. 10 Appropriation, strategy and tactics falls back on several of those concepts that have had great influence on the architectural research-​related discourse that deals with use and everyday life (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; de Certeau 1984; Rapoport 1990, 1994; Korosec-​Serfaty 1973). My own description of terrain articulation is primarily based on the grouping that Mattias Kärrholm does regarding territorial production (2004: 81–​97, 2007, 2012). In addition to appropriation, strategy and tactics, Kärrholm adds association, a concept which is more linked to the workings of memory than the three others. 11 The transportation of parkour to other places and the branching of parkour into free running, urban free flow and urban tricking is to some traceurs not a desirable development. When parkour, for instance, is related to free running, traceurs often claim that there are crucial differences on how to use one’s technical skills and which material scenarios to master. In these discussions, parkour is often considered (by traceurs) to be more about practice, whereas free running is more about performance (Nilsson 2010:165 ff.). 12 In Kärrholm’s terminology Law’s Euclidian topology is translated into body, but the significance of body is also captured by the expression material figure (Kärrholm 2004: 205 f.). In my own writings ‘body’ would cloud my discussion on human bodies. The term material figure also more clearly shows a possible double meaning of the concept; objects are both metric (Euclidian) and have specific material qualities. In terrain production –​which describes a bodily encounter with places –​this double meaning appears as more crucial for the possibility for a terrain to be activated at a certain place, than in the production and stabilization of different territorial claims.

References Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Atkinson, M. (2009), ‘Parkour, anarcho-​environmentalism, and poiesis’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33(2), 169–​194. Borden, I. (2001), Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body. London: Berg Publishers.

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Wall terrains 167 Buchanan, I. (1997), ‘The problem of the body in Deleuze and Guattari, or, what can a body do’, Body & Society, 3(3), 73–​91. Brighenti, A.M. (2010a), ‘On territoriology. Towards a general science of territory. in theory’, Culture & Society, 27(1), 52–​72. Brighenti, A.M. (2010b), ‘At the wall. Graffiti writers, urban territoriality, and the public domain’, Space & Culture, 13(3), 315–​332. Brighenti, A.M. (2014), ‘Mobilizing territories, territorializing mobilities’, Sociologica, 1/​2014. Certeau, M.  de. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:  University of California Press. Christie, M. (2003), Jump London. London: Optomen Television. De Laet, M., and Mol, A. (2000), ‘The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology’, Social Studies of Science, 30(2), 225–​263. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2004) [1987], A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Downey, G. (2005), Learning Capoeira. Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-​Brazilian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleeson, B. (1998), Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge. Haraway, D.J. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Haraway, D.J. (2003), The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D.J. (2008), When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hebért, G. (1942), L’éducation physique virile et morale par la méthode naturelle. Paris: Vuibert Librairie. Huizinga, J. (1955), Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-​Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press Højbjerre Larsen, S. (2008), ‘Parkour:  en fænomenologisk analyse af en ny bevægelsesaktivitet’, Specialeopgave. Institut: Idraet pt. Odense. Imrie, R., and Hall, P. (2001), Designing and Developing Accessible Environments. London: Spoon Press. Ingold, T. (2004), ‘Culture on the ground. The world perceived through the feet’, Journal of Material Culture, 9(3), 315–​340. Jump London (2003), Documentary by Mike Christie, Optomen Television. Kafer, A. (2013), Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Korosec-​Serfaty, P. (1973), ‘The case of newly constructed zones: Freedom, constraint and the appropriation of spaces’, in R. Küller (ed.), Architectural Psychology. Proceedings of the Lund Conference, Lund. Kärrholm, M. (2004), Arkitekturens territorialitet, till en diskussion om makt och gestaltning i stadens offentliga rum. Dissertation, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University. Kärrholm, M. (2007), ‘The materiality of territorial production’. Space and Culture, 10(4), 437–​453. Kärrholm, M. (2008), ‘The territorialisation of a pedestrian precinct in Malmö. Materialities in the commercialisation of public space’. Urban Studies, 45(9), 1903–​1924. Kärrholm, M. (2012), Retailising Space: Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space. Farnham: Ashgate. Kärrholm, M., Johansson, M., Lindelöw, D., and Ferreira, I. (2017), ‘Interseriality and different sorts of walking:  Suggestions for a relational approach to urban walking’, Mobilities, 12(1), 20–​35.

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168  Emma Nilsson Latour, B. (1986), ‘The powers of association’ in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?, London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. Latour, B. (1991), ‘Technology is society made durable’, in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters. Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body & Society, 10(2–​3), 205–​229. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2002), ‘Objects and spaces’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(5–​6), 91–​105. Law, J. (2004), After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law, J., and Hassard, J. (eds.) (1999), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Law, J., and Mol, A. (eds.) (2002), Complexities. Social Studies of Knowledge Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991) [1974], The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lindblom, G. (1949), The One-​Leg Resting Position (nilotenstellung), in Africa and Elsewhere. Stockholm: Statens Etnografiska Museum, Smärre meddelanden, 22. Maunders, P. (2009), Parkour –​the Nature of Challenge. www.northernparkour.com/​ viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4027 (accessed 1 April 2009). Mauss, M. 1973 [1935], ‘Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–​88. Mol, A. (2002), The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nilsson, E. (2010), Arkitekturens kroppslighet. Staden som terräng. Dissertation, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University. Neuman, A. (2008), ‘Organiserad spontanidrott’, Transition, 3/​2008. Rapoport, A. (1990) [1982], The Meaning of The Built Environment, A  Nonverbal Communication Approach. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rapoport, A. (1994), ‘Spatial organization and the built environment’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: Routledge. von Scheuring, D. (2007), in B. Wüllenweber and A. Basile, Old School & New School. Two Views of Skateboard Photography. Berlin: Bildschöne Bücher. Schön, D. (1987), Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-​Bass. Solà-​Morales Rubió de, I. (1995), ‘Terrain vague’, in C.C. Davidson (ed.), Anyplace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Steinbock, A.J. (1995), Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Valentine, G. (2007), ‘Theorising and researching intersectionality:  A challenge for feminist geography’. Professional Geographer, 59, 10–​21. Whipplesnaith (2007) [1937], The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Cambridge: Oleander Press.

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8  Gating housing in Sweden Walling in the privileged, walling out the public from public places Karin Grundström

Introduction Walls and fences cut through and divide cities. In Paris, a fence is going up around the Eiffel Tower. In New York, the artist Ai Weiwei is building more than one hundred fences, walls and installations throughout the city, as a commentary on increasing enclavism in our societies. This chapter focuses on the walls that surround Swedish housing: walls that reference the gated community and, to many, in the words of Robert Frost, ‘give offence’ by ‘walling in’ and ‘walling out’. A substantial amount of research shows that walled-​ in housing, or gated communities, negatively impact socio-​ spatial relations among neighbourhoods and between neighbourhoods and society (Atkinson 2006; Polanska 2010). Additionally, gated communities are considered to reflect and reinforce hierarchies of racialization, wealth and power (Atkinson and Blandy 2006; Marcuse 1997). Gated enclaves may also reinforce existing segregation trends through the privatization of public space, the privatization of services and the displacement of crime, resulting in a ‘fortress city’ (Low 2003; Davis 1990), founded on the fear of crime and a perceived need for increased security (Breetzke et al. 2013; Blakely and Snyder 1999). It should be noted that Swedish cities do not have the equivalent of gated communities, in the sense of isolated islands of ‘incarceration’ (Atkinson 2006) or of a ‘fortress city’. One reason is that housing has been central to the development of the Swedish welfare state. Over a period of more than forty years, housing was constructed for the Swedish people and by the early 1970s the national housing programme had achieved decent housing conditions for the entire population of Sweden as well as a high housing standard (Boverket 2014; Grundström and Molina 2016). A second reason is that Swedish cities have a history of protecting public access to urban land. The Swedish Planning and Building Act (Plan-​och bygglagen 2010) designates all urban land not developed or planned for construction, including streets, parks, pathways and spaces in between, as publicly accessible land (allmän platsmark). As a result, access and right-​of-​way through cities have been central to urban life. Taking shortcuts across city blocks, through passages and parks and opening doors and entering courtyards have been the normal way of moving through cities.

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170  Karin Grundström Gates, walls and fences that restrict mobility have been almost non-​existent. However, during the past two decades Swedish cities have seen an increase in walls, locks, fences and gates around housing. Gating began with the introduction of locks and codes in the 1990s, a practice that was extended in the 2000s through the construction of fences and walls around housing, leading after 2009 to the design and construction of new, exclusive residential hotel housing in all three Swedish metropolitan regions (Grundström 2017a; Rodenstedt 2015). To date, the practices of gating are severely under-​studied in the Swedish context. Yet, investigating the walls around housing  –​codes, locks, fences, rails, gates and walls  –​is important considering the demonstrated detrimental effects of gating on socio-​spatial relations. In this chapter, I investigate the relation between walls and segregation through an analysis of the practices of walling in and walling out, using examples of walled-​in, or gated, housing in Malmö. The reference point in the analysis is the US gated community, both because of the origins of the gated community in the US and because of the references made to the US gated community in Swedish debate, research and media. Although I agree that there are similarities, particularly in how housing alludes to affluence and distinction, there are also significant differences. I argue that gating does exist in Sweden, but in contrast to the gated community –​in the sense of a coherent housing enclave –​gating takes shape on two different levels, as urban gating and, for the privileged, as residential hotels. First, this chapter shows that gating transforms and builds on existing urban form and housing form and secondly, it shows that mobility has become an asset available through exclusive housing for some, while being a restricted asset for the general public. Third, the urban walls that surround gated housing are crucial material devices in the process of restricting and supporting mobility and, finally, this particular form of urban walls makes visible the ongoing residential segregation in the Swedish cityscape.

Practices of gating housing The scholarship on housing surrounded by walls, gated communities and enclavism is considerable. One tendency is for scholars to primarily investigate either the perspective of walling in or walling out: to stand, so to speak, either inside or outside the walls. Scholars who have researched walling in –​ that is, phenomena of relevance primarily to those choosing to live behind the walls –​have concluded that gating can have positive consequences, including increased property values, the production of club goods for residents and possible ‘spill-​over effects’ of wealth from gated to non-​gated communities (Glaze 2004; Manzi and Smith-​Bowers 2004). Scholars who have researched walling out –​the consequences for society or those living outside the walls –​ have mainly concluded that gating and gated communities are chiefly supportive of ‘self-​imposed disaffiliation, spatial and social withdrawal of the affluent’ (Atkinson 2006), which negatively impacts socio-​spatial relations.

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Gating housing in Sweden 171 Furthermore, gated communities have been shown to reflect and reinforce hierarchies of racialization, wealth and power, the displacement of crime, the privatization of services and the implementation of security technologies (Atkinson and Blandy 2006; Blakely and Snyder 1999; Breetzke et  al. 2013; Low 2003; Marcuse 1997). A second tendency is that the concept of the ‘gated community’, defined in the Anglo-​American linguistic and cultural context, has been implemented in varying urban contexts across the globe. Researchers have thus explored the variations of gated communities and have identified examples of the architecture and physical features of the walls and gates (Grant and Mittlestedt 2004) as well as the social features of the community. One example is the development of typologies defining the process of enclavism in Britain, based on levels of material protection in relation to the socio-​economic position of the community (Atkinson 2006; Atkinson and Flint 2007). Other examples include research on variation in design that looks at how forms of enclosure vary with the cultural and social conditions of the community. In China, communities are ‘walled without gates’ (Yip 2013); in Canada, a low fence and a gate suffice to materially distinguish the boundaries of the community (Grant 2006); and in Barbados the design of gated communities is related to the economic status of the community, referencing the architectural design of hotel complexes (Clement and Grant 2012). But even if research on the ‘gated community’ has taken account of various national and cultural contexts (Cséfalvay and Webster 2012) the Anglo-​American concept still poses challenges when used in the analysis of housing in differing urban contexts around the world. Specifically, importing the Anglo-​American concept may influence ideas about and understanding of housing and way-​of-​life norms that are materialized in housing (Yip 2013). In the Swedish case, there are linguistic and legal differences, as well as differences in urban form, which argue against a direct import of the concept. First, the concept of community does not exist in the Swedish language; instead society (samhälle) is the concept that defines the Swedish sense of togetherness (Trägårdh 2012). Second, in Sweden, planning laws and regulations limit possibilities to construct private neighbourhoods, private streets or private parks to which public access is prohibited (Plan-​och Bygglagen 2010). Finally, as described in this chapter, the tradition of city building and car dependency differs considerably between Sweden and the US, and these are factors which greatly influence the urban form and how people travel and move through cities. Instead of importing the Anglo-​American concept and adapting it to the Swedish context, this chapter takes a different theoretical starting point to understand enclavism and gating:  namely, the dialectic practice of gating, more precisely the practice of walling in and walling out. In general, the logic of capitalism is based on the clustering of valuable social and spatial assets (Bourdieu 1995, 1999; Harvey 2008). In times when housing has become an investment and an expression of distinction, the walls constructed and

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172  Karin Grundström the new forms of exclusive housing surrounded by walls tell a story of ‘how to be housed’. More specifically, they tell us how hierarchies are expressed and practised (Lefebvre 2007), how privileged groups concentrate valuables in their daily lives and of who and what is kept at a distance. According to Bourdieu, hierarchical societies express hierarchies and social distancing through space. These hierarchies are ‘naturalized’ through historical processes and thereby obscured. But social space is always expressed in physical space as a distribution of services and goods, and of individuals or groups with varying abilities to acquire these goods and services. High and low positions in social and physical space tend to overlap, thus forming a basis for hierarchies, as both the most and the least exclusive goods and services are concentrated in specific locations. In privileged districts the concentration of exclusivity leads to multiplying spatial effects of privilege and wealth, while in deprived districts, negative spatial effects, or territorial stigmatization, occur (Bourdieu 1995, 1999; Wacquant 2007). The segregation trends that are shaped by spatial effects express hierarchies, which are upheld by concentrating privilege while simultaneously keeping unwanted groups at a distance (Castro and Lindblad 1998). In addition to physical and social space, the hierarchies currently emerging are also influenced by the information age, shaping a world in which we ‘carry flows and move between places’ (Castells 2004), a world in which mobility has become a stratifying factor (Bauman 2000) and an avenue for distinction. This relates to the paradoxes and tensions inherent in housing surrounded by walls (Lang and Danielsen 2010): the walls do not have a one-​sided effect, but consequences through both walling in and walling out. It additionally suggests the importance of including housing and housing choices made by privileged groups, since the concentration of affluence and assets to specific locations also has consequences for other parts of the city. This does not suggest that segregation is a zero-​sum game but that the choices and preferences of affluent groups can influence and often restrict access to assets for less privileged and vulnerable groups. Identifying spatial effects aids an analysis of how housing surrounded by walls exemplifies the continual formation and expression of hierarchies. Methodologically, this study draws on a wide variety of sources and previous studies. A  review of the (very limited) existing research on gated housing in Sweden was carried out in 2015 along with a survey of media coverage on the exclusive forms of ‘concept’ housing that emerged in the Swedish housing market in the 2010s. Based on the media survey, a review was carried out, also in 2015, of websites, advertisements and marketing materials produced by developers and property agents for exclusive ‘concept’ housing. The empirical material, in the form of a case study and a morphological study, was collected in the city of Malmö. Malmö was chosen based on information-​rich selection, as Malmö is the city most in focus for research on gated housing in Sweden. A case study of Victoria Park in Malmö was carried out in 2011 and 2012. Victoria Park was chosen as a

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Gating housing in Sweden 173 case based on information-​oriented selection, representing an extreme case (Flyvbjerg 2006), as it was the first and largest housing complex in Sweden built explicitly to incorporate ideas drawn from gated communities in the US. Methods included participant observations, semi-​structured interviews with eight residents and a focus group interview with seven residents (Bryman 2008; Kvale 1997) addressing their everyday life in the housing complex and the reasons behind their choice of housing. In addition, a walk-​through (de Laval 1997) included discussions of residents’ use of various amenities and their perception of the aesthetics of the interior decorations and the architectural design. Methods also included joining guided tours and walks for visitors and potential residents, mingling over coffee, visiting apartments by invitation, and speaking to residents, housing association board members, receptionists and staff employed at Victoria Park. The morphological (Scheer 2010; Moudon 1997) study was carried out in 2017, based on a section through the city. The choice of section was based on a previous study investigating a pathway leading between the vulnerable eastern part of Malmö and the wealthier Western Harbour (Listerborn and Grundström 2014). Along this pathway, socio-​economic conditions as well as urban form vary, from newly constructed housing to modernist housing to the medieval urban core, thus representing the variety of multi-​storey housing in Malmö. Along the section characteristic typologies were identified based on the relationship between urban form and the design of walls and gates. The choice of multi-​storey housing was made because 77 per cent of housing in Malmö belongs to this category, and it is also the most common form of housing in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Finally, I  have explored gating through both images and texts, through abductive reasoning and imaging (Cross 2011) by which I  have been able to explore, identify and define the phenomenon of gating in the Swedish urban context. Drawing and writing have been parallel practices of equal relevance and importance to the investigation of walling in and walling out. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section identifies how the gated community has transformed into the Swedish form of gating, which I refer to as urban gating. I argue that urban gating adapts and continues to build on the existing urban form and that gating has paralleled social and geographical polarization in the Swedish cityscape. The walls surrounding housing have led to a restriction of mobility and restriction of access to places previously accessible to the public. The second section identifies gating at the level of the housing unit. I  make the argument that a new space of disaffiliation, or dwelling on-​the-​move, has emerged:  a space accessible only to mobile, privileged groups, housed in residential hotels. The chapter concludes that housing has become an entry point for the concentration of assets of value to privileged groups, in a way previously unknown in Swedish housing. The slow normalization of gating leads to practices of walling in privileged groups while walling out the general public from places previously accessible for all.

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From gated community to urban gating As the idea of walled-​in housing has travelled from the US to Sweden, its material expression has changed in relation to urban form, from the ‘gated community’ to what I  refer to as urban gating; a series of gated blocks dispersed through the cityscape (Grundström 2017a). Although urban gating and the gated community have different shapes and urban layouts, they both create materially reinforced enclaves, and thus ‘give offence’ by making residential segregation visible in the cityscape. There is a crucial difference in the historical development of urban form between European and US cities, which influences how ‘enclaves of housing surrounded by walls’ have taken shape. The origin of the gated community was the luxurious settlements of wealthy US elites, who withdrew to mansions in park-​like landscapes to escape noisy and polluted cities. One of the first examples was Tuxedo Park, built outside New  York in 1885. The gated community began as an elite form of housing, and it remained so until the 1970s, when a drastic increase in the number of gated communities took place as middle-​class, leisure and retirement homes were built in the Sun Belt (Blakely and Snyder 1999). A second increase in the number of gated communities occurred in the 1980s, but at this juncture gated developments were also built in response to fear (Low 2003). Central to the urban form of the gated community is the ‘loop and lollipop’ settlement pattern of post-​WWII US urbanism. This layout ensures individual car access to each house and creates buffer zones between and around each housing area. Furthermore, such a housing area has one main entrance to the next level of the street system, which facilitates control of access. Although gated communities with grid systems do exist, the gated community was primarily founded on a cul-​de-​ sac street system, with one guarded entrance combined with walls or fences surrounding the ‘community’ (see Figure 8.1). As the notions inherent in the gated community have travelled the world, their walls have morphed and adapted to existing urban forms. One city where the ideas of the gated community have taken root is Malmö, Sweden’s third-​largest city. Malmö was founded in the Middle Ages and grew into a city by the fifteenth century. It expanded slowly over the centuries, until the turn of the last century, when it doubled in size. At the time when the first gated community outside New York was constructed, Malmö was planning and building multi-​storey housing blocks in grid systems. A  second phase of major expansion started with the implementation of the Folkhem programme, which was the welfare-​state housing programme developed by the Social Democratic party in the 1930s. The Folkhem programme eliminated a national housing shortage, and by the early 1970s it had achieved decent housing conditions for the entire population of Sweden as well as a high housing standard (Boverket 2014; Grundström and Molina 2016). In Malmö, the largest expansion occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden as

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Gating housing in Sweden 175

Figure 8.1  C  onceptual map of the gated community, showing the loop and lollipop urbanism prevalent in gated communities, and key dates of gated housing development in the US. Source: Karin Grundström, U.S. Gating, 2017. Ink on paper, 32 × 32 cm.

a whole built nearly one million housing units, this time in a contrasting urban form, with freestanding buildings in open landscapes (Tykesson 2003). The Folkhem programme was followed by a period of de-​and reregulation of housing policy, the privatization of the housing market and, since the mid-​1980s, an increased social polarization in the three Swedish metropolitan regions of Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm. Between 1986 and 2001, polarization developed, on the one hand, through super-​gentrification in already wealthy areas and, on the other, through low-​income filtering of vulnerable urban districts (Hedin et al. 2012; Salonen 2012). In parallel, housing construction decreased dramatically, from nearly 100,000 units per year in

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176  Karin Grundström 1974 to 20,000 units in 2015. The small number of units actually constructed was geared towards the middle or upper middle classes and profiled as offering specialized ‘styles’, ‘interests’ or ‘concepts’ (Boverket 2011, 2014; Grundström and Molina 2016). The de-​and reregulation of housing policy and the privatization of the housing market was paralleled by the adoption of key codes and locks. In Malmö, the implementation of codes and locks in inner-​city housing began in the early 1990s, but it was not until 2001 that an urban renewal project, in the 1870s district, added locks, gates and fences to the premises. The Lugnet housing development (constructed in 1979) was one of the first Swedish examples of an entirely gated housing block. Both the process of acquiring building permits and the final construction of walls and gates in 2001 drew criticism and prompted one of the first debates on gating. One study identified the restricted use of public spaces as a negative consequence of gates, rails and fences (Nyström 2000) and another study discussed gating as a threat to social cohesion (Öresjö 2000). Although gated communities had been increasing rapidly in the US for two decades, the continued construction of walls, fences and gates in Swedish cities was at the time deemed ‘unlikely’ (ibid.). Media and public criticism notwithstanding, the construction of fences and gates continued, and the 2000s saw the construction of housing for the middle and upper middle classes that was designed with walls or to be easily gatable with small additions. Finally, as housing inequality rose to new heights in the 2010s, with exclusive housing for privileged groups on the one hand and a housing shortage on the other (CRUSH 2016), exclusive residential hotels began to be built: a form of housing that, in the Swedish context, must be considered a strong expression of gating due to the locks, gates, reception and surveillance systems that guard their premises (see Figure 8.2). In sum, as gating takes root in Malmö, it does not break completely with the existing urban morphology, but adapts and continues to build on what already exists. The notion of enclavism inherent in the idea of the gated community has thus morphed into a new form. The implementation of urban walls, in the form of fences, rails, gates, digital surveillance technologies and brick walls, has paralleled the residential segregation trends that have transformed Swedish metropolitan regions since the 1990s. Overall, the correlation between polarization and gated housing is clear. As social polarization increases, so does the construction of walls around housing. Walling out the public: gating as restriction of mobility The walls that surround housing today are not only a visible manifestation of polarization but also a physical obstacle restricting access to places previously accessible to the public. A consequence of these urban walls is that they both restrict mobility through the city and restrict access to a morphologically varied urbanism.

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Figure 8.2 Morphological analysis of Malmö based on a section through the entire city from west (upper left) to east (lower right). Buildings are presented at the same scale and dated based on time of original urban development. The map dated 1870 shows the addition of modern, gated housing to the traditional ‘stone town’ urbanism. Source: Karin Grundström, Malmö Morphology, 2017. Ink on paper, 32 × 32 cm.

Gated housing exists across the city of Malmö, in both wealthy and vulnerable neighbourhoods, and in neighbourhoods with varying urban form. In all of its manifestations, nonetheless, gating walls out the public from previously accessible places. But although the practice of walling out is general, the specific form that gating takes –​how walls and fences are built –​varies in relation to urban form. Based on the historical-​morphological analysis (Scheer 2010) sketched out in Figure 8.2, three main multi-​storey housing typologies can be identified: the traditional ‘stone town’, which was built until the 1930s; functionalism, predominant between the 1930s and 1980s; and finally the dense

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178  Karin Grundström urban block built since the 1980s. These different housing forms employ different kinds of walls. In the traditional blocks of the inner city, codes and locks efficiently restrict access to courtyards and passages that are planned and legally defined as public. This may, from an international perspective, seem normal; yet, it should be noted that prior to the 1990s all courtyards and passages were open for public access, ensuring that anyone could cross through blocks, take shortcuts and discover and appropriate the city at his or her own pace and according to his or her own interest (Lefebvre 2007). The addition of locks and codes to the traditional stone town is not entirely obvious to the eye; nevertheless, it severely reduces the complexity of publicly accessible urbanism from courtyards, passages, doorways and streets to streets only. In urban districts built during the functionalist era, Corbusier-​inspired, free-​standing buildings were constructed in park-​like environments. In this urban context, fences and gates are clearly visible and severely alter movement patterns, as they surround places originally planned and landscaped as parks and greens accessible to all. This kind of gated housing severely reduces accessibility, but in a visually different way compared to the previous example. Here, the entire green or landscaped milieu is visible through the fence but not accessible. The consequence is that a substantial amount of common land is gated off from public use and public access is reduced to streets only. Finally, in exclusive urban districts designed and built during the past two decades, the shape of buildings often includes walls, fences and gates. One example is the flagship dockland harbour development known as the Western Harbour, whose design drew on characteristics of the medieval city. Most of its buildings were initially designed with partial walls, but since its inauguration in 2001 smaller additions have been built to gate the housing blocks. In this case, the initial design was not entirely enclosed, but it supported the easy restriction of access. Another example is the residential hotel Victoria Park, which is walled by a combination of low fences, gates and camera surveillance and is located next to a nature preserve, which ensures both privacy and easy control of access (Grundström 2017a). Both of these housing developments are examples of how current design includes material ways of restricting public access. As shown in the map in Figure  8.3, one result of gating in Malmö is a significant change of morphology: the original, varied and complex morphology is reduced from three main typologies to one typology only –​the one composed of the street system and a gated urban block. One may argue that the urban form as such does not change, which is true. Even so, although the morphology may remain complex, the addition of fences, locks and gates renders it inaccessible to the urbanite. Another result of gating is that a considerable amount of land that was publicly accessible before the 1990s is gated off from public use. The consequence is a practice of ‘walling out the public’ since access is restricted, or denied, to greens, courtyards, passages and in-​ between spaces and thereby the use-​value of public urban land is reduced (Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 2007). The fact that urban walls are walling out the

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Figure 8.3 Three typologies of gated housing were identified along a section between east and west in Malmö. The three typologies –​dense modern (top), traditional stone town (middle) and functionalism (bottom) –​are presented at the same scale and in original form (left) and after gating (right). In the centre the year of gating for each typology is indicated. Source: Karin Grundström, Urban Gating in Malmö, 2017. Ink on paper, 32 × 32 cm.

public may seem evident. The paradox in the Swedish case is, however, that the walls are walling out the public from public places. Urban gating The walls around housing in Swedish cities are not a copy of the gated community but take a different form: that of urban gating (Grundström 2017a). Urban gating is a dispersed form of gating. It takes shape around the housing unit or housing complex and includes privatized amenities. As shown in

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Figure 8.4 Conceptual map of urban gating, showing the grid-​based street pattern and gating within urban blocks in the Swedish morphological-​historical context of 2017. Source: Karin Grundström, Swedish Gating, 2017. Ink on paper, 32 × 32 cm.

Figure 8.4, the walls are constructed around one or several multi-​storey housing units along the borders of the property. The result is a series of gated units dispersed in a pattern across the entire city. One might argue that the US loop-​and-​lollipop urbanism of free-​standing housing units and the European urbanism formed by multi-​storey housing are contrasting urban forms and therefore not comparable. But even though they have different shapes and urban layouts, they both lead to the materialization of boundaries –​resulting in the material reinforcement of housing enclaves. The continuous gating off of smaller parcels of land throughout cities is a form of gating that is inserted fraudulently in the urban landscape. It is less visible and less tangible than an entire gated community, surrounded by walls,

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Gating housing in Sweden 181 policed and guarded by security staff, but its consequences remain similar to those of the gated community in that it represents a materialization of social and geographical polarization (Bourdieu 1999; Castro and Lindblad 1998). One expression is how the shape and design of gating varies with socio-​economic conditions through the city of Malmö, as represented in the map in Figure 8.3. In the territorially stigmatized districts (Wacquant 2007) from the functionalist era, metal rails and barbed wire restrict access to privately owned housing. In contrast, in the wealthier western district housing is initially designed to be gated, and thus has a more architecturally appealing expression. In sum, urban gating is a series of gated blocks dispersed through the cityscape and it thus differs from the US neighbourhood enclave. As the gated community has transformed into urban gating, the walls surrounding housing have become visual devices of polarization. These walls ‘give offence’ by making residential segregation visible in the cityscape, by restricting access to a morphologically varied urbanism and by restricting mobility through the city.

From gated community to residential hotel Gated housing in the Swedish urban context can be understood on the urban scale, as urban gating, but also on the scale of the individual housing complex, since it is around individual housing complexes or housing blocks that gating evolves. Although gated housing exists across socio-​economically different neighbourhoods, the housing forms that have generated the most media attention and debate are the most exclusive forms of new, gated housing: what I refer to as residential hotels (Grundström 2017a). The Swedish residential hotels reference the notion of the gated community in that they allude to ideas of affluence and privilege in a privatized housing form, similar to the ‘lifestyle community’ (Blakely and Snyder 1999), and are ‘walled or fenced housing developments, to which public access is restricted’ (Atkinson and Blandy 2006). In spite of these similarities, a residential hotel also differs from a gated community in its urban form and location and its focus on health and travel for the middle-​class, modern, mobile Swede. The residential hotels offer a new space of disaffiliation for privileged groups by concentrating services and amenities within residences and by supporting mobility, both within the housing complex itself and internationally. One of the first examples of a residential hotel was Victoria Park, inaugurated in 2009, a project that spurred debate about whether or not gated communities actually existed in Sweden and whether such forms of housing should be built at all (Kållberg and Sandquist 2008; Sveriges Television 2009). Just as urban gating is built on existing forms, so is the residential hotel. The residential hotel takes up the architectural idea of combining shared facilities and apartments, a common feature in for example co-​housing and retirement homes, but adds the architecture of hotel housing and the provision of private services in an atmosphere of leisure, wealth and travel. Residential hotels

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182  Karin Grundström are marketed to buyers of all ages and households of all sizes, to ‘anyone’ who ‘enjoys a good life’, and avoiding any association with the market for the various kinds of ‘retirement home’. In total numbers, the most exclusive residential hotels comprise only around one to two per cent of total housing: two to three hundred units per year of the 20,000 units constructed yearly. Although few in number, nonetheless, the residential hotels have a significant impact, as they also influence the design of middle-​class housing, which is built and marketed as providing a ‘good life’ in a gated environment with amenities reserved for residents only. Swedish property agents and developers, citing high customer demand, expect to see an increase in this form of housing (Eklund 2014). Walling in the privileged: gating in support of mobility One might think that the construction of urban walls around housing would lead to an overall decrease in mobility. But even as the urban walls of gated housing restrict mobility for the public, walls also promote and support increased mobility, although only for the select group of residents living in exclusive residential hotels. The design of residential hotels, including privatized lounges, cinemas, health facilities and restaurants, supports mobility and socializing between residents, both within the housing complex and internationally. A key element in support of mobility of the residential hotel concept is the way it references hotel architecture and the hotel as a luxurious environment (Avermaete 2013). It gives residents access to new kinds of physical spaces  –​a reception, a lounge, a fitness centre  –​in which to represent and reproduce their lifestyle while surrounded by services, protected by security and located in places with easy access to high-​speed physical and digital infrastructure (Grundström 2017a). Together, these spaces, services and amenities provide an environment that supports not only mobility within the housing complex but also international travel to places far beyond its walls. One of the residents, a man in his sixties who enjoys the sociability and international atmosphere of Victoria Parks, notes: another thing that I have noticed is that many of the people who live here, they travel extremely frequently … and also … they have a second home some place else …. Central to the international, hotel atmosphere is the inclusion of distinctive architectural elements, such as a reception. Receptions are significant as markers of distinction; they represent luxury and travel and are of central importance to the lifestyle marketed by residential hotels. Through the reception, residents are offered services and ‘a hotel feeling’ (Veidekke Bostad 2014) meant to ‘facilitate daily life and contribute to a golden experience’ (Svea Fanfar 2015). Services range from in-​ house services,

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Gating housing in Sweden 183 such as dog-​walking and housekeeping, to security and communication services when residents travel or stay abroad. A  second distinctive feature of residential hotels is a lounge. Victoria Park was the first housing complex to have a lounge for residents, but others have followed. In the lounge, residents can ‘relax, read newspapers and magazines and chat with neighbours. Here you will always find activities and relaxation from dawn until dusk’ (Veidekke Bostad 2013). In Victoria Park, the lounge is a node in the housing complex; residents pass it on their way to work or when going from their apartment to the restaurant, billiard room, cinema or spa. It is also the place where coffee is served every day and a place to read newspapers, chat with neighbours and be entertained. A  third distinctive feature is the inclusion of fitness and wellness amenities. Residential hotels such as Victoria Park, Svea Fanfar, Sädesärlan, TureNo8 and Karlavägen 78 all include various swimming, spa and gym facilities, healthy food, yoga and beauty or wellness treatments to support the lifestyle of their residents. Along with the pools and spas come interior decorations reminiscent of exotic locales. In addition, some residential hotels also include a restaurant, a cinema, a wine cellar and a private sailing boat or tennis court. These spaces offer stages for performing wellness and affluence in an international atmosphere of travel and leisure and constitute the lifestyle marketed by the housing company. One of the residents, a woman in her late thirties, who works internationally explains what the lifestyle of Victoria Park means to her To me, this lifestyle means having an indoor pool available all the time, having the outdoor pool in summer, and having a cinema where I  can watch movies, I love the movies … you know, this feeling of service … if there’s anything I need, I can just ask for it … and I can leave my key there [the reception] I’m not always at home when things need to be done in my apartment. This lifestyle is guarded by the wall of the residential hotel, composed of several materials and practices, which together form the outer boundary of the housing complex. The material gating comprises outer walls, rails, gates, locks and the reception. In addition, there is the digital infrastructure of codes, key cards and camera surveillance, which, along with the residents and the hired staff –​including service staff, hosts, receptionists, concierges and patrolling guards –​maintains the practice of keeping out unwanted groups and the city beyond the wall. In sum, the consequence is a walling in of privileged groups. Residential hotels concentrate assets valuable to the privileged, modern Swede and thereby add a dimension of stratification through housing (Bourdieu 1999; Castro and Lindblad 1998). They combine apartments with hotel architecture, they are serviced by hired staff and they are located in already privileged urban districts. Additionally, an international atmosphere is supported, in which

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Figure 8.5 The residential hotel supports a liquid daily life in which place and time are at times dependent and at times not, based on the preferred choice of the resident. Source: Karin Grundström, The residential hotel, 2017. Ink on paper, 32 × 32 cm.

national and international travel is facilitated by hired staff and seamless access to high-​speed transportation and digital infrastructure. Dwelling-​on-​the-​move behind walls The residential hotel is a form of housing in which a new space is emerging: a space of dwelling-​on-​the-​move. Dwelling-​on-​the-​move is a space of smooth and effortless shifts, locally as well as globally, between daily activities and places for work, leisure and wellness, accessible through housing (Grundström 2017b). Dwelling-​on-​the-​move is a space constructed in residential hotels, in which residents make use of digital and physical space to choose their preferred

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Gating housing in Sweden 185 locations for work and leisure. Furthermore, they may leave their housing at any time yet still be connected to and in control of their property. Dwelling-​ on-​the-​move is supported by the design of the housing complexes and by the services they offer their residents. It is constructed in a form of housing built for multiple uses that together support a ‘liquid’ daily life (Bauman 2000). The receptions, lounges, gym, restaurants and meeting rooms are built to facilitate residents’ choice of place, so that each one can be a place for either work or leisure or for both at the same time. In exclusive surroundings, residents with similar lifestyles meet, mingle and work in lounges, libraries, health centres and spa areas reserved entirely for them. Although wealthy groups have previously had the possibility of constructing walls around exclusive housing, the residential hotel differs by constructing an everyday existence where residents have access to and can freely choose between hypersedentarism and hypermobility. This means that residents, when at home in their residential hotel, can choose to stay solely within the confines of the walls of the housing complex. All the amenities and services needed for daily life are in place or can be delivered. Alternatively, residents can also choose to leave for work or leisure; they can travel near or far, just as they desire, and can spend long periods of time abroad. Working, shopping or vacationing may take place in Dubai, Hamburg or Stockholm (see Figure 8.5). This creates a privileged group of mobile residents who can profit from utilizing their time and location to avoid the urban, material and social conflicts of traffic jams, crowded stores, busy streets, doctor’s offices, gyms, public cinemas and libraries. Dwelling-​on-​the-​move is, in the Swedish urban context, a new way of making one’s position in physical and social space coincide (Bourdieu 1995, 1999): i.e. of combining what is kept in proximity and what is kept at a distance. Victoria Park and similar housing complexes make it possible to concentrate services, amenities and social spaces around a select group of residents who live in wealthier parts of cities and who may choose to leave whenever they desire. Meanwhile, walls, hired staff and surveillance technology keep unwanted groups of people out of sight and out of mind. Housing for privileged groups has become an entry point for the private acquisition of amenities and services, a place to both dwell and work, and a way to access high-​speed physical and digital connectivity. In all, residential hotels offer multiple-​instead of single-​use spaces, privatized forms of socializing, i.e. ‘lounging with like-​minded’ rather than in the city, and housing services available around the clock, irrespective of where residents may find themselves. This is a new level of disaffiliation, previously non-​existent in Swedish housing.

Gating housing in Sweden: walling in the privileged, walling out the public from public places In sum, this chapter shows that the process of gating in the Swedish urban context leads to walling in the privileged and walling out the public. This may

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186  Karin Grundström seem evident, but the consequences differ from what might be expected in the context of a ‘gated community’. The urban walls that surround housing are part of a process of walling out the public from public places and, as a consequence, restricting mobility. Simultaneously, walling in the privileged is a process through which a select group of residents, in contrast, can increase their mobility. The chapter shows, first, that the walls around housing in Swedish cities are not a copy of the gated community but take a different form:  that of urban gating. Housing surrounded by walls, in the sense of fences, rails, gates and digital devices, does not break completely with the existing urban morphology, but adapts and continues to build on what already exists. The idea of enclavism has thus morphed into a new form. Perhaps surprisingly, existing planning practice in Sweden, with its relatively high protection for public access, which keeps the streets, parks and bodies of water free from material gating, has not sufficed to counteract the increased practice of gating. One reason is that the size of individual plots or blocks where construction is permitted varies greatly and can be quite large. A second reason is that construction of fences and walls is generally permitted up to a certain height, and proprietors can thus lawfully place fences, gates and locks on their plots. General praxis notwithstanding, municipalities have the monopoly on planning and could, in principle, legally restrict the possibility of constructing walls around housing. But although gating has been criticized in both media and research, and challenged by planners defending an open streetscape, such regulations to restrict gating have yet to be advanced. The chapter also sheds light on the restriction and support of mobility resulting from the construction of housing surrounded by walls. On the one hand, walls physically restrict or deny access to greens, courtyards, passages and in-​between spaces in a city, spaces that before the 1990s were accessible to the public. Considered in the context of any single block, the walls may not appear problematic. Viewed as a collective phenomenon, however, the total amount of land removed from public use by urban gating is considerable. Such gating leads to a decreased use-​value of urban land, since it is no longer possible to move as freely and independently as previously. Moreover, urban gating diminishes possibilities of experiencing a varied urban morphology, as the accessible morphology is reduced from a more to a less varied urbanism –​to that of the gated block and the street. One somewhat paradoxical consequence is that fences erected around urban blocks restrict access by pedestrians and cyclists, but protect vehicular access. The paradox is particularly prominent in cities such as Malmö and Stockholm, which envision a sustainable future by promoting pedestrian and cyclist mobility while restricting vehicular mobility (Malmö Stad 2013; Stockholm Stadsbyggnadskontor 2010). Even though urban walls around housing lead to an overall decrease in mobility, walls also promote and support increased mobility, although only for a select group of residents living in exclusive residential hotels. The design

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Gating housing in Sweden 187 of residential hotels, including privatized lounges, cinemas, health facilities and restaurants, supports mobility and socializing between residents. Furthermore, their atmosphere is one of leisure, wealth and travel, and they have an aesthetic that supports international travel, further reinforced by the fact that residents do travel extensively and stay abroad in second homes. In all, the Swedish residential hotels reference the notion of the gated community in that they allude to ideas of affluence and privilege in a privatized housing form surrounded by walls. In spite of these similarities, a residential hotel also differs from a gated community in its urban form and location and its focus on health and travel for the middle-​class, modern, mobile Swede. Residential hotels are interesting as a new form of housing with shared amenities, but more specifically they are interesting as a form of social distinction through housing. A new space of privilege is constructed, a space of dwelling-​ on-​the move, a space of smooth and effortless shifts, locally as well as globally, between daily activities and places for work, leisure and wellness, accessible through housing. Just as urban gating is built on existing forms, the residential hotel builds on an architectural form, but alters and constructs a new meaning of dwelling: a liquid form of being housed that supports ideologies of nomadic mobility, similar to those of the global nomads or cybernetic elites. Finally, this chapter also strives to show how gated Swedish housing reflects and reinforces the ongoing social and geographical polarization of the metropolitan regions. Drawing from the work of Bourdieu and others, I have argued that the construction of walls and gates around housing is a materialization of social and geographical polarization and that housing surrounded by walls constitutes a stratifying factor in residential segregation. One reason is that residential hotels are located in already wealthy areas, thus adding to the concentration of affluence. A second is that amenities that were previously publicly accessible, such as restaurants, cinemas, health centres and other meeting places, are now constructed within the boundaries of private housing ensembles. This has stratifying consequences since it gives immediate access to residents in privileged areas while residents in vulnerable areas risk having fewer public amenities at their disposal, and additionally have to travel longer distances to access amenities and services. It also leads to private forms of socializing and ‘lounging with likeminded’ for select groups of city residents, but not for others. Additionally, in a liquid modernity, mobility has become an asset, and it seems clear that mobility is central to new forms of ‘disaffiliation’ for privileged groups. Residential hotels offer spaces where residents always have the choice of when, how and where to move, while residents in less privileged areas are bound by limits of corporeal movement, clock time and places designated for single activities. Gated housing is a new phenomenon in Swedish cities. At present it is uncertain to what extent it will continue and how many walls and gated housing blocks will be constructed. But even if gating and the construction of residential hotels are relatively new and limited processes, they signal a

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188  Karin Grundström change in how housing and urban land are understood and valued. For one, they suggest a change in the primary political understanding of housing, from a policy of ‘housing the people’ to a market-​driven process of ‘housing the privileged’. They also point to a change in the understanding of the value of public access. It seems that in contrast to US gating which can be understood as a practice of reinforcing private property, Swedish gating leads to the gating of our commons, the gating of a shared resource. In a dialectic process, the walls around housing blocks both promote and restrict mobility, according to social class. To conclude, gates and walls around Swedish housing present a serious challenge, especially since the practice of un-​gating remains uncommon.

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Gating housing in Sweden 189 CRUSH (2016), Tretton myter om bostadsfrågan [Thirteen Myths about Housing]. Göteborg: Dokument Press. Cséfalvay, Z., and Webster, C. (2012), ‘Gates or no gates? A cross-​European enquiry into the driving forces behind gated communities’, Regional Studies, 46(3), 293–​308. Davis, M. (1990), ‘Fortress LA’, Cities and Society, 267–​283. de Laval, S. (1997), Planerare och boende i dialog, metoder för utvärdering [Planners and Residents in Dialogue, Methods for Evaluation]. Stockholm: Majornas Copyprint. Eklund, F. (2014), Eklund Stockholm New  York. [Online] Nyproduktion [New Development], available at www.esny.se/sv/new-development (accessed March 2015). Flyvbjerg, B. (2006), ‘Five misunderstandings about case-​study research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–​245. Glaze, G. (2004), ‘Some reflections on the economic and political organizations of private neighbourhoods’, in R. Atkinson and S. Blandy (eds.), Gated Communities. Abingdon: Routledge. Grant, J. (2006), ‘Planning responses to gated communities in Canada’, in R. Atkinson and S. Blandy (eds.), Gated Communities. Abingdon: Routledge. Grant, J., and Mittlestedt, L. (2004), ‘Types of gated communities’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 31, 913–​930. Grundström, K., and Molina, I. (2016), ‘From Folkhem to lifestyle housing in Sweden:  segregation and urban form, 1930s–​ 2010s’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 16(3), 316–​336. Grundström, K. (2017a), ‘Grindsamhälle: the Rise of urban gating and gated housing in Sweden’, Housing Studies [online] doi.org/​10.1080/​02673037.2017.1342774. Grundström, K. (2017b), ‘Mobility as a stratifying factor in housing: dwelling-​in-​place contra dwelling-​on-​the-​move’. Mobilities [online] doi: 10.1080/​17450101.2016.1274559. Harvey, D. (2008), ‘The right to the city’, New Left Review, 53, 23–​40. Hedin, K., Clark, E., Lundholm, E., and Malmberg, G. (2012), ‘Neoliberalization of housing in Sweden: Gentrification, filtering, and social polarization’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(2), 443–​463. Kvale, S. (1997), Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun [The Qualitative Research Interview]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kållberg, M., and Sandquist, A. (2008), ‘Lyxboende –​med vakter’ [Luxury housing –​ protected by guards], Expressen [online] 4 June, available at www.expressen.se/​leva-​ och-​bo/​lyxboende-​med-​vakter/​ (accessed March 2015). Lang, R., and Danielsen, K. (2010), ‘Gated communities in America: Walling out the world?’, Housing Policy Debate, 8(4), 867–​899. Listerborn, C., and Grundström, K. (eds.) (2014), Strategier för att hela en delad stad. Samordnad stadsutveckling i Malmö [Strategies to Heal a Divided City: Coordinated Urban Development in Malmö]. Malmö: Mapius 16, Malmö University. Lefebvre, H. (2007 [1974]), The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Low, S. (2003), Behind the Gates, Life Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. London: Routledge. Malmö Stad (2013), Malmös väg mot en hållbar framtid [Malmö’s Way Towards a Sustainable Future]. Malmö: The Malmö Commission. Manzi, T., and Smith-​Bowers, B. (2004), ‘Gated communities as club goods: Segregation or social cohesion?, in R. Atkinson and S. Blandy (eds.), Gated Communities. Abingdon: Routledge. Marcuse, P. (1997), ‘The enclave, the citadel and the ghetto’, Urban Affairs Review, 33(2), 228–​65.

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190  Karin Grundström Moudon, A.V. (1997), ‘Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Urban Morphology, 1, 3–​10. Nyström, L. (2000), ‘Stadsdelens Vardagsrum. Grannskap, Lokal offentlighet och Demokrati’ [The living room of the neighbourhood. Neighbourhood, local public space and democracy], in L. Nyström (ed.), Stadsdelens Vardagsrum. Karlskrona: Stadsmiljörådet, Boverket. Öresjö, E. (2000), ‘Låt oss slippa Grindsamhällen! Om social tillit i ett hållbart samhälle’ [Save us from gated communities! Reflections on social trust in a sustainable society], in L. Nyström (ed.), Stadsdelens Vardagsrum. Karlskrona: Stadsmiljörådet, Boverket. Plan-​och bygglagen (2010), [Swedish Planning and Building Law] 2010:900, §4. Rättsnätet [online], available at www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/20100900.htm (accessed May 2014). Polanska, D. (2010), ‘The emergence of gated communities in post-​communist urban context: And the reasons for their increasing popularity’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 25, 295–​312. Rodenstedt, A. (2015), Living in the Calm and Safe Part of the City:  The Socio-​ Spatial Reproduction of Upper-​ Middle Class Neighbourhoods in Malmö. Diss., Uppsala: Uppsala University. Salonen, T. (2012), Befolkningsrörelser, försörjningsvillkor och bostadssegregation. En socio-​dynamisk analys av Malmö [Migration, Conditions for Sustenance and Residential Segregation: A Socio-​Dynamic Analysis of Malmö]. Malmö: The Malmö Commission. Scheer, B.C. (2010), The Evolution of Urban Form, Typology for Planners and Architects. Chicago: The American Planning Association. Stockholm Stadsbyggnadskontor (2010), Promenadstaden. Översiktsplan för Stockholm [The Walkable City. Urban Development Plan for Stockholm]. Stockholm: Stockholm stad. Svea Fanfar (2015), Svea Fanfar Housing Association [webpage], available at www. sveafanfar.se (accessed May 2015). Sveriges Television (2009). ‘Välkomna nästan allihopa’ [Welcome almost everyone], Kulturnyheterna, SVT1, 27/​11. Trägårdh, L. (2012), ‘Nordic modernity. Social trust and radical individualism’, in K. Kjeldsen, J. Schelde, M. Andersen and M. Holm (eds.), New Nordic –​Architecture and Identity. Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Tykesson, T. (2003), Malmös kartor, från 1500-​talet till idag [Maps of Malmö, from the Fifteen Hundreds until Today]. Lund: Historiska media. Veidekke Bostad (2013), ‘Residens Sannegården, drömmen om Manhattan, hemma i Göteborg’ [Residence Sannegården, a Manhattan dream, at home in Gothenburg] Veidekke Bostad [online], available at http://veidekkebostad.se/residens-sannegarden/​ (accessed June 2015). Veidekke Bostad (2014), ‘Sädesärlan  –​det goda livet är serverat’ [Sädesärlan  –​the good life is served] Veidekke Bostad [online], available at http://veidekkebostad.se/ sadesarlan/​(accessed May 2015). Wacquant, L. (2007), ‘Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality’, Thesis Eleven, 91, 66–​77. Yip, N.M. (2013), ‘Walled without gates:  Gated communities in Shanghai’, Urban Geography, 33(2), 221–​236.

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9  The right to the city is the right to the surface A case for a surface commons (in 8 arguments, 34 images and some legal provisions) Sabina Andron 1.  Surfaces are intensive, expressive and deep Surfaces are spaces of friction, tension and expression. They are the patchy areas between the hard and soft parts of the built environment, between stuff and air, between private solids and public fluids. Surfaces separate and expose, they contain and endure, and they brandish their cracks and colours in public view, often for public access. Classes of surface materials can be read as inventories of building technologies, but they are also objects of expressive interest and textural intensity, exquisite imperfections and variations on the battered body of the city. Just like derma on living creatures, the skin of the city is deep and multi-​ layered. It accumulates paint and colour, creating a palimpsest of testimonies and experiences, but it also sheds its fabrics in an unaffected process of self-​ preservation. The surfaces of buildings develop rifts, intervals, and  signs of deliberate modelling and trauma, all of  which they flaunt nonchalantly, always prepared for more.

2.  Neutral surface mode does not exist There is no such thing as an impartial surface, free from invisible tensions and palpable material constraints. All surfaces are part of the lawscape (Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulos 2015), some form artscapes and communicative networks (Stewart 1988) and most contribute to economies of exposure and visibility (Tripodi 2009). Surfaces generate capital by hosting consumerist messages or promoting city-​wide agendas of regeneration and placemaking; they become objects of adoration and unattainability when embellishing contemporary architectural icons; they evolve into bi-​dimensional monuments of aesthetic and heritage interest; and they are tools of exclusion and control in the fight for the image of the city. In fact, I would suggest that surfaces are the image of the city, hence the high stakes in protecting their desired aspect and predicting any potential threats to their integrity.

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 12 types of skins, bruises, lines and shapes which mark the surfaces of the city.

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 (Cont.)

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 (Cont.)

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 (Cont.)

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 (Cont.)

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Figures 9.1–​9.12 (Cont.)

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198  Sabina Andron The spaces of exclusion of the neoliberal city often appear in the form of private ownership of public spaces, which also reflects in the treatment of surfaces. Hostile surfaces, just like hostile architecture, are designed to preclude any unwanted inscriptions and to offer customised, built-​in rejection of nonconforming signage. Anti-​graffiti coatings densify surfaces even more, and they slyly politicise the materiality of the surface by sometimes not declaring their presence (for example, in the case of transparent coatings). The resulting under-​cover surfaces will less readily accept dispute and inscription, but they will nevertheless maintain their exposure and vulnerability, albeit in a less accessible way. Ultimately, it all goes down on the surfacescape: reinforcements, breaches, commodification, struggle, acceptance, segregation, conviviality, occupation –​and there are few better ways to examine these than by looking at inscriptions. Surfaces host a conflict between the institutionally enabled dominance of monophonic discourses, and the fluid, editable, re-​inscribable proposals of a communally produced, polyphonic language. The single discourse can appear as a measure of cleansing and eradication, support for fiscally conformist commercial messages, or strategically backed muralisation and artification of

Figure 9.13 Surface as tool for exclusion, geared up against inscription through warning signs and invisible protective coatings. It is not that a protected surface cannot be written on –​but protective coatings make the removal of unwanted writing much smoother.

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Figure 9.14 Surface as collateral casualty of urban change: the graffitied walls of the former Heygate council estate in London come down to make room for newer, more resilient and sanitised façades.

specific urban areas. Political agendas and administrative strategies often determine the visual forms of surfaces, from localised, plural, materially embedded inscriptions to prolific, replicable, and globally palatable icons.

3.  Surfaces visibilise law, specifically private property and public order Urban surfaces are thoroughly legally bound and materially produced, beyond the obvious razor wires, keep-​out signs and anti-​climb paints. Surfaces are relational spaces and legal products (Blomley 2014), and they are uniquely relevant to understanding two fundamental postulates of the legal city: private property and public order. Property and order are inscribed in the way surfaces are equipped to deal with approved and unapproved signage, and can be inferred through an understanding of surface inscriptions and materialities. The surface lawscape becomes an engulfing, dominating force, whose influence is exerted past the obvious physical markers, and whose subversions are resilient objects of further legal contention. Space is law is surface.

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Figure 9.15 Surface as generator of capital: authorised commercial displays are given privileged spots of visibility, but they remain vulnerable to additions and contestations. The transparent plastic sheet on the side of this bus shelter mediates between privileged ads and outsider inscriptions, simultaneously protecting the former and enabling the latter.

The first claim at territories is always associated with ownership and is often exclusionary, as the rights to public visibility and display come second to the right to property and its integrity. When ownership takes precedence, there is no envisioning of property scenarios by non-​owners, which is why graffiti is damaging and not welcome. Any writing, letter, picture, device or representation, painting, writing, soiling, marking or other defacing by whatever means, etching, obliterating, displaying and scratching:  listed together, the legal definitions of graffiti as unwanted mark-​making read like a comprehensive list of surface alterations, a presentation of everything that can possibly be done to change the appearance of a surface without permission (see Part  6, Sections 43–​44 of the Anti-​Social Behaviour Act, 2003, Part 4 the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act, 2005, Part III of the London Local Authorities Acts 1995 and Part  3 of the London Local Authorities Act, 2004). Offending against property is therefore an offence not just against a thing, but also against the

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Figure 9.16 Detail of a London mural painted by superstar artist Shepard Fairey in 2012. The mural went up to support Fairey’s exhibition at Stolen Space Gallery in October 2012, and was afforded protected surface status from the beginning:  a prominently placed, large-​scale single discourse, intolerant of expressive plurality within its bounds.

values that make it and the bodies who own it. Breaking, cutting, scratching, tearing and damaging are all done to the physical surface, but they acquire symbolic meaning as being done against the owned property, and against the right to private ownership itself. Scratching a surface is not just altering the surface matter, it is also violating the idea of property and its implicit entitlements and restrictions.

4.  Communal surface production outwrites exclusive ownership Surfaces offer some of the best examples to illustrate the links between property and exclusion, but they are also the best places to observe the numerous contestations of this social and legal postulate. Legally, surfaces are the border between private property and public order, but they also represent political possibilities for establishing an urban commons and a claim to the right to the city.

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Figure 9.17 A few months later, the surface territory from Figure 9.16 was still under contestation, between the privileged “art” in the background and the unwanted “crime” in the foreground.

Figure 9.18 Finally, multiple layers out-​marked the fiercely protected mural, claiming a right to surface participation despite their lack of authorisation or endorsement.

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Figure 9.19 The comprehensive semantics of anti-​graffiti legislation, which includes all possible alterations done to a surface and on a surface.

Figure 9.20 The law protects private property and prescribes public order, while surfaces flourish in communal production in between.

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Figure 9.21 The surface lawscape is constantly strained and reconfigured, as trespassing marks occupy heavily regulated and surveilled environments.

The surface lawscape is of the material world, but is conditioned by social manipulation and legal instrumentation: the law produces it, and it produces law. It is a semiotic, material, cultural and political artefact, reinvented with each new development of surface-​coating technologies, reconfigured by each addition of a billboard display and strained with every conviction of criminal damage and vandalism. Non-​definitive boundaries between public and private, surfaces are actualised anew with each occupation, in a recurring process of activation, materialisation and visibilisation.

5.  Inscriptions turn private property into a precarious commons (precariousness is accessibility) Surfaces are the territories of friction between owned and claimed, and between private and public. Envisioned as part of a commons, surfaces become a political imaginary and an organising tool, not just the public-​facing boundary of exclusionary property (Chatterton 2010). Surfaces unlock the power regimes inscribed in private property, while simultaneously triggering

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Figure 9.22 The hard materials of the surfacescape are in place to ensure control and order, but they are also populated by an array of vivid paint-​and-​paper creatures. A  sign warns us against patrol dogs enforcing the lawscape, while cats and elephants establish their own surface dominance.

property’s social function through their reluctant or willing acceptance of signs and inscriptions. Graffiti hacks private property again, and again, and again, until it turns it into a precarious commons, a permanently temporary communal space, more visible than any document or certificate that designates the property’s exclusive privacy. Surfaces are the bearers of damage to private property, but they are also the enablers of a public formation, a volatile space of public display and usage which functions despite, or regardless of, the legal severity of ownership (Iveson 2007; Brighenti 2009). Not public, nor private, but communally used, in public sight, like an open-​source book of urban production and participation. Surface space is determined by co-​creation, inclusion, subversive opportunity and plural access, through inscriptions which eschew privileged legal status:  minor contributors without documents, non-​property-​bound decision-​makers, owning it without being the legal owners. Unwittingly exposed to inclusion but resilient in its support for dissent: such is the nature of the surfacescape.

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Figure 9.23 An array of visual and material determinations composes the deep surfacescape, which is constantly vulnerable to severe violations and miscellaneous interventions.

Figure 9.24 A moment of claimed stability, where the paint on the wall mirrors its legal ownership, giving visible form to a contractual privilege.

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Figure 9.25 A hierarchy of transgression: the open-​source book of surface production with its various layers of illegal claims, from flyposting to tagging.

6.  Surface conflict is spatial justice The struggle between bodies to occupy a specific place, at a specific time, is defined by Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulos as spatial justice, a form of spatial tension that keeps bodies in movement and negotiation. Inscriptions as bodies, coatings as bodies, the buff as a body, advertising and dominant neoliberal ideology as bodies, abstract and coloured bodies all fight over surface occupation. Multiple surface bodies can occupy the same space at the same time, and they co-​exist in parasitic, belligerent or agreeable terms. Surfaces allow for multiple occupation because of their specific type of spatial depth, which concentrates materials and expressions within broad two-​dimensional spaces. The fight for visibility and territory could then be read as a form of surface justice, with inscriptions as bodies performing a complex, fluctuating occupation. Inscriptions generate territories, they repeat and invent norms and they set up habits –​all of which become legal modulations. Surface territories are not only material and cultural artifacts, but they are also political contentions, as they communicate and convey meaning about a variety of claims. Surfaces appear magnetic and matter becomes attractive, they

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Figure 9.26 Multiple bodies occupy surfaces simultaneously, under different degrees of entitlement. Some should be there, while others not –​and their fight for territory and legitimacy is a production of spatial justice.

Figure 9.27 The absence of consensus or visual dominance guarantees the justice of the surfacescape.

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Figure 9.28 Graffiti removal by buffing, or painting over undesired inscriptions. Aside from the lack of resources or interest that often leads to such patchy cleaning jobs, these spots of mis-​matched colour show the traces of removal and wield the visual dominance of the remover  –​if only temporarily.

oppress and they enable, as spatial justice unveils at surface level. The right to occupy the same space at the same time must be fought for, so there will be surface treatments and cross-​overs, discrete subversions and dominant pictures, in an ongoing fertile battle. While there is conflict, there is justice, because conflict is movement, change and inclusion, and conflict is just. Conflict is the spatial justice of the surfacescape. Solve the conflict through apparent consensus, and the lawscape becomes a dictatorship, by excluding, censoring and silencing attacks against its precarious order. Embrace the surface conflict, and you are looking at the continuous making of surface spatial justice, in its thickly layered displays of entitlement and exclusion.

7.  Artification and criminalisation are attempts to stabilise surfaces Property owners want to stabilise surfaces by conditioning access based on ownership, while municipal authorities attempt surface domination by either

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210  Sabina Andron criminalisation or artification. Criminalise surface inscriptions, and you can achieve clean surfaces through removal and erasure; artify inscriptions, and you can police them by using an aesthetic argument. Both approaches are aimed at the same result, which is to achieve controlled and predictable territories of single expression and visual consistency. Surfaces might be strained by fixed jurisdictions and legal claims, but they keep bending, swelling, retracting and peeling like the city they are facing. Surfaces are political because they are accessible and visible, despite attempts at control and predictability. Legislate them, coat them, clean them, fence them, art them –​but surfaces remain precarious when facing the city. Surfaces are city more than they are rules, permanently becoming, and defiantly showcasing the minor in order to make it significant. This lack of stability makes surfaces more resilient and ultimately impossible to control by any single discourse, be that of private property or urban order. Surface bodies can outwrite, obscure or sanction each other, and this continuous tension and lack of resolve is the very bloodline of surface production and participation.

Figure 9.29 Artification as a way of stabilising surfaces. Murals impose single visual discourses on entire surfaces, artwashing walls and attempting to design out plural participation.

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Figure 9.30 Curated works on hoardings are the symbolic enablers of urban change and gentrification. This site in London was transitioning from a modernist housing block into a boutique hotel, and hoarding displays were neatly regulated on an “outdoor gallery” model  –​no cross-​overs, no layering, just ordered individual panelling.

Figure 9.31 Surfaces as tools used by municipal authorities in their place branding strategies. Note the reflected Shoreditch sign on the side of the canal, and the neatly authored murals on prominent display.

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Figure 9.32 The obliteration of graffiti takes precedence on this surfacescape as a means of projecting control and order.

Figure 9.33 The unpredictable nature of graffiti is seen as a menace to the visual order of the city.

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Figure 9.34 A line was added every day this message stayed up on this wall in East London. “No. of days graffiti remains” is not just a series of marks on a wall, but a challenging of local governance via the surfaces of the city. Mobstr’s work in turn was used to challenge the hierarchy of access to these spaces and surfaces, and transformed into “No. of dickheads in Hackney Wick”.

8.  The right to the city is the right to the surface The surface lawscape is legally suspended between the protection of within and the regulation of without. The law compresses surfaces until a point of complete reduction, where they ideally become no more than planar borders, frictionless transition points between two regimes of control that were instituted and are managed by a single system of governance. The thinner the surface, the fewer problems it poses, as its materiality disintegrates, its visuality is restricted and its presence is obliterated by attempts to control it. The border as concept, as legal threshold between two qualitatively different spaces of here and there, of public and private. The paper sheet that exists only conceptually, to demarcate its public and private sides, and to reject any subversion or contestation. However, just as sheets of paper are material objects and not just bearers of inscription, surface  borders are never pristine lines of demarcation and exclusion:  they are loci of contestation and tangible physical conflict, sites of materiality which become activated through social production. With each

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214  Sabina Andron meddle, surfaces swell, they become larger and meatier, and they cumulate and stack every addition and reclamation. Surfaces become complicated for the law because they form interstitial repositories of potential, of the neither public, nor private, of the legal and spatial ambiguity of threshold spaces, neither within, nor without (Brighenti 2013). The thicker the surface, the harder for the law to issue comprehensive mechanisms to control it, and so surfaces become a third type of space, in between the public and the private. Open to access and vulnerable to conflict, surfaces as commons are sites of tactical engagement and spatial co-​production, where censorship and exclusion are co-​designed out of the picture. Every protective coating gets nailed by a tag, and each tag is overwritten by another, which then gets cleaned by the buff, which is covered by a billboard, which is replaced by a mural, which in turn gets tagged and restored and tagged again. Exclusion prevention through multiple co-​design; plural inscriptions designing out the single authority; spatial justice through ongoing conflict. Temporary concessions, with no resolution in sight.

References Anti-​ Social Behaviour Act 2003, Part  6, Sections 43–​ 44. www.legislation.gov.uk/​ ukpga/​2003/​38/​contents (accessed 5 May 2017). Blomley, N. (2014), ‘Property, Law, and Space’, SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY:  Social Science Research Network, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/​ abstract=2381518 (accessed 12 July 2017). Brighenti, A.M. (ed.) (2013), Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-​Between. Farnham: Ashgate. Brighenti, A.M. (2009), ‘Walled urbs to urban walls –​and return? On the social life of walls’, in A.M. Brighenti (ed.), The Wall and the City. Trento: professionaldreamers. Chatterton, P. (2010), ‘Seeking the urban common: Furthering the debate on spatial justice’, City, 14(6), 625–​628. Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, Part  4. www.legislation.gov.uk/​ ukpga/​2005/​16/​contents (accessed 5 May 2017). Iveson, K. (2007), Publics and the City. Oxford: Blackwell. London Local Authorities Act 1995, Part III. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/1995/10/​ contents/​enacted (accessed 5 May 2017). London Local Authorities Act 2004, Part 3. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/1/pdfs/​ ukla_20040001_en.pdf (accessed 5 May 2017). Philippopoulos-​Mihalopoulos, A. (2015), Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. New York: Routledge. Stewart, S. (1988), ‘Ceci tuera cela: Graffiti as crime and art’, in J. Fekete, Life after Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Tripodi, L. (2009), ‘Towards a vertical urbanism. Space of exposure as a new paradigm for public space’, in A.M. Brighenti (ed.), The Wall and the City. Trento: professionaldreamers. Unwin, S. (2000), An Architecture Notebook: Wall. London: Routledge.

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10  The multiple walls of graffiti removal Maintenance and urban assemblage in Paris Jérôme Denis and David Pontille

Pick a wall in the streets of Paris, let’s say in the lively third arrondissement. Look at it. It’s a nice wall, a facade of one of those old buildings that make the charm of the City of Light. Depending on which author inspires you most –​Charles Baudelaire, Georges Perec, Walter Benjamin –​you could use many different words to describe it, to explain what it looks like, what it is made of, and to characterize its place in the neighbourhood. But let’s complicate things a little and consider this wall as it looked four days ago, or at least at the wall that could be seen at the same address four days ago. Now, there are numerous inscriptions on it. Again, depending on your background and your expertise, you may or may not be able to read this lettering, though you would certainly agree to name them ‘graffiti’. But let’s go back to the wall. Is it the same wall? Hard to say. Maybe you shouldn’t decide right away. Especially if, again, you move to a new vantage point, and find yourself two days after the apparition of the graffiti. Early in the morning, you see a man already at work, spraying some liquid on the wall and, as his intervention unfolds, you witness the progressive disappearing of the graffiti. A few minutes later, the wall is exactly as you found it at the beginning of this paragraph (that is, chronologically, two days after the man’s intervention). This little thought experiment is an invitation to think of, and look at, walls and graffiti in a slightly different way than usual. It shows how hard it can be to identify stable properties that could satisfyingly be used to describe urban walls. Indeed, in this story, the very materiality of the hypothetical wall changed over the days. First, one or several graffiti writers added some paint to the amalgamation of bricks, concrete, stone and paint that the wall was made of. Then, a worker sprayed water, maybe sand and chemical products, on it, progressively erasing the letters and the words the wall had borne for a few days. And even after this intervention, we can doubt that the wall simply recovered its ‘original’ material properties. The process certainly affected some of them and probably added new ones. All these changes occurred in just a few days –​imagine if we have observed the wall for a whole year, or a decade… As for graffiti, its traditional descriptions are shifted by our story as well. Of course, the inscriptions that once appeared on the wall take place in a

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216  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille social world and are the outcome of cultural practices that come with their own norms and values. They can also be studied as speech acts, or writing practices –​practices that have become widespread in large cities around the world for decades now. But in our story, the graffiti are described from a very particular standpoint, foregrounding a dimension that has rarely been considered as such in social sciences: its removal. In this chapter, we aim to investigate this removal, and the policy that sets the conditions of its accomplishment. Removal is a mundane operation, yet one that contributes crucially to the constitution of contemporary urban realities. Studying graffiti removal, we believe, is notably a way to better understand the modes of existence of walls in the city. To do so, we explore the case of Paris in this chapter, drawing on an ethnographic study during which we gathered the main legal and contractual documents of the current graffiti-​ removal policy of the city, made observations of removal interventions and verification processes, and conducted in-​depth interviews within the municipality and with two of its contractors. Our exploration stands at the intersection of two growing research areas: studies focused on ‘urban assemblages’ on the one side (Brenner et al. 2011; Farías and Bender 2010; McFarlane 2011b), and repair and maintenance studies on the other (Henke 2000; Graham and Thrift 2007; Denis and Pontille 2014; Jackson 2014). Far from being a reductionist instrument of territorial control, the Paris graffiti-​ removal policy is  indeed a complex assemblage of urban maintenance that performs economic, political, technical and moral orders. The walls of Paris are one of the crucial components of this assemblage, featuring as complex, multiple artefacts. In this chapter, we show that graffiti removal produces a series of ontological enactments (Smith 1974; Woolgar and Neyland 2013) that practically perform various versions of the walls (Mol 1999). In the following sections, we first outline the main streams of research we draw on: urban assemblages, maintenance and repair, and ontological multiplicity. We then briefly describe how graffiti removal is organized in Paris. We identify five distinct ways through which graffiti-​removal policy enacts the walls of the city: as an object of maintenance, as a surface, as a space for public expression, as an official decorum, and as a material composite. Finally, we conclude by foregrounding how the notion of assemblage (agencement) in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1980) helps to understand the way walls are governed and enacted in the city.

Urban assemblages, maintenance and multiplicity For several years now, at the crossroads of human geography and actor-​ network theory, the notion of ‘assemblage’ has been at the centre of many debates (Farías and Bender 2010; McFarlane 2011a, 2011b; Rankin 2011; Kamalipour and Peimani 2015). Borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari (1980), the term and its revival owe a lot to DeLanda, who has promoted the virtue of ‘assemblage thinking’ (DeLanda 2006, 2016). Its use in urban

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 217 studies is also largely indebted to the earlier contributions of human geography and actor-​network theory, particularly to Thrift’s work (Pile and Thrift 2000; Amin and Thrift 2002) and Latour’s foray into urban fabrics (Latour and Hermant 1998). Assemblage thinking is an attitude that allows for a ‘non-​reductionist’ approach to the city (DeLanda 2006) and has contributed to ‘decentring’ urban studies’ traditional objects and issues (Farías and Bender 2010). It particularly draws attention to two hitherto neglected aspects of cities: their sociomaterial heterogeneity, and the circumstantial character of their transformations in time. Urban life, in this perspective, is anything but a stable reality that could be analysed ‘at rest’; cities are studied as composite entities constantly in the making. [T]‌he concept of assemblage is particularly useful for grasping the spatially processual, relational and generative nature of the city, where ‘generative’ refers both to the momentum of historical processes and political economies and to the eventful, disruptive, atmospheric, and random juxtapositions that characterise urban space. (McFarlane 2011a: 650–​651) Moreover, far from being a univocal and consistent phenomenon, urban life is made of uncountable ingredients, of extremely diverse nature. Even the most mundane objects and the simplest task become part of a more or less complex assemblage. This shared interest in small objects and ordinary practices highly contrasts with most of urban studies’ traditional concerns. For instance, in this approach, even a crucial notion such as space is subject to reconsideration. Instead of being the unquestioned starting point for analysis, spatial properties are considered as heterogeneous and precarious outcomes of sociomaterial practices from which they cannot be separated (Latour and Hermant 1998; Latham and McCormack 2004; Kärrholm 2007). This stream of research thus calls for a study of both the sociotechnical complexity of cities and their very situatedness and ordinariness, ranging from large infrastructures to mundane objects. It invites us to discover how things hold together, how they collapse, and to understand the conditions in which these more or less precarious conglomerations act, what kind of urban reality they perform, without deciding what counts as an important feature beforehand. Among the uncountable objects and practices this interdisciplinary inquiry into urban assemblages draws attention to, some bear witness to a mostly unproblematized dimension of urban life:  maintenance and repair work. Maintenance and repair activities have been of growing interest in social sciences, and have recently gathered a community of scholars from different domains: ethnomethodology, human geography, media studies, history, science and technology studies (Henke 2000; Graham and Thrift 2007; Gregson et al. 2009; Jackson 2014; Denis and Pontille 2015; Domínguez Rubio 2016;

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218  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille Tecnoscienza 2015; continent 2017). Even though very different objects and settings have been investigated in this emerging literature, maintenance and repair studies share a common set of concerns that resonate with some of the issues raised in the discussions on urban assemblages. By exploring how fixing, mending, restoring, cleaning or upkeeping are concretely accomplished, maintenance and repair studies notably describe a world where sociomaterial order is constantly produced and reproduced, mostly through mundane practices. There is no place here for material reductionism and essentialism. Through the lens of maintenance and repair practices, the ability of an infrastructure to order behaviours, as the capacity of an object to last, or the potential for a ‘mobile’ to become ‘immutable’ cannot be reduced to intrinsic material properties. The material properties of things, in their very heterogeneity, are enacted through ceaseless maintenance and repair practices. A few scholars have shown that maintenance and repair studies offer a great entry point to reveal the complexity of hitherto overlooked urban realities, and to pursue the exploration of urban assemblages. For instance, Edensor (2011, 2012), who has investigated the conditions in which the St Ann’s Church in Manchester has been restored, explains how repair and maintenance work literally unfolds urban materiality, bringing to light both its fluidities and its stabilities. Discovering the processes of the church’s restoration, we understand that the stone itself is not at all an inert and isolated object. Its repair goes through dealing with ‘entangled materialities’ and constantly changing entities that are connected to a wide geography of knowledge and labour. Other mundane aspects of urban life have also been studied at the intersection between assemblage thinking and maintenance and repair studies. Investigating the daily life of buildings, Strebel (2011) has highlighted the importance of ‘block checks’ during which concierges use ‘conversation, gestures, craft and movement (…) tools and technologies’ to bring buildings to life (p. 244). The order of the building, he explains, is a complex process that maintenance workers deal with on a daily basis. We also observed the same kinds of delicate sociomaterial ordering processes within the Paris subway stations, where the wayfinding system is enacted as a standardized set of immutable and immobile signs thanks to the constant supervision and the daily interventions of maintainers. This maintenance work goes through a regular exploration of the material ecology of subway spaces and an incessant mix of assembling and disassembling operations (Denis and Pontille 2014, 2015). The streets themselves can be understood as the fragile results of a continual maintenance work, as demonstrated by Shaw (2014). Following the cleaners who operate in the centre of Newcastle at night, Shaw has emphasized that both the development of night-​time leisure industry in the city and the way the neighbourhood looks during the daytime are made possible by the sociomaterial competencies of these maintenance workers who, with their tools and the materials they deal with, ‘form a single waste-​ production-​machine-​assemblage’ (p. 190).

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 219 The city  –​its neighbourhoods, its infrastructures, its furniture, its activities, etc. –​is thus the outcome of a continuous maintenance work that goes through more or less known practices, instruments, documents, rules, and of course workers. This is where assemblage thinking and maintenance and repair studies meet: instead of questioning urban reality as a ready-​made phenomenon, or as the encounter only between planners’ strategies and users’ tactics, they investigate it as a series of practical enactments. What we would like to add to this landscape is attention to the multiplicity of these enactments, and thus to the ontological variations of the city components. The recent conversation about multiplicity in social sciences has participated in an ontological moment —​if not a ‘turn’ —​that pushed a bit further certain epistemological displacements initiated by early Science and Technology Studies on differences and variability (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Instead of considering reality as a stable given ground, where plurality can be seen as the result of various interpretations or constructions, it invites us to recognize that reality is always practically enacted, and that these enactments support a variety of ontologies (Mol 1999). Reality itself is then multiple. This has important consequences on how social research is carried out and what its outcome can be. The researcher here does not provide a single overarching description of a phenomenon, nor does she gather distinct perspectives on it. Rather, she explores the conditions in which different versions of the studied phenomenon are enacted. Such attention to the performativity of descriptions and practices bring to light hitherto unnoticed or overlooked differences. In their seminal work, de Laet and Mol (2000) have studied for instance a ‘fluid’ bush pump, an innovation that is ceaselessly reshaped and never takes the form of a closed black box. In a very different setting, Mol’s inquiries into the multiple versions of atherosclerosis (Mol 2002) foregrounded the technical, practical, and linguistic dimensions of their enactments. Woolgar and Neyland (2013) have expanded on these works, investigating the multiple ontological enactments of ordinary objects and the mundane governance it participates in. Investigating these differences not only allows for an inventory of various versions of an object but also tackles the issue of their relationships: versions may have partial connections, align with one another, one version may include or be dedicated to another, and, of course, versions may ignore one another, and sometimes even be contradictory (Law 2010). Because ontological enactments do not install the conditions of existence of isolated, autonomous objects, but of worlds in which the relational identities of various entities are held together, they are a particularly rich entry point to expand on the works on maintenance and urban assemblages. Describing such enactments helps us to question the performative character of urban maintenance practices, and to investigate the multiple and relational ontologies enacted in urban assemblages. It is especially a fruitful means to reconsider the mode of existence of one of the paradigmatic artefacts of territorial ordering and disciplinarization processes –​the wall. If it is difficult to

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220  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille decide the status of the wall we took as an example in the beginning of this chapter, it is precisely because its ontology varies. Graffiti removal itself, an operation of urban maintenance that could be seen as a stabilizing and disambiguating practice, participates in these variations.

Removing graffiti in Paris At the end of 1999, the city of Paris launched a call for tenders for a particularly ambitious programme: the removal of ‘90% of graffiti’ within one year. Following this ‘clean-​walls operation’, a five-​year period of maintenance was planned, during which contractors would ensure that the walls of Paris would remain free from unsolicited inscriptions. Since then, new calls for maintenance have been issued every two to five years. This framework, which has remained roughly the same save for small adjustments, has dramatically changed the way graffiti have been taken care of in Paris. Until then, graffiti removal was an obligation that every building owner had to fulfil. The first call for tenders drew on a municipal by-​law that had centralized the process and had organized it in such a way that it could be provided as a free service. Since then, a number of private companies (initially one, nowadays three) have been bestowed the task of ‘cleaning’ the walls of Paris day after day. The contracts signed by the municipality and the private companies are performance-​based. Besides identifying the areas of intervention (all building facades of a specific neighbourhood, up to 4 metres high from street level), they set objectives (a maximum threshold of graffiti presence in each area) and intervention deadlines (10 days to remove a graffiti after its detection). The service is operated in two steps. First, a report is sent via an online form by either a civil servant, a company worker or a private citizen. Second, reports are gathered every morning and distributed to the removal squads. Four main removal techniques are employed: paint, solvent, high-​pressure water, and sandblaster. Each month, the companies activity is verified. One of their managers and three or four representatives of the City organize a walk in the streets of Paris, during which they collectively check whether the amount of graffiti remains above the contractual threshold, or not –​if not, the companies face failure penalties. Besides private companies, a team from the municipality remains in charge of specific places not included in contracts, such as public gardens, schools and some courtyards. The private and public agencies work hand in hand. The managers of the local team run the inspections, and on exceptional occasions, such as when the interventions take place after a protest, the teams work altogether. Seen from a distance, this removal policy might look like a monolithic ‘disciplinary apparatus’ (Foucault 1977) that places walls under an intense scrutiny. From such a perspective, the removal policy could be examined as a powerful device of governance that results in growing social control of urban spaces, aimed at preventing any disruptions of the order in place –​notably,

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 221 regarding who is authorized to display public inscriptions. Yet, after carefully reading the rules and regulations, and shadowing the workers during their interventions, things appear more nuanced and complex. The ‘mundane governance’ (Woolgar and Neyland 2013) at the core of this removal policy is multiple, and its enactment does not reduce either walls or graffiti to unequivocal objects.

An object of maintenance First, the Paris graffiti-​removal policy enacts walls as objects of a specific kind of maintenance. To understand this, we have to go back to the early 1980s when a theoretical and political model of maintenance known as the ‘broken-​ window theory’ (Wilson and Kelling 1982) emerged. This theory famously influenced graffiti-​removal programmes in the US, notably the ‘war on graffiti’ that was initiated in the NYC Subway by Mayor Ed Koch in the early 1980s, and then expanded to the whole city by Rudolph Giuliani during the 1990s. Giuliani was himself a great inspiration to Jean Tiberi, the Paris mayor who launched his own removal policy in 2000. Still today, broken-​window theory is considered as the cornerstone of most graffiti-​removal initiatives (Stewart and Kortright 2014). But what exactly is ‘broken-​window theory’, and how is it related to graffiti? In their landmark paper, Wilson and Kelling (1982) –​respectively, a professor of government at Harvard, and a former director of the evaluation team of the Police Foundation –​addressed the issue of community life quality and, more generally, public order. The authors insisted on the importance of foot police patrols and their ‘order-​maintenance function’. We shouldn’t forget, they claimed, that policemen are essential to such maintenance, and this goes beyond just the fight against major crimes. To explain why day-​to-​day order maintenance matters, they relied on a psychosocial experiment conducted in the 1960s and, more importantly to our concern, on a seminal policy paper discussing the effects of graffiti on subway trains in New York (Glazer 1979). They drew two main conclusions from these sources. First, public order is a matter of visibility. Some things, such as broken windows and graffiti, work as signs of disorder, ‘signs of official failure’, as Glazer wrote. These symptoms should be eradicated, Wilson and Kelling held, not only because they can be the cause of a sense of fear within communities, but also, and this is the second foundation of the theory, because they are contagious. ‘(I)f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken’ (Wilson and Kelling 1982: 31, emphasized in the original). Understood as signs that ‘no one cares’, each single instance of broken urban furniture, each piece of graffiti, is seen as an encouragement that may lead to other cases. Each is a potential step toward the deliquescence of social order.1 The authors contrasted the broken-​window approach with the usual criminological focus on crime-​solving. Their theory calls for a constant supervision of places focused on signs of disorder, and it requires numerous and regular

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222  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille interventions to get rid of them as soon as possible. This way of dealing with graffiti has important and concrete consequences for how the walls of the city are treated. Indeed, if graffiti are signs of disorder, it means that walls do have a normal, ‘ordered’ condition which graffiti disrupt. The removal interventions are a way to bring back walls to this original shape, and thus to restore order. Yet, configured as a maintenance activity, graffiti removal is an endless process that entails thousands and thousands of interventions per year. It is an ongoing task that can virtually never stop. Hence, what is regarded as the ‘normal condition’ is not a prior stable condition for walls, but the ephemeral outcome of a continual undertaking: clean walls are both a premise and a result in the graffiti-​removal assemblage. The idea that walls have an ‘original’ condition and that graffiti removal should lead to its restoration is at stake in each intervention. Leaving the walls as if neither graffiti nor removal interventions happened is not an easy task though. One of the difficulties in using paint to cover a graffiti is, for instance, to find the right hue that will exactly match the colour of the wall. And even if they manage to obtain the right colour, workers still have to find a way to delimit the zone of their intervention, so that the new painting remains as invisible as possible. Otherwise, they would produce what they call a ‘cleanness stain’. The same kind of problem occurs when using high-​ pressure water or a sandblaster:  if graffiti are removed simply following the outlines of the letters and drawing, what workers call a ‘ghost’ would remain. The ink or the paint used to write the graffiti would be erased, but its shape would still be distinguishable. Bearing such traces, the wall would not be considered cleaned, and maintenance work would not be successfully accomplished. Moreover, graffiti-​removal interventions are also steered by a certain ideal of ‘invisible work’ (Star and Strauss 1999). As one of the workers we followed told us: I have this kind of philosophy: that you do not see anything. Ideally, no one would notice that we came, and no one would even remember there was graffiti. (Interview with John) What is at stake in each intervention and in the constantly reiterated ‘restoration’ of wall order is thus the production of a double invisibility: of course, invisibility of the removed graffiti, but also invisibility of its removal, namely the erasure of any traces of materials used (e.g. chemical, water, paint, sand …), of actions performed during the intervention, and of the workers themselves.

A surface The constant (re)production of clean walls is a requirement explicitly stated in the contracts the City Hall signs with contractors. The organization of the supervision of walls, and the strict deadlines each company has

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 223 to meet once a graffiti is detected, are a direct translation of the broken-​ window theory principles. Yet, these principles are not organized in terms of the rhythm of interventions only. Maintenance contracts also define the graffiti-​removal process in spatial terms. The presence or absence of graffiti is measured in Euclidian units and interventions are described in square metres and ‘thresholds’. The question ‘how much graffiti should be removed?’ is thus translated into ‘how many square metres of graffiti should be erased?’ Through this ontological enactment, walls are enacted as surfaces, and the city is handled as a quantified territory. Walls are comprehended as two-​dimensional areas, converted into planes that can be measured, added and combined, so as to be statistically commensurable. Before the first call for tenders, an ‘Observatory of graffiti’ had been set up to do the first measurements and split the city into different zones. Henceforth, quantification has been integrated within the maintenance process itself through the constant production of statistical data. Each intervention begins with a picture of the graffiti about to be removed (Figure 10.1). The picture is saved in a database, with a form providing additional information: the nature of the wall, its location, the type of graffiti, and their size. Once the intervention is finished, another picture of the ‘empty’ wall is added to the file.

Figure 10.1 Taking a picture before removing the graffiti. Source: © J. Denis and D. Pontille.

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Figure 10.2 Reporting the amount of surfaces with graffiti. Source: © J. Denis and D. Pontille.

The data are regularly sent by contractors to the municipality, where monthly and annual reports are edited. In these reports, two indicators are particularly important: the average quantity of cleaned surface during a certain time, and the ‘recurrence rate’ (how long before a cleaned surface has to be treated again). Not only do these indicators account for the activity of the contractors, but they also provide precious information to the city’s staff in order to recalibrate the zones that will appear in the next call. Measured surfaces are employed to control the contractor’s activity, too. As said earlier, every month an inspection is set up to verify that the terms of contracts are met. This inspection is conceived of as a representative sample of the whole area: a new point of departure is picked randomly each time, from which a systematic path is followed for a specified length (first street to the right, next to the left, next to the right, and so on). During this collective walk, every spotted graffiti is noted on a paper form, along with its ‘size’, that is the amount of surface it occupies. At the end of the tour, the sum of all the affected surfaces is calculated (Figure 10.2). If the total exceeds the required threshold for the zone, the contractor is charged a fee.

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 225 Walls are also enacted as surfaces in a further sense. The removal policy tackles the interfaces between public and private spaces, which divide and connect the streets and the buildings, to determine what falls under the municipality’s responsibility and what under the tenants’. Interestingly, redefining the conditions under which theses surfaces are ‘cleaned’, the Paris removal policy has dramatically transformed the role of walls. Previously seen as the responsibility of building owners, graffiti removal has now been turned into a municipal matter. This was made possible thanks to a by-​law that has rendered wall surfaces ‘more public’ than in the past. Two things should be noted, though. First, the territory quantified as measurable surfaces, and taken care of by the municipality and its contractors, is far from exhaustive. The city captured by this policy is fragmentary. Several walls –​notably those owned by certain public and private companies –​slip out of this policy. Second, this framework is not a matter of contracts and legal texts only, rather, it has to be constantly reenacted in the streets. During the monthly verification, for instance, the definition of what counts as a cleaned surface and how it is measured are discussed and adjusted. Likewise, the frontier between public and private spaces is regularly reenacted. Sometimes, the workers might have to negotiate the access to a wall with local inhabitants and tenants. Metal shutters are also an excellent example to understand the necessity of such reenactments: when they are down, they count as surfaces, and the graffiti they bear have to be removed. This means that they have to be taken care of in the early hours of the morning, before the stores open and they disappear as walls.2

A space for public expression Obviously, graffiti removal is not simply based on measuring surfaces and calculating rates of recurrence. As public inscriptions, graffiti are also considered an expressive means: any particular drawing or written word can be examined for its expressive and aesthetic features.3 This is another important feature of the Parisian graffiti-​removal assemblage: the meaning, forms and colours of all graffiti are scrutinized in their own right. This close examination draws on particular, official characterizations. Such an approach towards public inscriptions entails a specific ontology of walls as spaces for public expression. A first characterization is the difference between authorized graffiti, often called by removal workers ‘artworks’ or ‘murals’, and the rest. To make this distinction possible, local authorities regularly send to contractors an updated list of walls with graffiti that should not be removed. This list works as a supplementary document to the initial contract signed with the municipality:  it designates exceptions. Such a distinction is also made through specific demands from the municipality. For instance, contractors sometimes receive pictures similar to the one in Figure 10.3, where the graffiti that have to be removed are clearly distinguished from the ‘mural’ that should remain intact.

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Figure 10.3 Making a clear distinction between graffiti and artwork. Source: © J. Denis and D. Pontille.

This characterization is at play during day-​to-​day interventions as well. As we were following removal workers in the streets of Paris, they regularly explained to us why this or that inscription should not be erased, mobilizing situated criteria such as ‘It’s clear that this inscription is intended to be here’ or ‘This one is signed’. Sometimes, the situation is not obvious, though. Each time workers have doubts, they take a picture of the wall and, once back to their headquarters, they show it to their manager, so as to discuss it and make a decision. Some of these doubts may also be dispelled in situ by the tenants. For instance, a shopkeeper may ask the workers to spare what she regards as an acceptable beautification of a metal shutter or a front grey wall close to her shop. The characterization of public inscriptions is thus far from automatic and the list of authorized graffiti is supplemented by situated judgements, hesitations and collective discussions made on a daily basis. Therefore, even though each wall constitutes a unique ‘where of graffiti’ (Cresswell 1992), depending on the conclusion these adjustments lead to, it may be enacted in different ways: from a dirty surface that has to be cleaned to a display of artworks meant to last. A second official characterization, which refers to a very different aspect of expressivity, plays an important role in the graffiti-​removal policy. The

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 227 municipal contract identifies a distinct form of graffiti: those that are ‘offensive, pornographic or prejudicial to public order’. Such categorization has tremendous consequences. It calls for a specific treatment and a particularly demanding contractual framework. Indeed, whereas ‘regular’ graffiti have to be removed within ten days after their detection, the contractors are compelled to erase the offensive ones within three hours, 24/​7. Each time insults appear, walls are thus treated as discursive devices, and their cleansing becomes part of a ‘politics of the performative’ (Butler 1997). Yet, once again things are not linear. Even though most graffiti do not raise any doubts, some may appear equivocal, while some others may remain indecipherable for a certain period of time. For instance, during our fieldwork a worker came back from his daily tour impressed by ‘the amount of graffiti the artist ACAB wrote’ in a certain area. His manager promptly retorted that ‘ACAB’ actually meant ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ and was thus an offensive graffiti that had to be removed immediately. She called another worker, still in this neighbourhood, and asked him to intervene. Since then, a notice has been displayed in the office recalling the meaning of ‘ACAB’. The injurious categorization is therefore an ongoing open process, with its hesitations and its reconsiderations. Again, the notion of assemblage is useful here, since it helps recognize the situatedness of the policy and its ontological enactments.

An official decorum In some cases, notably when a politician or a public official is scheduled to appear in a specific location for a special occasion, such as the celebration of a national holiday or the inauguration of a building, graffiti removal takes on a very particular pace. Public celebrations and the presence of authorities involve specific removal interventions, which enact the walls of the city in a manner that dramatically differs from the ones we previously described. These interventions are exceptional in many respects. First, they are not included in the contracts that define the day-​by-​day task of the contractors, and are charged separately. Graffiti removal is here handled on a case basis. The location or the route that has to be cleansed is sent to the concerned contractual company several days in advance, and a reinforced staff of operatives is often called forth. Second, the contractors do not work alone. The municipal team dedicated to graffiti removal participates in these operations, as well as the teams that are in charge of other aspects of street-​cleaning. Lastly, and most importantly, these “high-​impact operations” are not in line with the broken-​window theory framework. Indeed, what is at stake here is not the eradication of a phenomenon considered as harmful to the public order through regular supervision and fast, repeated interventions. Instead, graffiti removal takes the form of ‘one shot’ operations, and temporarily enacts the walls of Paris as an official decorum, a pristine scene on which no sign of dirt, of any kind, must be seen.

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228  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille Theses situations recall that of the renovated and repainted graffiti-​free subway trains especially prepared in 1984 for the four hundred Europeans invited for a weekend stay in New  York City by a tour agency based in London. This anecdote, with which Austin (2001:  2–​3) starts his book on the history of NYC graffiti, reminds us that the public image of a city is of crucial concern, and that its control is sometimes considered so important that it leads to the production of real theatrical performances, in Goffman’s sense of the expression (1959). The walls that can be seen in the background of an official celebration are crucial components in the decor of the event. Free of graffiti, they display a stabilized and cleaned environment, meant to manage the impression of the participants: passers-​by and active members, officials themselves, security squads, but also the audience of the newspapers and websites that display photos or videos of the event. Such enactment of walls as a ceremonial decor has important consequences for the urban reality that graffiti removal performs. Even though the locations of public appearances for inaugurations or memorials obviously change from one event to another, they do not take place all over the city. In Paris, only a few arrondissements are concerned. This means that, even from the standpoint of graffiti removal, not all walls of the city are similar. Inequalities emerge between those that exceptionally, but regularly, fall into officials’ programme and those, cleaned on the regular basis of the graffiti-​removal policy, that are merely dedicated to the everyday life of inhabitants, and non-​VIP tourists. Two kinds of territories are performed in this asymmetry. The first one is that of the ‘regular’ city, which is managed by the regime of broken-​window theory, and covers virtually the totality of the streets and the neighbourhoods. Walls are here taken care of on a daily basis, cleaned so as to recover a state considered as ‘normal’, that is devoid of graffiti. The second territory, which is performed by exceptional interventions, is ephemeral. It pops up once in a while like a fragment detached from the day-​to-​day urban ecology. It takes place in the assemblage that performs the local setting of an official staging, and that is also meant to circulate in multiple visual representations –​ newspapers, television, websites, etc. The walls of this second territory are enacted as components of a legitimate image of Paris. This enactment goes through rendering them temporarily pristine, a condition way beyond ‘normal’.

A material composite Either routinely accomplished or exceptionally operated on an event basis, graffiti removal is anything but a simple activity. As interesting as the vocabulary of erasure may be, walls are not paper sheets from which graffiti could be wiped off with a rubber. It is, actually, a challenge. Beyond the risk of generating what workers call ‘cleanness stains’, most removal techniques themselves represent a non-​negligible threat to the integrity of walls. How these threats

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 229

Figure 10.4 Touching the wall and the graffiti. Source: © J. Denis and D. Pontille.

are taken into consideration highlights a fifth crucial ontological enactment made by the graffiti-​removal policy: walls are treated as material composites. One only needs to look at the first move that inaugurates every intervention to measure the importance of the material side of graffiti removal. Each time removal workers enter into action, they make the same gesture before proceeding further: they stretch their hand out and touch the surface they are about to treat (Figure 10.4). By doing so, they told us, they assess the material properties of both the wall and the graffiti. This first gesture provides direction for the following operations. Thanks to this material appraisal, workers are able to properly engage in their intervention. Above all, they can choose the right technique, and dismiss those incompatible with the materials to be faced. In the presence of a porous stone wall, for instance, it is inconceivable to use high-​pressure water or sandblasting. As one of the workers explained to us, this is due to the behaviours of both the stone and the graffiti: With porous material, it’s really complicated. The graffiti migrates within the stone very quickly, it is almost impossible to remove it entirely. And

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230  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille the stone itself is extremely fragile. If you use high pressure, you carve into the wall, really. The damage would be irreparable. (Interview with Steven) There is only one solution in this case: the use of paint in order to cover the unwanted inscription. When the surface is already painted, other problems occur. The workers have to evaluate the consistency of the paint, and its capacity to resist a certain dose of chemicals. They have to find the right balance between the preservation of the original paint and the ability of the product to erase the paint or the ink of the graffiti. But the material enactment of walls is not done only by a visual and tactile evaluation. It also goes through the workers’ corporeal postures and their bodily adjustments during the removal intervention. The use of high-​pressure water, for instance, requires the right distance. Workers need to tune their gestures with a series of meticulous trials and errors during the first seconds of the operation that allows them to gently erase the inscriptions without deteriorating the wall that bears them. Likewise, applying chemicals requires a careful use of sponges and rags. It is of critical importance to deploy them in the right place and at the right time. If the product is left for too long on the wall, it would irremediably damage the wall and prevent any ‘normal’ state being restored. Several aspects are particularly interesting in this ontological enactment. It notably shows that walls are fragile. This is an important dimension of maintenance practices:  it foregrounds the material vulnerability of things and their need to be taken care of (Denis and Pontille 2015). Even though walls may appear as one of the most solid material components of cities, their sturdiness should not be considered an intrinsic and universal property. Our exploration of graffiti removal can be seen as an invitation to study other kinds of walls maintenance, such as renovation, refacing, or more mundane operations. Furthermore, beyond this generic vulnerability, we have noticed that when it comes to materials, to the ‘stuff the walls are made of’, things may get hazy. During removal interventions, what constitutes a wall is actually not an obvious matter. What workers are dealing with is a material composite, a composite that is not the mere addition of previously identifiable things, but presents a ‘material ecology’ (notably made of chemicals, water, sand, stones, concrete, plaster, bricks, mural paint, graffiti paint, ink, etc.) with which the workers have to engage in order to successfully proceed to removal. By doing so, they follow, without knowing it, Ingold’s plea to take the material complexity of things into consideration: We see the building and not the plaster of its walls, the words and not the ink with which they were written. In reality, of course, the materials are still there and continue to mingle and react as they have always done …. (Ingold 2007: 9)

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 231 What is particularly striking in this aspect of the removal process is that the distinction between the wall, on one side, and the graffiti, on the other, is not given beforehand; rather, it is a situated achievement, the outcome of the interventions themselves. Above all, this outcome is difficult to obtain. The whole operation could fail  –​and in some situations it does. A  bit of what eventually proves to be the graffiti can remain in place. A bit of what eventually proves to be the wall may disappear. Yet, bringing walls back to their ‘normal state’ entails removing only ‘the stuff graffiti are made of’. Graffiti removal therefore requires a delicate material ontological operation that simultaneously enacts what the wall is and what the graffiti are.

Conclusion In this chapter, we showed that graffiti removal in Paris, as in other cities, is a crucial part of a politics of public order maintenance. The removal policy, a paradigmatic application of broken-​window theory, is indeed organized as a daily never-​ending process, through which what are considered as visible signs of disorder are constantly wiped off walls and taken away from the sight of inhabitants and passers-​by. Taking into consideration what could be considered as insignificant maintenance practices profoundly changes the traditional understanding of the modes of existence of walls in the city, and the sociomaterial order they participate in performing. First, from legal and contractual documents to the removal techniques, and workers’ gestures and words, we showed that graffiti removal enacts walls. This is obviously not the only domain of activity that participates in the definition and the conditions of existence of walls, yet this enactment is extremely important: without a graffiti-​removal policy, a great majority of walls in Paris would neither look nor exist the way they do today. Yet, we also showed that such enactment is anything but unidirectional. Even though graffiti removal is conceived of as a way to maintain public order straight on the walls, its exploration foregrounds the multiplicity of ontological enactments that are performed to do so. The ‘same’ wall can be handled as the object of a specific kind of maintenance, as quantified surface, as controlled space of public expression, as part of an official decorum, and as an uncertain material composite. The ‘same’ wall is, in other words, the result of the consecutive, sometimes simultaneous, enactments of very contrastive versions that each raises specific concerns. Investigating the enactments of walls as crucial parts of a specific urban assemblage is important in many respects. It is a means to emphasize how these enactments make language and matter hold together. Following Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are intrinsically made of words-​and-​ matter. Graffiti removal is particularly telling in this regard. It deals with traces and inscriptions unofficially displayed in the city, whose erasure implies the articulation of the material properties of walls (stone, brick, paint, concrete …), graffiti (ink, paint …) and removal techniques (water, sponge, paint,

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232  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille sand, rags, chemical products …). Graffiti removal is thus a singular case of ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) in which what is produced and reproduced is the absence, rather than the presence, of some enunciative entities. Silencing, too, is an essential part of the collective enunciation of the city. We also showed that, as part of an urban maintenance assemblage, the ontological enactments that occur in graffiti removal are relational. Indeed, a specific enactment of walls implies, at least, a specific enactment of graffiti, of order maintenance, and of urban reality. Moreover, these relational enactments are not inert, and cannot be described as a mere set of rules and principles. The original French word used by Deleuze and Guattari (1980) is precisely agencement, a term that insists not only on material and linguistic heterogeneity, but also on agency. Graffiti removal, and urban maintenance in general, is a process; obviously, they draw on documents, laws, standards that are extremely important, but they would remain lettre morte without workers, interventions, exceptional operations and verification processes. These situated actions perform a certain territorialization, but they are also subject to deterritorialization processes. Indeed, we saw that the removal interventions cannot be automated. They imply improvisations, adjustments and situated judgements. They also have to deal with the environment of the city, for instance with weather conditions that constrain the use of certain removal techniques. The practice is also subject to changes:  new kinds of walls materials regularly appear (such as porous coating or rusty metal surfaces making graffiti removal tricky), innovative graffiti-​removal techniques are tested (for instance, to intervene on trees without damaging them), and so on. Finally, our exploration foregrounds the connection between graffiti removal and other assemblages, other ontological enactments. This is obvious when it comes to street cleaning, as we have seen in the case of the enactment of an official decor. But two other assemblages, briefly encountered in our descriptions, are also directly connected to graffiti removal. The first one enacts graffiti as artworks or murals. The lists of authorized pieces that are transmitted to the municipality contractors are one of the numerous ingredients of this assemblage, in which graffiti writers themselves, specific budgets and numerous other things are also crucial. If graffiti writers are almost absent from the removal assemblage, they are at the centre of the ‘cultural’ assemblage, in which they are enacted as artists. An important aspect is that, even though they differ dramatically in rhythm and components, both assemblages participate in the same ontological enactment of walls as sites of public expression. A second assemblage is worth mentioning, which is also essential to the maintenance of order: the legal ‘struggle’ against graffiti. Here, graffiti are enacted as a crime. Graffiti writers, again, appear to be at the centre of preoccupations, yet this time as delinquents who have to be tracked, arrested, and punished. The connection with removal interventions is made through the database where the pictures of each operation are stored. Sometimes, the

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 233 police ask for access to this database. The walls on these occasions are not enacted as objects of maintenance, surfaces, sites of public expressions, decor, or material composite, but as evidence of crime. Hence, the answer to the question, ‘what is an urban wall?’ is by no means simple, direct, and univocal. Walls are enacted in practices. They take place in, and contribute to, a variety of assemblages. Each assemblage does not perform single and distinct ontological enactments of walls, though. Some partially share the same version, while others bring different versions into existence. Graffiti removal and urban maintenance in general, though they may seem univocal ordering processes, are of this kind. They enact contrasted ontologies of walls and of urban reality.

Notes 1 For a more general discussion on the role of observable traces in the continuous upkeep of urban spaces, see Murphy (2017). 2 For a broader elaboration on the diverse rhythms of walls, see Brighenti (2009). 3 The aesthetic examination has been at stake since the very beginning of NYC graffiti writing (Cresswell 1992), and is still disputed nowadays (McAuliffe and Iveson 2011; Brighenti 2016).

References Amin, A., and Thrift, N. (2002), Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity. Austin, J. (2001), Taking the Train. How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press. Brenner, N., Madden, D.J., and Wachsmuth, D. (2011), ‘Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory’, City, 15(2), 225–​240. Brighenti, A.M. (2009), ‘Walled urbs to urban walls –​and return? On the social life of walls,’ in A.M. Brighenti (ed.), The Wall and the City /​Le mur et la ville /​Il muro e la città. Trento: professionaldreamers, 63–​69. Brighenti, A.M. (2016), ‘Expressive measures: An ecology of the public domain’, in K. Avramidis and M. Tsilimpounidi (eds.), Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. New York: Routledge, 119–​134. Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. continent (2017), Special issue on repair, edited by L. Houston, D.K. Rosner, S.J. Jackson and J. Allen. continent, 6(1). Cresswell, T. (1992), ‘The crucial “where” of graffiti:  A geographical analysis of reactions to graffiti in New York’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10(3), 329–​344. DeLanda, M. (2006), A New Philosophy of Society:  Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2016), Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1980), Milles plateaux. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Denis, J., and Pontille, D. (2014), ‘Maintenance work and the performativity of urban inscriptions: The case of Paris subway signs’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(3), 404–​416.

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234  Jérôme Denis and David Pontille Denis, J., and Pontille, D. (2015), ‘Material ordering and the care of things’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 40(3), 338–​367. Domínguez Rubio, F. (2016), ‘On the discrepancy between objects and things’, Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), 59–​86. Edensor, T. (2011), ‘Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 238–​252. Edensor, T. (2012), ‘Vital urban materiality and its multiple absences:  The building stone of central Manchester’, Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 447–​465. Farías I., and Bender T. (eds.) (2010), Urban Assemblages. How Actor-​Network Changes Urban Studies. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Glazer, N. (1979), ‘On subway graffiti in New York’, The Public Interest, 54, 3–​11. Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. Graham, S., and Thrift, N. (2007), ‘Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1–​25. Gregson, N., Metcalfe, A., and Crewe, L. (2009), ‘Practices of object maintenance and repair:  How consumers attend to consumer objects within the home’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 9(2), 248–​272. Henke, C.R. (2000), ‘The mechanics of workplace order:  Toward a sociology of repair’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 44, 55–​81. Ingold, T. (2007), ‘Materials against materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, 14(01), 1–​16. Jackson, S.J. (2014), ‘Rethinking repair’, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies  –​Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 221–​240. Kamalipour, H., and Peimani, N. (2015), ‘Assemblage thinking and the city: Implications for urban studies’, Current Urban Studies, 3(4), 402–​408. Kärrholm, M. (2007), ‘The materiality of territorial production: A conceptual discussion of territoriality, materiality, and the everyday life of public space’, Space and Culture, 10(4), 437–​453. de Laet, M., and Mol, A. (2000), ‘The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology’, Social Studies of Science, 30(2), 225–​263. Latham, A., and McCormack, D.P. (2004), ‘Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28(6), 701–​724. Latour, B., and Hermant, E. (1998), Paris ville invisible. Paris:  Les empêcheurs de penser en rond /​La Découverte. Law, J. (2010), ‘The materials of STS’, in D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 173–​188. McAuliffe, C., and Iveson, K. (2011), ‘Art and crime (and other things besides …): Conceptualising graffiti in the city’, Geography Compass, 5(3), 128–​143. McFarlane, C. (2011a), ‘Assemblage and critical urbanism’, City, 15(2), 204–​224. McFarlane, C. (2011b), ‘The city as assemblage:  Dwelling and urban space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(4), 649–​671. Mol, A. (1999), ‘Ontological politics. A word and some questions’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 74–​89. Mol, A. (2002), The Body Multiple:  Ontology in Medical Practice. London:  Duke University Press Books, 216–​216.

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The multiple walls of graffiti removal 235 Murphy, M.A. (2017), ‘Dwelling together: Observable traces and controls in residential urban spaces’, Space and Culture, 20(1), 4–​23. Pile S., and Thrift N.J. (eds.) (2000), City A-​Z. London: Psychology Press. Rankin, K.N. (2011), ‘Assemblage and the politics of thick description’, City, 15(5), 563–​569. Shaw, R. (2014), ‘Cleaning up the streets:  Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne’s night-​time neighbourhood services team’, In S. Graham and C. McFarlane (eds.), Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. London: Routledge, 174–​196. Smith, D.E. (1974), ‘The social construction of documentary reality’, Sociological Inquiry, 44(4), 257–​268. Star, S.L., and Strauss, A. (1999), ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8(1–​2), 9–​30. Stewart, M., and Kortright, C. (2014), ‘Cracks and contestation: Toward an ecology of graffiti and abatement’, Visual Anthropology, 28(1), 67–​87. Strebel, I. (2011), ‘The living building: Towards a geography of maintenance work’, Social & Cultural Geography, 12(3), 243–​262. Tecnoscienza (2015), Special issue on maintenance and repair in science and technology studies. Tecnoscienza, 6(2). Wilson, J.Q., and Kelling, G.L. (1982), ‘Broken windows’, Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29–​38. Woolgar, S., and Lezaun, J. (2013), ‘The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?’, Social Studies of Science, 43(3), 321–​340. Woolgar, S., and Neyland, D. (2013), Mundane Governance:  Ontology and Accountability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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11  Walls as fleeting surfaces From bricks to pixels, trains to Instagram Lachlan MacDowall

Introduction –​“We just form a fucking wall …” In early January 2015 in San Antonio, Texas, the NBA’s Detroit Pistons were battling the home town Spurs in a regular season game. The Spurs led by three points with 10 seconds left in the match, but through a series of errors found themselves down by 1 point with only the smallest amount of time left in the match. Under NBA rules, with 0.01 seconds on the clock, the only permissible shot would be a deflection from an in-​bound pass. Confronting this situation in the time-​out huddle, and caught on the TV cameras, Detroit coach Stan Van Gundy scribbled furiously on his whiteboard, telling his players: “We just form a fucking wall ….” Just as the game of basketball became at that moment a new sport –​with scoring only allowed by deflecting the ball into the hoop from a pass outside the court –​so Van Gundy abandoned basketball’s usually complex coaching schemas for the most basic and perhaps instinctive of all defensive strategies. In a game based on speed and freedom of movement, forming a wall of players is not an effective strategy, except in these most unusual of circumstances. Detroit managed to prevent the Spurs from scoring, winning the match and the video of Van Gundy instructing his players went viral, not least because of his use of an expletive and his whiteboard drawing:  instead of the usual detailed diagramming involving criss-​crossing moves on and off the ball, he simply scrawled his marker back and forward insistently, leaving a messy, heavy line. “The Wall vs. Everybody” appeared on official team t-​shirts of the Piston’s cheerleaders and series of Internet memes. Taking place in San Antonio, (nearly) the NBA’s southern-​most venue and (nearly) its closest to the US-​Mexico border, in a basketball league dominated by Afro-​American players and a growing Latino audience, Van Gundy’s gesture had an ambiguous political valency. But six months later, the humour of the memes would be displaced by Donald Trump’s announcement at his official campaign launch at Trump Towers in New York, that he “will build a great, great wall on our southern border”. Though the practical details of the funding and construction of Trump’s wall would falter, the rich semiosis of “The Wall” would place the image of frontiers, nation-​building, violence

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 237 and exclusion at the centre of his campaign and later, his presidency. Like the most unusual version of basketball played by the Pistons and the Spurs, Trump’s vulgarity transformed the nexus between culture and politics in the US, becoming, in Vanity Fair’s headline, the “new normal” (Warren 2017). This chapter reflects on the ways in which the cultural power and semiotic features of contemporary walls have become organised in relation to political discourse while retaining complex valencies, particularly in a digital economy, in which the semiotic effects of walls are reconfigured and recirculate without reference to their original context. The rise of the photo-​sharing app Instagram has signalled a new phase of digital culture in which the proliferation of mobile digital devices and new relationships to visuality, tactility and screens are forged within the architecture of a closed, corporate platform that would have been antithetical to earlier ideals of an open Internet. More than simply a popular app that acts as a container for content, the unfolding design of Instagram describes a new logic of urban behaviour and relations. In the Instagram Era, cities are also changing and the meaning and function of walls within cities take on a new character. This chapter explores three domains in which Instagram cultures have transformed the work of walls. It does so with reference to examples from graffiti and street art, arguing that these forms have an exemplary relationship to Instagram’s logic, as demonstrated by the intuitive similarities between the blur of rolling horizontal walls viewed from a train and the experience of fast scrolling through vertical churn of an Instagram feed, updating Schivelbusch’s classic formulation of the perceptual nexus between the railway and early cinema (Schivelbusch 1986). The chapter argues that firstly, like film sets, walls have become a backdrop for the production of digital content. That is, walls are now both activated as momentary settings for performances and just as quickly rendered as redundant as film sets post-​shooting. Secondly, as Instagram functions to both amplify and accelerate the production of new walls, the surfaces of walls are being transformed at increasing speeds, making walls akin to a mobile or fleeting surface such as a train. Thirdly, Instagram also expands the notion of a wall’s content, which no longer simply refers to its material structure or visible surface but also its presence within Instagram’s “corrupt archive” and as a networked element of the Internet of Things. In this context, walls can be viewed not just as passive targets for photographs or mark-​making but, through the scale and pattern of the interactions between urban subjects, as the generators of vast amounts of data. Even as the significance of bricks as a construction material is fading, walls themselves are undergoing a technological revolution. Just as the existing US-​ Mexico border walls and Trump’s imagined version is strewn with cameras and sensors, contemporary walls are now highly technologized objects, for instance, Tesla’s Powerwall product which houses batteries inside a wall cavity and, according to its website, provides “backup power during utility

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238  Lachlan MacDowall outages, natural disasters and even the Zombie Apocalypse (you know it’s coming)” (Tesla 2017). In a world of the Internet of Things, the networking of household objects and appliances, walls are also becoming data machines. This change is registered not just through the insertion of digital devices into walls –​power sources, sensors, reactive elements –​but by the way in which walls become part of a larger economy of surveillance, visibility and attention. The chapter is divided into three parts:  the first considers the transition from walls to screens via the analogous move from bricks to pixels in a range of artworks, noting both the aesthetic possibilities of urban grid designs and their homology with the gridded forms of the techno-​financial systems. Secondly, I take up the connections between walls and trains in graffiti culture, itself manifested in a number of artworks, to consider how walls-​as-​screens mirror the previous mobility and fleeting nature of train surfaces. Finally, the contemporary wall as a machine that produces data is considered, taking a longitudinal study of a single wall as symptomatic of a wider epistemological transformation.

Part 1: from bricks to pixels, walls to screens Long after brick walls have been superseded by other building materials they are still used for their significatory reassurance as much as their material properties. In Western cities, traces of bricks remain in the post-​war suburbs, in heritage architecture or are inserted into new buildings of timber and steel as a decorative element. During the Industrial Revolution the construction of new factories was often completed in manufactured bricks, even where stone was available, due to their low costs and advances in the mechanisation of brick production. The first brick-​making machine was patented in the 1850s in New York and Middlesex, capable of producing 25,000 bricks daily. Though the exact dimensions of bricks varied, they were in part determined by a bricklayer’s grasp, so one hand would lay the bricks and the other apply the mortar with a trowel. The width of a brick was usually twice its length, allowing for a system in which bricks were laid in alternating patterns for increased strength or decoration. However, in a contemporary era characterised by the increasing abstraction of finance capital even bricks and mortar  –​a phrase used to stand in for the materiality of the real estate in opposition to ephemeral assets –​are undergoing their own form of de-​materialisation. For example, Brick X, a start-​up company that was founded in Australia, one of the areas in which measures of housing unaffordability are more pronounced, aims to disrupt the housing finance market, and allows investors to purchase shares in a house, represented by a single brick. This system of “fractional ownership” means the company is “selling houses just one brick at a time”, with an opening price of around US$100 per brick (Schipp 2017). In this model, the “bricks and mortar” of the family home are sub-​divided and disaggregated, such that the solidity and unity of the house’s structure

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 239 masks a complex web of owners. In a flourish of marketing and mercantile imagination, the single material units of the houses’ construction become available as an investment model. The model is based on two simultaneous, and contradictory, imaginings of the wall –​that it represents a solid structure and hence a solid investment, but that the wall’s ownership can be split apart, a single object splintered into pieces that individually have little value. Under this new regime, wealth is visualised as a collection of equal, visible parts:  bricks become units of currency. In fact, the idea has its precursors in the late eighteenth century, when George III levied a brick tax to pay for the cost of the war with the American colonies. The initial tax was levied on the production of each 1000 bricks, but manufacturers dodged the tax by increasing the size of bricks, until the sizes of bricks themselves were capped by legislation (Lucas 2017: 29–​55). If bricks were the pre-​eminent construction material of the early Industrial period they also formed a conceptual model for urban construction based on uniform materials scaled up from the human body that could be joined together in endless combinations, much like the world of pixels that followed the abandonment of the brick factories (Figure 11.1). This link between bricks and pixels as constitutive elements of the urban is cemented by the early video game Tetris, in which bricks constructed of the primitive, visible pixels descend from the sky, and more recently in

Figure 11.1 Graffiti inside the kiln of an abandoned brick factory, Melbourne, 2008. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

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240  Lachlan MacDowall

Figure 11.2 Lost artwork by Invader on bluestone bricks, Melbourne (2002–​2012). Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

Minecraft, in which players begin the game in a grassy glade and must literally invent the urban by constructing buildings from coloured cubes of various materials. The connection between the uniform matrix of bricks and the perfect endless grid of pixels is also evident in the work of a number of street artists, notably the French artist Invader, who reproduces images using tiles and other squares, again referencing the aesthetics of early video games (Figure 11.2). Also, artists that utilise the regular shapes of temporary fences that often follow the demolition of walls are also registering the residue of walls and a pixel template. Examples of this include Andy Uprock, who places plastic cups in the gaps in chain link fences, and Sunfigo, who weaves plastic tape into the same surfaces, or the figures constructed of square milk-​crates by the Cornelius Brown collective (Figures 11.3 and 11.4) It is no coincidence that so many examples of the parallels between bricks and pixels come from the early millennium, a period that is a high point for both street art and the public Internet. In an era before apps such as Instagram quarantined images in proprietary spaces and hermetic enclosures, the Internet had an energy for shared creativity and activism that also reflected a nostalgia for first encounters with computers, made literal in Invader’s work. While the rise of “pixel bricks” reflects a playful and participatory mood, it also takes place in an era in which the intensification and chaos of the

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 241

Figure 11.3 “Cuprocking” in the grid of chain link fence by Andy Uprock, Melbourne, 2008. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

global financial system are themselves underpinned by a claustrophobically networked world, in which, to paraphrase a television advertisement of the time from one of the world’s largest banks, “there are no more emerging markets”. Street art’s rise in the 2000s is book-​ended by two large-​scale financial meltdowns: the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–​2008. For Sean Cubitt, the infinite grid of pixels also has a negative cast, for: While screens are made up of thousands of individual pixels and subpixel diodes, they are all composed in rigid grids of rows and columns, a

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Figure 11.4 Figure constructed of milk-​crates, Melbourne, 2007. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

totalitarian ordering of vision that accords with the dominance of spreadsheets, databases, and geographic information systems in twenty-​ first-​century rule. (Cubitt 2016: 83) The shift from the building blocks of bricks to units of pixels reflects a broader shift from walls to screens. As my colleagues Papastergiadis, Barikin, McQuire and Yue (2016) argue, the proliferation of screens in urban spaces is the most visible symptom of the wider mediatisation of cities, which might stretch back to the installation of billboards or the light effects of ecclesiastical stained glass (Papastergiadis et al. 2016: 3; Huhtamo 2016).

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 243 The pixels of screens have taken the place of bricks as the basic building block of urban space. On the one hand, this is due to a literal insertion of public screens into public space, along with the ubiquity of hand-​held digital devices. But we can consider this transition from walls to screens in a more extended sense, as the walls of the city become the backdrop for the production of digital content  –​either as mise en scène for posing photographs or as the painting of graffiti and street art –​ostensibly for a local audience, but increasingly for a much larger, and largely absent, digital audience. Walls still function as screens, in the sense of acting to screen or eliminate vision, but they are also more like screens in the contemporary sense, as new forms of attention are being paid to their surfaces.

Part 2: trains-​as-​walls In early 2017 a train painted with official livery declaring “Kosovo Es Serbia” (Kosovo is Serbia) in 21 different languages left Belgrade bound for North Mitrovica, a town in northern Kosovo, the first train service joining the towns since the military conflict of the 1990s. The interior of the carriage contained images of Serbian Orthodox saints and references to the UNESCO World Heritage List. The decoration of the train carriages was widely seen as a provocation, denying Kosovo’s controversial declaration of independence in 2008. The train was stopped before it arrived in Serbia though the row escalated to a military threat. BBC News reported: Instead of promoting freedom of movement, the North Mitrovica train affair is threatening to derail an EU-​mediated process that has seen the two sides reach agreements on everything from judicial structures to, last month, a long-​awaited international telephone dialling code for Kosovo. (Delaney 2017) Though this incident recalled the earlier history of train journeys between conflict zones, in diplomatic meetings and during European wartimes, it also suggested a new form of train travel, where the carriages contained, like graffiti to authorities, a defilement, a surprising and unwelcome message. Whereas most train systems retain carriages with a spare and clean exterior devoid of messages, the minimal livery design of state bureaucracy, these carriages had large and explicit messages inside and out. A year and a half before the Serbian carriage had caused such controversy, another train carriage, this time in Hamburg, was the source of considerable upheaval and speculation. A red commuter train pulls into Barmbek station outside Hamburg. In a video of its arrival, two women with prams cross in opposite directions while a woman in a grey trench coat looks out across the adjoining platform. When a young woman dressed in jeans and black jumper eventually presses the door button of the S-​Train, it opens to reveal a wall of long grey bricks completely filling the doorway. Entry is impossible.

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244  Lachlan MacDowall This is an artwork of conceptual vandalism by graffiti artists Moses and Taps. The video of The Wall (2015) shows them calmly walking into a train layup in the middle of the day to construct the wall from bricks and mortar before the train is back in service for the evening peak hour. In The Wall, the commuter’s path is disrupted by an unforeseen erection of the brick barrier blocking their entry but the art work also plays off the conceptual division between trains and walls in graffiti culture. Graffiti originated on walls before moving to trains:  the recent book Wall Writers, which documents the history of street writing in Philadelphia and New York following the summer of 1967, is also a document of the changing architectural surfaces of the inner-​city neighbourhoods. As street writing as a craze spread to New York, it spread to the train system. In contemporary graffiti, the physical risks and challenges of painting trains place them above walls as surfaces. At the same time, there’s a perceptual equivalence between walls and trains, as viewing graffiti from a passing train produces the same kind of relation as watching graffiti on the outside of a train from a stationary vantage point. The Instagram Era has seen an increase in the simulation of train surfaces on walls –​graffiti writers will frequently construct a train backdrop on which to construct simulated train graffiti (Figure  11.5), while the occasional train graffiti will employ bricks as a design element. Moses and Taps’s art work is part of a larger series of their own conceptual attacks on the conventions of graffiti but it is also a moment in a wide

Figure 11.5 Trains transposed to walls in a graffiti mural, Melbourne, 2014. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 245 practice of graffiti artists using the train system for more than graffiti:  the unauthorised installation of surprising elements (a carriage full of leaves) or performances (a team of masked vandals brazenly clean and scrub a train carriage interior to the bemusement of commuters). In this context, The Wall makes visible and literal graffiti’s transposition, in which walls become trains and trains become walls. It also helps us make sense of a second transposition in which contemporary walls and trains have traded qualities. The public train systems present the qualities previously attributed to walls: staid, slow, solid. Walls, in the meantime, now have the qualities previously ascribed to trains as icons of modernity:  accelerating surfaces of fleeting images and shifting appearances. A consideration of the contemporary reversal and transposition of the relationship between trains and walls –​trains as mobile walls for graffiti, contemporary walls-​as-​screens that appear as mobile and fleeting as trains –​can be a fertile territory (Figure 11.6). The remainder of this section looks at this in more detail, examining how the material design of train surfaces reflects the broader political conditions which shape contemporary walls: a combination of lapsed state funding and corporate ownership and vulnerable infrastructure set against the imagined risks of terrorist attack. Just as Donald Trump’s promise to match China’s Ming Dynasty fortifications with his own “great, great wall” conjured notions of external threats, so trains-​as-​wall and

Figure 11.6 The transposition of walls and trains: the image of a graffitied train in a Melbourne restaurant, 2016. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

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246  Lachlan MacDowall walls-​as-​screens are the product of competing cultures of securitisation in contemporary cities.

Bombing Melbourne’s trains In Melbourne’s train network, changes in security procedures and the new designs of trains and train yards have structured the post-​‘9/​11’ production of graffiti. As in many cities, the transition from the model of nationalisation and state ownership favoured in the post-​World War II period has shifted to a train network under corporate control. This shift, from public to private ownership, has produced new security regimes and had distinct effects on the kinds of graffiti that are produced in Melbourne. These shifts are also reflected in the new designs of trains and train-​yards and in emergent security developments in the wake of the terrorist attacks on train networks in Madrid (2004), London (2005) and, in 2017, cities such as Brussels, St. Petersburg and near Bhopal, India. In the language of the graffiti subculture that emerged in New York in the early 1970s, to bomb is to attack, damage or destroy a surface with paint or marker (Cooper and Chalfant 1984). Arising out of the climate of protest generated by the civil rights movement, the re-​emergence of youth gangs and the increasing availability of spray paint, the subculture of graffiti tagging began in the streets of New  York, with early graffiti writers adding their street number to a nickname or pseudonym to produce a ‘tag’ that would be sprayed, scratched or scrawled on available surfaces across a neighbourhood. By 1971, the surface of choice had become the interiors and exteriors of the train carriages, which spread graffiti across the entire city, transforming the increasingly elaborate tags from static markers of neighbourhood territory to mobile signifiers of individual identity. Bombing trains involved tagging or ‘piecing’ the surface of train carriages inside and out for maximum visual impact, often with the addition of design elements appropriated from advertising, comic books and television cartoons. The stylised image of a round black bomb with lit fuse was a popular addition to pieces or panels in the early years of train graffiti in New  York (Cooper and Chalfant 1984). Though train graffiti has now become a global phenomenon through newspaper reporting, books, films and ‘zines documenting train graffiti, international networks of graffiti writers and more recently, through the Internet and apps like Instagram, the styles of graffiti developed in New York remain the dominant source of imagery and inspiration. Thirty years after the emergence of train graffiti, the stylised bomb still appears in the graffiti on Melbourne’s trains (Death From Above 2003). In part, the early image of the bomb in New York’s train graffiti signified the dangers of the train yards: the threat of violence from other gangs, the transit squad and the third rail, an electrified section of the train track. As

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 247 a cartoon bomb specifically designed to be viewed on a train, with the speed of the moving carriage suggesting the regular rhythms of television animation, it was also a particular reference to the thrill of cartoon violence, when for an instant the screen would shake and pulse explosively. Early train graffiti is full of the tropes of animated explosions: flames, shrapnel, burst and punctured outlines and clouds of smoke. The presence of the bomb in the iconography of graffiti also affected the lettering, which shifted from a highly readable ‘public’ style in the 1970s to a wild style where the letters were either fragmented and blown apart or densely interlocked and armoured against the effects of the bomb. As Kane 2 describes his wild style in Cooper and Chalfant’s Subway Art, the letters were “armed”, bristling and hostile to the gaze (Cooper and Chalfant 1984). Train graffiti was temporary, always subject to erasure, always a fusion of creation and destruction. As graffiti artist A-​One stated, “A vandal is someone who throws a brick through a window. An artist is someone who paints a window. A  great artist is someone who paints a picture on the window and then throws a brick through it” (Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990: 382). The website Subway Outlaws offers an alternative narrative of the beginnings of modern graffiti in the United States, which ties graffiti writing directly to the destructive potential of the bomb: While Graffiti iconography has been around since Egyptian times, it was not until World War II, that one name became identified with Graffiti. That name was “KILROY”. “KILROY” worked in a bomb plant in Detroit where, after checking a bomb he would scrawl in white chalk “KILROY WAS HERE”, on its side. These bombs found their way throughout war torn Europe and “KILROY” became a celebrity. As American forces took back towns from the Germans, a soldier would invariably write “KILROY WAS HERE” on whatever wall was left standing. After the war, the name “KILROY” became synonymous with Graffiti, finding its way on countless student’s notebook covers. (‘History (Subway Writing): 1969–​1989’) Just as the name Kilroy became synonymous with the devastating potential of the bomb, so the practice of ‘bombing’ trains contains an element of destructive energy. In the subculture of graffiti, bombing trains is a fundamentally ambivalent activity, as much a programme of sabotage, vandalism and subcultural advancement as a programme of urban beautification. In the aftermath of the 2005 Madrid train attacks, bombing was associated with trains in a new and powerful way. The Australian Federal Transport Minister John Anderson noted at the time that trains were the most vulnerable of all transport systems to terrorist attack (Nicholson 2004). Union representatives noted that Melbourne’s public transport system “had particular points of vulnerability”, and these were exacerbated by the

248

248  Lachlan MacDowall privatisation of train and station cleaning contracts, which left many stations unstaffed and casual cleaners employed by sub-​contractors not subject to security checks. The Union State Secretary Trevor Dobbyn announced something graffiti writers had long known:  the rail network of train carriages, stations, yards, sidings “is not a closed system like an airport, it is an open and porous system, one governed by competing and uneven ideas of security” (Silkstone 2005). With the ownership and identity of Melbourne’s public transport system split between corporate control and state government regulation, two modes of security coexist:  a pragmatic and efficient corporate army whose aim is to minimise the visible effects of graffiti and a residual state bureaucratic system with responsibility for criminal enforcement and public safety. This dual system of security is also reflected in the shift in train design from the Hitachi-​and Comeng-​designed models of the 1980s and 1990s to the new Siemens trains (Figure 11.7). For example, Hitachi and Comeng trains have a series of horizontal striations running the length of the carriage, designed to prevent the application of paint and particularly to spoil the visual effect of graffiti murals (Figure 11.7, top). In contrast, Siemens trains have a flat surface (Figure 11.7, bottom). Instead of restricting spray-​painting, the new series of trains anticipate a graffiti attack. They are designed not for graffiti prevention –​a war as unwinnable as the war on terror –​but for the rapid and effective cleaning of graffiti, making it invisible. Ironically, the design of the new Siemens series of trains draws heavily on the New York subway carriages of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heyday of a nascent graffiti culture which spread worldwide and still maintains the sides of trains as its surface of choice. The first page of the first issue of Melbourne graffiti magazine Death From Above stated, almost in disbelief: “Thanks for giving us the most perfect new flat trains …” (Death from Above 2003: 2). Partly these design changes reflect limited resources, in which private train operators seem happily pragmatic about targeting the appearance of graffiti. From their point of view, it seems cheaper to employ teams of low-​wage casual cleaning staff to labour with mops and acid to hand-​clean train exteriors, rather than invest in security personnel. As long as the graffiti is confined to the train yards, the company meets the terms of its contract with the government to remove graffiti from running trains within 24 hours. The surfaces of Melbourne’s trains are a site of struggle in the broader remapping of public and private spaces, with train graffiti providing an index or archive of the uneven nature of existing regimes of security, which at present allow a gap between the bombed trains of the graffiti world, with its repetitive dreaming of violent destruction, and the bombed trains of Madrid, gutted by improvised explosive devices thought to have been hidden inside backpacks.

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 249

Figure 11.7 Melbourne train designs and detail of train surfaces. From top: Hitachi and X’Trapolis trains. Source: photographs by Lachlan MacDowall.

Conclusion: walls as data machines The ubiquity of networked screens, both large electronic billboards and private, mobile devices, is transforming how walls function in contemporary urban spaces. In many contexts, the existence and meaning of walls have become more tenuous, fleeting and mobile. Considering the relationship between urban walls and trains, as a model for mobile walls, provides a way of understanding walls’ new mobility. Graffiti writers, long familiar with the

250

250  Lachlan MacDowall spatial and aesthetic relations between walls and trains, are responding to these changing conditions. Brick walls still exist, but in the shifting semiosis of contemporary urbanity they now function as reassuring decorative elements connoting a prior age, just as they do for graffiti writers who re-​insert them into spray-​painted murals. As I’ve argued, the transition between industrial and post-​industrial cities exemplified by the shift from bricks to pixels involves a repositioning of walls as semiotic fields and surfaces of vision, reversing the previous relationship in graffiti culture of static walls and mobile trains. Instead, walls become part of circuits of transposition. While the public Internet in the first years of the new millennium offered spaces of digital freedom and experimentation, much like the highly controlled urban zones of contemporary cities, new digital zones exemplified by apps such as Instagram exist as new walled cities or shopping malls. As Walter Benjamin argued in The Arcades Project, the new malls of late-​ nineteenth-​century Paris attempted to reproduce the spaces of the bourgeois interior and, as was manifest in later designs for shopping malls, to enclose consumers in a reassuring yet sealed-​off zone. Just as the new technology of large glass sheets was instrumental to the display of commodities and forms of desiring vision produced by the original malls, so Instagram uses the technology of glass (the phone screen rather than the shop window) to display commodities while producing an endless interior to which there is no outside –​like the architecture of the arcade, which bends time and space to enclose the consumer, so the architecture of Instagram aims to enclose the user and keep their attention. In an arcade, a consumer was invited to stroll along a tunnel and be drawn to each successive display window and then enter the shops to make a purchase. So, in Instagram, the user’s home feed is the arcade, strolling is scrolling, and entering the shops is possible by swiping to the right, a feature originally reserved for paid advertisers. Unlike walls, which grow imperceptibly with the addition of each layer of paint (Figure 11.8), screens don’t accrete a history in the same way. As part of my research into the impact of digital platforms on the production and circulation of graffiti and street art in the new digital economy of the Instagram Era, I conducted a longitudinal analysis of a single wall, a process that commenced in late 2014 and has continued through 2017. The research involves near daily visits to the wall and photographic recordings of any visual changes in graffiti, as well as broader investigations into the history and uses of the site (MacDowall 2016). I also tracked the way in which images from the site appear on social media sites, primarily Instagram, where a new audience, who may never visit the physical site, were drawn into feedback loops and responses about the work. There are a number of conclusions from this research which support the broader argument of this chapter about the relationship between walls,

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 251

Figure 11.8 Paint layers visible in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane, 2015. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

screens and trains. Firstly, the frequency of repainting at the site was high –​ walls would often last a matter of days before being repainted, rather than weeks or months (Figure 11.10). Figure 11.10 shows that of two walls at the site, most repainting was done in under three weeks. On only two occasions during this period, during September 2015, did graffiti remain intact for more than two months. Secondly, like any other digital objects, the walls of the site were easily able to produce data, including the digital images of the graffiti, the frequency of repainting and the social networks produced by the patterns of collaboration. The rich social world of graffiti that is usually represented by the practice of “putting up” friends and fellow graffiti crew members now became a more formal kind of data –​who painted with whom and when –​that was further enhanced by the formalised networks of Instagram, where images were posted, reposted, liked, etc. In the Instagram Era, walls-​as-​screens became machines for data. Finally, as if to confirm my broader conceptual argument, the affect created by the rapid turnover of the walls was one of panic. The feeling of needing to rush daily to the site to get a photograph before it was repainted was a familiar one  –​it was the same feeling previously elicited by photographing graffiti on trains. The speed of change on the wall’s surfaces heralded the walls-​as-​trains phenomenon.

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252  Lachlan MacDowall

Figure 11.9 Simulated brick wall and peeling render on actual brick wall (detail), by Nemco, Melbourne, 2014. Source: photograph by Lachlan MacDowall.

Both in graffiti culture, newly popular street art and the broader visual regimes of mobile photography in the era of Instagram, walls take on new meanings, shifting from the reassuring solidity of bricks and mortar  to  becoming fleeting surfaces that form the backdrop for digital content. We might still instinctively recognise what it means, in Stan Van Gundy’s words, to “form a fucking wall”, though we are now adrift in a culture in which the rich semiosis of the term is no longer as solid as its referent.

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Walls as fleeting surfaces 253 Walls 1 and 2 70 60

Duration (days)

50 40 30 20 10 0 Sep 2014

Nov 2014

Jan 2015

Mar 2015

May 2015

Jul 2015

Sep 2015

Nov 2015

Jan 2016

Frequency of repainting Wall 1

Wall 2

Figure 11.10 Visualisations of the frequency with which walls were repainted at the site.

References Cooper, M., and Chalfant, H. (1984), Subway Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Cubitt, S. (2016), ‘Defining the public in Piccadilly Circus’, in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 81–​94. Death From Above (2003), Issue 1, Melbourne. Delaney, G. (2017), ‘Train row almost pulls Kosovo and Serbia off the rails’, BBC News, 18 January, available at www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38666279 (accessed 22 June 2017). ‘History (Subway Writing): 1969–​1989’, Subway Outlaws webpage, available at www. subwayoutlaws.com/History/History.htm (accessed 26 June 2017). Huhtamo, E. (2016), ‘Walls, attractions, and media: An Archaeology of public visual displays’, in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 31–​48. Lucas, R. (2017), ‘The tax on bricks and tiles, 1784–​1850:  Its application to the country at large and, in particular, the County of Norfolk’, Construction History, 13, 29–​55. MacDowall, L. (2016), ‘A boneyard of data:  Graffiti and street art’s temporalities’, in Journal of Street Art and Urban Creativity, 2 (in press), available at www. urbancreativity.org/uploads/1/0/7/2/10727553/lachlan_sauc_vol2_n2.pdf (accessed 23 June 2017). Nicholson, B. (2004), ‘Trains “at risk”: Minister’, The Age, 11 May. Papastergiadis, N., Barikin, A., McQuire, S., and Yue, A. (2016), ‘Introduction: Screen cultures and public spaces’, in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 3–​27.

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254  Lachlan MacDowall Schipp, D. (2017), ‘New breed of house buying:  No inspection, no auction, $100 a brick’, News, 13 September, available at www.news.com.au/finance/money/investing/ new-breed-of-house-buying-no-inspection-no-auction-100-a-brick/news-story/6097 e97f8097cd0cb1fcb08ecc931bc0 (accessed 23 June 2017). Schivelbusch, W. (1986), The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: University of California. Silkstone, D. (2005), ‘Melbourne transport vulnerable,’ The Age, 24 June. Tesla (2017), available at www.tesla.com/en_AU/powerwall (accessed 26 June 2017). Varnedoe, K., and Gopnik, A. (1990), High/​Low:  Modern Art and Popular Culture. New York: Abrams in association with the Museum of Modern Art. Warren, J. (2017), ‘”Modern Day Presidential”:  Has Trump’s vulgarity become the new normal’, Vanity Fair, 3 July, available at www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/ modern-day-presidential-has-trumps-vulgarity-become-the-new-normal (accessed 19 September 2017).

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Index

afterimage 11, 119–​122, 129, 133, 1​ 37 anti-​graffiti see graffiti architectural sort 157–​162, 165; see also material figure art 13, 20, 31, 47, 49–​50, 125, 130, 132, 202, 210, 244, 247; street art 8–​9, 20–​21, 24–​27, 29, 31n7, 32n9, 72, 237, 240, 243, 250​ artification 13, 198, 209, 210 barriers 6, 10, 14n1, 17, 18, 29, 36, 38, 39–​42, 52–​53, 54, 60, 66, 79, 94, 98, 100, 102, 144, 145, 147, 244; barricades 5, 27, 37, 126, 127; fences 1, 2, 5–​8, 10, 28, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49, 79, 81, 84, 90, 144–​145, 159, 163–​164, 169–​171, 174, 176–​178, 181, 186, 210, 240–​241; hedges 2, 6, 7, 145; see also interface Belfast 8, 10, 17, 35–​54; Alexandra Park 43–​45; Belfast Metropolitan College 49, 53; Bruceval Avenue 46–​47; Cupar Way, 39, 40, 54; Falls 35, 39; Hazelwood Integrated Primary School 39; Madrid Street 49; Shankill 35, 39; Springfield Road 45, 48–​49, 53; Workman Avenue 46–​49 Belgrade 11, 18, 90, 243 Belle, David and Sebastian Foucan 146–​147, 152–​153 Benjamin, Walter 95, 105–​106, 108, 112, 250 Berlin wall 17, 37, 69–​70, 81 blind walls 121, 124, 130–​131, 135 body articulation 146–​151, 156, 159 Botta, Mario 151 boundary 18–​19, 30, 35–​37, 38, 46, 53–​54, 64, 69, 149, 183, 204; see also interface

brick-​making 238–​239 brick walls 14, 39, 50, 52–​53, 131, 162, 176, 238–​239, 244, 250, 252 broken-​window theory 221, 223, 227, 228, 231 Brussels 18, 31n5, 81, 246 Cairo 5 Calais 8, 79 comfort 106, 110–​111, 116n21 commemorative plaques 119, 130–​131, 134, 141n11 commons 113, 188, 201, 204–​205, 214 Copenhagen 157, 159–​160, 161, 165n1; Islands Brygge 161; Ørestaden 160 Cosme Velho see Rio de Janeiro Cyprus 14, 31 Dame du Lac 152–​153, 157 Dávila, Nicolás Gómez 94 destruction 18, 119, 126, 127, 130, 133, 135–​136, 140n7, 248 deterritorialisation see territorialisation disappearance 12, 120, 127–​129, 134, 138; disappearance of borders 61, 66, 80 disintegrating city 127, 133, 138 disintegrating memory 135 disintegration 125–​126, 128–​129, 135 dismantle 17, 37, 39–​40, 46, 50, 79; see also removal of walls Duisburg 3 dwelling on-​the-​move 173, 184–​185 enclaves 4, 11, 19, 35, 54, 84, 169–​170, 174, 180–​181; enclavism 170–​171, 176, 186 enemy-​others  81–​83 Estonia 14n1 Exu 96, 101, 103, 110, 115n6

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256 Index Folkhem programme (Sweden) 174–​175 Ford, David 44 format 119–​122, 134 formative place 120, 122 formative space 125, 134 formatting 121, 124–​125, 133, 135 France 8, 152 Frost, Robert 7, 169 gated communities 6, 12, 169–​171, 173–​176, 179–​181, 186–​188 gates 4, 5, 6, 18, 31, 39, 43–​49, 53, 82, 170, 171, 173, 176, 178, 183, 186–​189; city gates 4, 5 generation 120–​125, 140n1, 140n7, 140n8 generational experience 122 Gillard, Julia 63–​64, 66 Giuliani, Rudolph 221 Globo (tv-​network) 94, 105, 108, 110–​114, 115n10, 116n15, n20, n21 graffiti 8–​10, 13, 20–​22, 24–​32, 198–​200, 205, 209, 212–​213, 215–​216., 220, 244, 246; anti-​graffiti 198, 203 graffiti removal 215–​216, 220–​225, 231–​233 Hadrian’s wall 17, 31n1, 80 Hébert, Georges 146–​147 Hermes 101–​3, 111, 115n4 Howard, John Winston 63–​64 Hungary 14, 79 immunity 3, 6, 11, 14, 87, 88–​89 immunitarian dispositif  82, 87 immunitarian imperative 86, 88, 89 immunitarian paradigm 87, 89 inscriptions 13, 81, 125, 127, 131, 134, 138, 198–​199, 200, 204–​205, 207, 209–​210, 213–​214 Instagram 14, 237, 240, 244–​246, 250–​251 interface 6, 38, 40, 42–​43, 46, 49, 52–​55; interface areas and zones 10, 43, 49, 54; interface barriers 40, 42, 50–​53; interface communities 49; see also barriers; boundary interior/​ising/​isation 5, 20–​21, 30, 96, 98–​101, 105–​106, 108–​112, 120–​122, 124, 127, 132–​136, 173, 183, 243, 245–​246, 250 Invader (artist) 240

Israel 5, 17, 61, 80, 140n3; The Israeli West Bank barrier 17, 80 Juppé, Alain 8 Kilroy 247 Koch, Ed 221 lawscape 13, 19, 191, 199, 204–​205, 209, 213 Lisses (France) 12, 145–​147, 151–​157, 159–​160, 165n1 London 4, 5, 13, 81, 157, 200, 201, 213, 228, 246; Crystal Palace 106; House of Parliament 15; Millbank prison 5; Thames Festival Pier 160 loss 121–​122, 125–​127, 129–​131, 133,​ 136 Lund 12, 144, 157, 159, 161–​164, 165n1; Sparta 161–​162, 164; St. Lars 162–​163 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 103, 110 Madrid train attacks 81, 246–​248 maintenance 7, 13, 160, 215–​223, 230–​233 Malmö 12, 144, 170, 172–​179, 181, 185–​186; Lugnet 176; Victoria Park 172–​173, 178, 181–​183; Western harbour 173, 178 Marinho, Roberto 107–​108, 114 marking 133, 134, 141n11, 141n18, 200 material figure 157–​159, 162, 166; see also architectural sort Matywiecki, Piotr 135–​137 Melbourne 24, 26–​27, 28, 32n12, 62, 72, 74n2–​3, 239–​242, 244–​249, 251–​252; Fitzroy (Melbourne neighbourhood) 29–30 Miłosz, Czesław 123–​126 Minecraft 240 Moses and Taps (artists) 244–​245 Muñoz, Oscar 49 new walls 1, 80, 81, 84, 90 New York 81, 169, 174, 221, 228, 236, 238, 244, 246, 248; Trump Towers 236; Tuxedo Park 174 Nicosia 31 nightclimbers of Cambridge 158, 162 ontological enactment 216, 219, 223, 227, 229, 230–​233 open city 18, 30–​31, 59 opening gates 2, 4–​5, 8, 28, 43–​47, 49, 53, 106

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Index 257 Paisley, Ian 39 Palestine 5, 17, 31n4 Paris 4–​5, 12–​13, 18, 81, 146, 151, 165n2, 169, 215–​216, 218, 220–​221, 225–​228, 231, 250 Paris commune 5 parkour 12, 144, 146–​149, 152–​166 Passos, Francisco Pereira 96 Pawlikowski, Paweł 119–​127 Petrobras 11, 106–​107, 115n12 policing 4, 37–​38, 63–​64, 74n5, 89 political technology 6–​9, 11, 83, 213–​214 politics of walling 2, 30–​31, 36–​37, 72–​73, 80–​82, 170–​173, 237–​238 porosity 83, 84–​86, 88–​89, 95, 122, 229, 232 private property 11, 13, 59, 71, 188, 199, 200–​201, 203–​205, 2​ 10 public order 13, 199, 201, 203, 221, 227, 231 railings 39, 50, 52–​54, 160, 162 refugees 10–​11, 70, 72, 80, 83, 85–​86, 89 removal of walls 4, 40–​42, 43, 50, 52, 53–​54; see also dismantle residential hotel 12, 170, 173, 176, 178, 181–​187 right to the city 13, 201, 213 Rio de Janeiro 11, 94–​96, 105–​106, 109, 111; Cosme Velho neighbourhood 11, 94, 96, 105, 108–​111, 114 Robinson, Peter 42 Rome 4, 18, 30, 32n19; Porta Pia 4 Rudd, Kevin 63–​64, 66 ruin 130, 141n10, 141n11 ruination 135 ruined structure 131–​132 ruins 105, 121–​122, 125–​126, 128 sectarian 35–​36, 39, 42, 47 September 11 attacks 81–​82, 246 sociomaterial order 218, 231 Sofles 27–​31, 32n14 spatial biopolitical technologies 11, 83, 88 spatial justice 13, 207–​209, 214 street art see art surface 2, 8, 10–​14, 20–​21, 24, 26, 28–​31, 37, 95, 107, 120–​122, 125–​128, 131, 133–​135, 137–​138, 152, 158–​159, 162, 191–​214, 216, 222–​226, 229–​233, 237–​ 238, 240, 243–​246, 248–​252; concrete surface 144, 152; fleeting surfaces

237–​238, 245, 252; surfacescape 198, 205–​206, 208–​209, 212 Świrszczyńska, Anna AKA Anna Swir 127–​129 Sydney 62, 74n2–​3 tablets 122, 125, 127, 130–​131, 138, 141n16 Tchorek, Mariusz 129–​131 Team JiYo 160, 165n1 teichopolitics 1 telenovela 110–​113, 116n20 terrain (concept of) 144–​145, 150–​151 terrain articulation 157, 166; see also terrain formation terrain formation 156–​157, 162–​163; see also terrain articulation territorialisation 1, 2, 8, 13, 163, 232; deterritorialisation 232 territoriology 1–​2, 20, 59, 81–​82, 103, 151, 163, 166n10, 200, 213, 216, 228, 232 territory 11, 26, 35–​37, 47, 60, 64, 66, 79–​80, 81, 108, 114, 207–​208, 213, 223, 225, 228, 246; territorial claims 37, 39, 144–​145, 150, 163, 166n12 thanatopolitical dispositif  90 threshold 6, 60–​61, 89, 96, 101, 110, 213–​214, 220, 223–​224 Tiberi, Jean 221 tourism 54 trains 13–​14, 20, 28–​29, 31, 96, 114, 130, 221, 228, 243–​249 Trump, Donald 79, 83, 236–​237, 245 Turnbull, Malcolm 72–​73, 75n14 Tuxedo Park (New York) 174 United Kingdom (UK) 8, 35, 43, 79 urban assemblage: 215–​219, 231 urban control and regulation 19–​20, 199–​201 urban encounter 19 urban gating 13, 170, 173–​174, 179–​181, 186–​187 urbanity-​as-​civicness 3–​6, 31, 250 urbicide 126 US/​Mexico border 17, 61, 236–​237 Van Gundy, Stan 236 Venice ghetto 4–​5 Vienna 4 violence 10, 17, 36–​38, 43, 81, 121, 128, 236, 246–​247

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258 Index visibility 2, 5, 8, 53, 66, 82, 98, 106, 138, 200, 238; inter-​visbility 2; invisibility 59, 66–​67, 72–​73, 98, 222; politics of visibility 2, 74n7 walk/​ing 26–​28, 95–​8, 114, 126, 137, 150, 152, 165n5–​6, 173, 183, 220, 224 wall articulation 162; see also terrain articulation wall defence, defending the wall 18–​20, 24–​26 walled cities 3–​4, 19, 83, 250

walls-​as-​backdrops  237 walls-​as-​data  251 walls-​as-​screens 242, 250 Warsaw 11–​12, 119–​122, 124–​139; Warsaw ghetto 121, 124, 126, 131, 137–​138, 141n11 wayfaring 29–​31 Weiwei, Ai 169 witness 119, 122–​123, 126, 135, 141n9 witnessed events 121–​122, 125, 129, 131–​133, 140 witnessing 12, 119, 122, 128, 135–​136